Work to win National Historic Landmark status for Hanford's B Reactor has taken another step forward in what's been a long, slow process.

Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., has had to push for a year to get both a full advisory board and one of its committees reappointed so they could consider the nomination for National Historic Landmark status.

Recently he wrote to Dirk Kempthorne, secretary of the Department of Interior, to thank him for reappointing the full National Park System Advisory Board and urge him to convene the board soon.

"Without the approval of the full board and your personal approval, the future preservation of B Reactor remains in question," Hastings wrote. "I urge you to do all that you can to enable the board to meet as soon as possible so that the final B Reactor nomination can be considered this year."

Hastings earlier successfully pushed to get the advisory board's Landmarks Committee reappointed. When it met in December, it unanimously recommended National Historic Landmark status for the reactor. The nomination was made in February 2007.

Supporters of preserving the reactor want it opened as a museum. 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.

In other B Reactor news, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., discussed public interest in the reactor at a Wednesday hearing of the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee.

She plans to continue to work with the Department of Energy to make it more accessible to the public, she said. Now the reactor only is open for occasional public tours, which fill quickly.

"It's an important part of our history -- good, bad and ugly," she said. "I think it is important that future generations see what so many people sacrificed there ... and the ingenuity."

In March, DOE adopted a formal policy requiring the reactor to be preserved while studies to evaluate options for turning it into a museum are evaluated.