The National Park System Advisory Board will consider naming Hanford's B Reactor a National Historic Landmark in July.

The designation would open up new opportunities for funding and strengthen efforts to preserve B Reactor as a museum, said the staff of Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash.

But it's been a long, slow process to get the historic reactor considered. Hastings has sought for more than a year to get both the full advisory board and, earlier, one of its committees reappointed so they could consider the nomination for National Historic Landmark status.

The board's committee unanimously recommended the status for the reactor when it met in December, 10 months after the nomination was made.

Now the full board will meet July 21 to consider landmark status for the reactor. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne will make the final decision.

"Please be assured that the secretary fully appreciates the importance of the landmark designation," Bernard Fagan, the acting chief of the Department of Interior's Office of Policy, wrote in a letter to Hastings last month.

The letter was in response to a request by Hastings that Kempthorne have the full advisory board meet as soon as possible.

In a separate project, the National Park Service has been studying options for preserving Manhattan Project sites, including B Reactor. It is expected to complete the study this year.

B Reactor was the world's first production-scale nuclear reactor and produced plutonium during World War II for the world's first nuclear explosion in the desert of New Mexico and for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.