The House Committee on Natural Resources will convene on Wednesday, July 11th at 10am to consider and vote on H.R. 5987, a bipartisan bill to establish a Manhattan Project National Historical Park that will include Hanford’s B Reactor. The Committee will also consider additional bills at the meeting.

“The effort to create the Park will take another step forward next week,” said Committee Chairman Doc Hastings, who is the sponsor of the bill and represents one of the three communities that will be home to a Park location, the Hanford site in the Tricities, Washington. “I expect the Committee will vote to favorably advance the bill to the full House for consideration. A great many volunteers have been working for years to bring this idea into reality, and I’m pleased that progress is being made in the law-making process to preserve this amazing and important piece of our Nation’s history.”

Very similar bills to establish the Park have been introduced in both the House and Senate, on a bipartisan basis, and both chambers held Committee hearings to listen to testimony and review the bills last week. The Senate bill, S. 3300, is sponsored by Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and represents the community of Los Alamos that is one of the three sites of the proposed Park. Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell of Washington state are cosponsors of the bill, as are Senators Mark Udall of New Mexico and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, which is home to the third Park site of Oak Ridge. In the House, the sponsors are Hastings, Chuck Fleischmann of Tennessee and Ben Lujan of New Mexico.

The House Committee meeting will be held in 1324 Longworth House Office Building and will be broadcast on the Internet for viewing from the Committee’s website: http://republicans-naturalresources.house.gov.

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