(Editor's Note: This is Part 2 of our "Behind the Story" look at coverage of the Hanford nuclear reservation's environmental issues.)

Determining when an ongoing issue becomes an issue worth investigating isn’t always easy.

Craig Welch, an environmental reporter for The Seattle Times who juggles topics from oceans to forests, also keeps his eye on the Hanford nuclear reservation, which had become, as one of his stories stated, an "atomic mess after 40 years of bomb-making."  

In Welch’s investigative stories "Big cleanup questions still loom at Hanford" and "Will ...

In "Problems plague cleanup at Hanford nuclear waste site," USA Today’s Peter Eisler takes on 56 million gallons of radioactive waste and finds he isn’t the only one who has a few things to learn. After 10 years of developing the “first-of-its-kind” nuclear waste treatment plant, the Department of Energy and its contractors still don’t know how to build it.

Project costs tripled to $12.3 billion and the start-up date was moved to 2019 from 2011, Eisler reported.

By using in-depth interviews and federal employees' documented concerns over "technical problems," Eisler was able to relay to ...

Our biggest mistake was thinking it’d be easy.

In late 2009, long before the nuclear accident in Japan, I had embarked on an investigative series on nuclear power. Under the direction of Associated Press National Investigative Editor Rick Pienciak, I was examining how well nuclear power plants hold up as they age. I was focusing on considering harmful factors within the plants, everything from radiation to rust. Soon, I began to wonder about safety outside the plants’ grounds. Had population growth in surrounding communities undermined what was once viewed as a fundamental safety feature of the plants: remote locations ...

For 20 years, an obscure Virginia regulatory board has forced thousands of landowners to lease their mineral rights to private energy corporations.

The corporations who drain natural gas belonging to landowners are required to pay them royalties. But whenever conflicts arise over gas ownership, the Virginia Gas and Oil Board places royalties into escrow accounts. Landowners receive no accounting of these royalties and cannot collect them without clearing enormous legal hurdles. Only two state employees monitor payments into the escrow, which now contains $25 million and has never undergone a compliance audit.

When I started my reporting, I wanted to ...

Chalk it up to the power of having a beer with a colleague in a creative environment, building a strong enough relationship with a source to ask for data and the willingness to apply mapping to a subject usually confined to business/consumer affairs reporting. The Enquirer’s "Gas Price Secrets Revealed" turned out to be a mapping story that used GIS as a key tool, but it could’ve appeared even without a map being published. The series, which ran over seven days, dispelled or confirmed several preconceptions about street retail gas pricing, while getting at some deeper issues ...