SPOKANE, Wash., May 19 -- A federal jury awarded a total of more than $500,000 Thursday to two people with thyroid cancer who blamed their disease on radiation from the government's Hanford nuclear installation, which made plutonium for bombs for four decades.

The jury deadlocked over whether another plaintiff's thyroid cancer was caused by Hanford radiation, and it ruled against three others with thyroid-related autoimmune diseases.

The lawsuit was brought against three government contractors that ran operations at Hanford -- General Electric Co., DuPont and UNC Nuclear Inc. Under law, the government will pay the damages and the costs of defending the contractors.

In their lawsuit, the six plaintiffs said they were exposed to radiation during the 1940s when they were children living downwind from Hanford, near Richland, Wash.

Both sides claimed victory.

"The Department of Energy should take a hard look at this," said plaintiffs' attorney Richard Eymann, who represents about 2,300 people with similar claims.

Kevin Van Wart, whose law firm represented the contractors, said the six people in this case were the strongest of the potential plaintiffs. Van Wart also said that the awards -- $227,508 for Steve Stanton and $317,251 for Gloria Wise -- fell far short of the cost of bringing the case to trial.

The 560-square-mile Hanford site began with the top-secret Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb during World War II. The plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, was made there.

Today, work at Hanford centers on a $50 billion to $60 billion cleanup that is expected to be finished by 2035.