We toured Reactor B at the Hanford nuclear plant this morning. The Hanford Site was used to produce plutonium for the bomb that helped bring an end to World War II. Most of the reactors were shut down by the late 60’s, with all but one of them entombed in concrete to allow the radioactive materials to decay. Supporting buildings have been removed and buried. The B Reactor was converted into a museum and was brought under the National Park Service in 2015 as part of the Manhattan Project National Historic Park along with a site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Oak Ridge Tennessee.
We hadn’t even realized this was a National anything until yesterday, when Deb discovered this while looking for places to spend the night. They allow overnight parking when participating in their tours, which found its way into Deb’s searches.
So we overnighted in the visitor center overflow parking lot in Richland. Three other RV’s did the same.
The rain followed us there. I woke up a few times during the night. 1am: rain. 2am: rain. 4am: rain. 5:30am: silence. And then it started to rain. The rain finally ended at 6:30 and by the time the tour started, the sun was peeking through.
Official start time of the tour was 8:30am and the time required was four hours. The length of time included a 45-minute bus ride from the visitor center to the reactor. During the bus ride, the docent relayed many facts about the area and background on the reactor site.
The tour of the reactor was quite fascinating. Aside from an initial talk by the resident docent, and two optional talks, we were free to walk around the place and check it out.
I found it fascinating from a technical standpoint, Deb found it fascinating from a historical standpoint. Just the sheer complexity of it all and the oversight needed to build a reactor from ground breaking to loading fuel in 11 months was mind-boggling. At the time, we were racing to keep ahead of the Germans in producing plutonium, so time was of the utmost.
The tour was very well done, very informative, and I would recommend it to anyone remotely interested who happens to be in the area. It’s probably the only place where an ordinary Joe like me can walk around inside a nuclear reactor facility.
There’s a backstory that’s not told, however. It seems that the National Park Service wants to put a pretty face on this whole project. It could be added to our “Worlds Largest” collection as the world’s most expensive clean-up project. None of this was mentioned in any of the presentations, but information to complete the backstory is available on the Internet.
There is plenty told of the heroism by engineers, physicists, construction workers, and the like to get a project like this off the ground in such a short amount of time. In actuality, they weren’t even sure it would work. They built a lot of safety features into the plant to ensure that any thing going wrong would shut down the reactor, which is good practice, but I have to wonder if some of the extreme safety features were in place because they weren’t really sure what would happen when they flipped the switch.
All the clocks in the plant are set to 10:48pm, the time that the reactor was started, and it was started at this time because most people would be asleep and may not notice if something went terribly wrong out there beyond all the wheat fields.
The production process was horribly inefficient. Tons of uranium was required to produce ounces of plutonium, and refining the plutonium from the reactor output required lots of chemical processes, resulting in huge amounts of hazardous waste that is still being cleaned up today. Some chemicals made it onto the ground and is probably working its way towards the Columbia River, others are stored in tanks and vaults which will need to be dealt with at some point.
This reactor is still being periodically inspected by the Russians after the nuclear disarmament treaties enacted during the Reagan Administration, with the last inspection performed in 2018. Water valves sit without their covers, monitoring pipes are disconnected, and all this is photographed periodically to ensure that nothing has changed. A pipe wrench was moved one year which caused some concern on the part of the Russians that things were starting to happen again, and that situation was resolved by retrieving the wrench and laying it on the same spot that previous photographs showed so that the photos would match.
It was all quite fascinating and well worth the time spent.
After the tour, we drove to Zillah, to stay at brother Duane’s house for a few days. We went and visited my mom in the afternoon. It was good to see her again.
And, two items to add to the World’s Largest collection today ... these were both pointed out by the docent on the bus going to the Hanford tour:
The Worlds’s Largest Freezer. At a total of 455,000 square feet, and costing $150 million to build, this freezer in Richland, Washington is used for frozen food products
This one is not the world’s largest, but the highest in the continental United States, the Tallest Treeless Mountain is Rattlesnake Mountain, again near Richland, Washington.
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