10 haunting photos of Idaho's Atomic City, 30 years after nuclear disaster drove everyone away

David Hanson

When photographer David Hanson arrived in Atomic City, Idaho in 1986, he knew he was capturing a still-cooling piece of American history.

While the Mountain West boomtown spent the late 1940s thriving on the power generated at the nearby nuclear complex, by the mid-1950s, a string of nuclear meltdowns had sent the town's residents searching for safer dwellings. Atomic City — current population: 29 — was left to become a shell of its former self. 

Thirty years later, Hanson has finally released his haunting photographs in a book called "Wilderness to Wasteland."

Here, he walks us through what he saw.

Hanson says he first visited Atomic City in the fall of 1985. "It was a sleepy, ramshackle town located next to a secret military complex," he tells Tech Insider. There wasn't a single soul in sight.

"The town was a collection of trailers, mobile homes, dilapidated houses, a combination store/post office/gas station, and the 'Atomic City Raceway' which had hosted stock car races in the summer," he says.

Fewer than three dozen people lived there when Hanson visited, and the population hasn't changed much since.