RICHLAND — A couple of hundred miles southeast of Seattle is the town that owes its modern existence to the Manhattan Project, the historic, top-secret World War II government program that built the first atomic bomb. That heritage remains evident. At Richland High, the sports teams are known as the Bombers, referring to the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bought for the U.S. Army Air Forces with donations from Hanford workers, each contributing a “Day’s Pay.” The school’s mushroom cloud logo refers to what those workers helped produce. I recently drove to this city of around 64,000 by the Columbia River with a different, world-changing technology in mind. These days, the major employer in Richland and its surrounds is a laboratory with 4,000 people, over 60% of them researchers. You might not have heard of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, now in its 61 st year.…