government and private companies, so it was able to branch out into related areas. In 2022 the laboratory employed 5,314 staff and had an annual budget of $1.2billion. The Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF), was a national research facility that began operating in 1982 to develop and test fuels, materials and components for the Clinch River Breeder Reactor project. The contract to construct and operate it was awarded to Westinghouse and 800 former Battelle employees who had been working on it were transferred. The Clinch River project was canceled by Congress in 1983, but the FFTF continued to operate, generating plutonium238 for nuclear power sources for NASA space missions and tritium for nuclear fusion research. It was shut down in 2009. Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Hanford Observatory is an interferometer searching for gravitational waves. The observatory at the Hanford Site was one of two, the other being in Livingston, Louisiana. The project was run as a cooperative venture by MIT and Caltech. The $211million price tag (equivalent to $million in ) generated debate about pork barreling and government funding of expensive Big Science projects, especially one as uncertain of success as LIGO. The Hanford Site was chosen from seventeen contenders for one of the two sites, mainly due to its relative isolation. In 2016 it was announced that gravitational waves had been detected. In 2018 the American Physical Society (APS) designated the two LIGO observatories as APS historic sites. The Columbia Generating Station is a 1,207 MW commercial nuclear power plant located on the Hanford Site north of Richland and operated by Energy Northwest, as the WPPSS has been known since 1998. Originally, five boiling water reactors were authorized in March 1973, but only one, WNP2, was completed. It began producing power in May 1984. The WNP-1 Reactor was budgeted to cost $660million in 1973 (equivalent to $million in ) and be completed by 1980. By 1986, the estimated cost had blown out to $3.8billion (equivalent to $billion in ) and the reactor was still unfinished. Meanwhile, the estimated total cost of the entire project had increased from $4.1billion in 1973 (equivalent to $billion in ) to $24billion in 1986 (equivalent to $billion in ). A net billing agreement that Senator Henry M. Jackson helped steer through Congress ensured that the bonds issue to finance their construction carried a AAA bond credit rating and therefore sold easily, but electricity