Miss America 2023 is coming. Here’s why Tri-Cities is a perfect place for her message

Tri-City Herald staff
·2 min read

Miss America 2023 is coming to the Tri-Cities next week.

Grace Stanke, a nuclear engineering student from the University of Wisconsin, wants to see the Hanford nuclear reservation, including historic B Reactor.

Her platform is “Clean Energy — Cleaner Future” and her bio says her goal is “to dispel myths around nuclear energy and inspire the next generation of female scientists, engineers and mathematicians.”

Women engineers at Washington River Protection Solutions, the Hanford site contractor, will hold a discussion with her on Wednesday, May 24, as part of the Women in Engineering Speakers Series.

The series is used to foster a sense of community among Hanford’s female engineers, and the discussion can be watched virtually by most Hanford employees.

It will be similar to the discussion women engineers held with Kayla Barron, an astronaut from Richland, who spoke for the series June 2022 after she returned from a stay aboard the International Space Station.

B Reactor at the Hanford nuclear reservation was built in less than a year as the allies raced to produce a nuclear bomb before the Nazis.
B Reactor at the Hanford nuclear reservation was built in less than a year as the allies raced to produce a nuclear bomb before the Nazis.

Stanke’s tour of Hanford will include a look inside B Reactor, part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. B Reactor, built in about 11 months as the allies raced to produce a nuclear bomb before the Nazis, was the world’s first production scale nuclear reactor and ushered in the atomic age.

She also will visit the Hanford tank farms, where 56 million gallons of radioactive waste are stored in underground tanks, until it can be treated for disposal.

There she will tour the Tank-Side Cesium Removal project where some of the least radioactive tank waste is being separated out of the tanks for the start of treatment at Hanford’s vitrification plant next year.

Workers train on operating the Tank Side Cesium Removal System at Hanford. It prepares low activity radioactive waste for glassification, bypassing the vitrification plant’s Pretreatment Facility.
Workers train on operating the Tank Side Cesium Removal System at Hanford. It prepares low activity radioactive waste for glassification, bypassing the vitrification plant’s Pretreatment Facility.

The waste is left from the past production at the Eastern Washington site of nearly two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program during World War II and the Cold War

Her evening will be spent at the Send-off Reception in Richland for Miss Tri-Cities Hailey Fisher and Miss Tri-Cities Outstanding Teen Abby Barber as the prepare to represent the Tri-Cities in the Miss Washington and Miss Washington Outstanding Teen competitions.

Stanke is expected to speak and may perform. She plays the classical violin.

She will not be at any events open to the general public.