The Good, the Bad, and the Hazardous: The Manhattan Project at Hanford

History is a funny thing. Though it seems it should be as set in stone as a mathematical equation, it actually quivers in a thousand interpretations. Take something as personal as family history: two siblings can have vastly different memories of life in the same household. Or, as recent controversies have shown, the history of our own country, in which historical figures can be revered by some, reviled by others. Such ambiguities are certainly apparent at the Manhattan Project National Historical Park.

B Reactor, courtesy National Park Service

The park:

Established in 2015, the Manhattan Project forms one of the nation’s newest national historical parks. As its tourist brochure states, it preserves portions of World War II era sites where the U.S. developed the world’s first atomic weapons. The park encompasses three far-flung locales: Los Alamos, New Mexico; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Hanford, Washington. The Hanford site, which I visited, sprouted up on a large elongated triangle of sparsely inhabited desert along the Columbia River. Its mission was to make plutonium to fuel the atomic bomb.

The good and the bad:

Cooling water pipes

How to present the park? As an heroic struggle to develop a weapon in time to win the war against Nazi Germany? A showcase of science at its most brilliant? Or a catastrophic mistake that bulldozed open a pandora’s box of potential devastation? The park literature does its best to present all sides – the remarkable technical achievements, the monumental human will to achieve, and the ethical and moral questions that linger as a sort of continuing nuclear fallout.

The tours:

About a year after the park opened, my husband and I stayed overnight in Kennewick, WA in order to reach the Hanford visitor center bright and early the next day. We had made our reservations months in advance. The choices then were: a visit to the B Reactor National Historic Landmark, the world’s first full-scale plutonium production reactor, where the material for the Trinity test and Nagasaki bombs was produced; a tour of pre-Manhattan Project buildings from the tiny agricultural towns of Hanford and White Bluffs, which were evacuated almost overnight to make way for the top-secret project; and an inspection of the site’s waste cleanup operations. The third tour is no longer available to the public, I assume because of radioactive leaks found in underground storage tanks in recent years. We opted to explore the B Reactor.

Our tour:

The pile

At the visitor center, we listened to an introduction to the day’s outing, after which we all got into a bus for a 45-minute drive to the reactor.  No personal cars are allowed within the park, which is run in a partnership between the National Parks Service and Department of Energy. Our bus turned off the main road, and ahead loomed the reactor, a massive gray concrete structure that resembled building blocks, with a cooling stack on one side. As we entered the reactor building, we seemed to step back in time, into a huge room where at any moment we might see scientists in black-frame glasses and white coats, pencils behind their ears and slide-rules sticking out of pockets. A wall resembled a stage with a curtain consisting of thousands of metal tubes. The ‘curtain’ is called a pile, in which uranium-fueled slugs were fitted into the tubes and cooled by water to—voila!—produce plutonium-239. Inside the building we viewed large pipes that pumped cooling water from the Columbia River, the office of the famed scientist Enrico Fermi, and smaller rooms with posters, signage, and period memorabilia.

Enrico Fermi’s office

A bit lost regarding the mind-boggling science involved in the project, I was nevertheless astounded by some of the posted facts. For example, there were so many workers at the site that 250,000 pounds of meat were consumed in the eight mess halls in one week, and 1,785,000 sheets were washed daily. Sheesh! Most amazing of all, from the start of construction to the moment B Reactor began operation, a mere eleven months had passed. Eleven months! Today, that wouldn’t even be enough time to write a proposal …

More history:

The B Reactor was the centerpiece of some thirty buildings and twenty service facilities in operation during World War II. After the war, in 1946, the reactor was shut down, then restarted in 1948 at the onset of the Cold War. It was shut down permanently in 1968. The surrounding buildings were dismantled and removed. For many years it seemed the reactor would meet the same fate, but a variety of local organizations worked tirelessly—and successfully—to preserve it. For more information, read the B Reactor pdf.

That’s not all:

In 2000, the Hanford Reach National Monument was created out of buffer land bordering the nuclear site. Its almost 200,000 acres encompass a free-flowing stretch of the Columbia River and shrub-dotted desert. More about it in a future post.

I appreciate the existence of the Manhattan Project Park. It doesn’t erase history. Instead, it assumes we humans are intelligent enough to process the good, the bad, and the hazardous.