“Trailblazer” Hanford engineer Wanda Munn passes away

July 29, 2025, 12:00PMNuclear News

Munn

Nuclear engineer and longtime ANS member Wanda Munn died on July 23 at the age of 93. Described as a “trailblazer for women [and] an outspoken advocate for the peaceful use of nuclear technology” in her Tri-City (Wash.) Herald obituary, Munn followed a unique path to her nuclear engineering career. She did not get her degree until she was 46, and she subsequently spent 18 years working on systems design, construction, and operation of the Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF) reactor for Westinghouse at the Hanford nuclear site in eastern Washington state.

Nontraditional student: Munn was born in 1931. She graduated high school early, at age 16, and started to pursue a medical degree. However, those plans changed when she married at age 18. By her early 40s, she was divorced and working as a secretary in a university nuclear engineering department when she decided to return to school to get a nuclear engineering degree.

Munn earned a bachelor’s degree in nuclear engineering in 1977 from Oregon State University. While there, she was president of the ANS student chapter as well as president of the student section of the Society of Women Engineers. In 1982, she earned an MBA from the University of Washington.

FFTF career: After receiving her engineering degree, she joined the Westinghouse Hanford team that was constructing the FFTF reactor. Munn was one of only a few female nuclear engineers working there. She retired from Hanford in 1995 but continued to serve on the Hanford Advisory Board. She also advocated for saving the shuttered FFTF reactor as a source of radioisotopes for medical treatments and other purposes. In 2001, however, the Department of Energy ordered the closing of the facility.

CDC board, city council: Munn remained very active in her retirement. In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed her to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, on which she served until 2018. She also served for four years on the city council of Richland, Wash.

Awards, honors, scholarship: A number of awards and honors were bestowed upon Munn over the years. These included the 1988 ANS National Public Communications Award, the Society of Women Engineers’ Distinguished New Engineer Award, a Woman of Distinction award from the Soroptomist International Club in the Tri-Cities, and the Tri Cities Engineer of the Year award. She was also inducted into the Oregon State University Engineering Hall of Fame and the College of Fellows of the Society of Women Engineers.

Munn’s legacy lives on. The Eastern Washington section of the Society of Women Engineers endowed a scholarship in her name for nontraditional students, such as those who, like Munn, reenter college later in life.


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