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HANFORD BECOMES OPERATIONAL (Hanford Engineer Works, 1943-1944)
Events
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The Plutonium Path to the Bomb, 1942-1944
The plutonium production facilities at the
Hanford Engineer Works took shape with
the same wartime urgency as did the uranium facilities at
Oak Ridge. In February 1943,
Colonel Matthias returned to the location he had helped
select the previous December and set up a temporary
headquarters. In late March, Matthias received his
assignment. The three water-cooled
production reactor (piles), designated by
the letters B, D, and F, would be built about six miles
apart on the south bank of the Columbia River. The
four chemical separation plants would be
built in pairs at two sites nearly ten miles south of the
piles. A facility to produce slugs and perform tests
would be approximately twenty miles southeast of the
separation plants near Richland. Temporary quarters
for construction workers would be put up at the Hanford
town site, while permanent facilities for other personnel
would be located down the road in Richland, safely removed
from the production and separation plants.
Life at Hanford would soon come to
resemble that of the other "atomic boomtowns" of
the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos and
Oak Ridge.
Ground-breaking for the water-cooling plant for the B
Reactor, the westernmost of the three, took place on
August 27, 1943. Construction also began that summer
on the two chemical separation locations (200-West and
200-East). The facilities there were to be massive,
scaled-up versions of those associated with
X-10 at Oak Ridge, each containing
separation and concentration buildings in addition to
ventilation (to eliminate radioactive and poisonous gases)
and waste storage areas. Labor shortages and the
lack of final blueprints, however, soon forced DuPont to
stop work on the 200 areas and concentrate on the
construction of support facilities in the B Reactor area
(100-B). As a result, the 1943 progress on chemical
separation was limited to the digging of two very large
holes in the ground.
Not until October 10 did DuPont engineers drive the first
stakes marking the location of the B-Reactor pile
building. The area immediately under the pile was
excavated and carefully load-tested. Once the
foundations were fixed, work gangs began to lay the first
of 390 tons of structural steel, 17,400 cubic yards of
concrete, 50,000 concrete blocks, and 71,000 concrete
bricks that went into the pile building. By early
1944, a windowless concrete monolith towered 120 feet
above the desert. Assembly of the pile itself
began in February. The cast-iron base and the
thermal and biological shields around the pile were
completed by mid-May. It took another month to lay
the graphite blocks within the shield and install the top
shield and two months to wire and pipe the pile and
connect it to various monitoring and control
devices. By July 1944, not only was the B Reactor
nearing completion, but the second (D) reactor was about
halfway finished as well. Work on the third (F)
reactor had not yet begun. To test several new
technologies, a smaller test pile was
constructed at Hanford and began operations in March of
1944.
In January 1944, workers laid the foundations for the
first chemical separation building, T Plant located in
200-West. Both the T Plant and its sister facility
in 200-West, the U Plant, were completed by October.
(U Plant was used only for training during the Manhattan
Project.) The separation building in 200-East, B
Plant, was completed in February 1945. The second facility
planned for 200-East was canceled. Nicknamed Queen
Marys by the workers who built them, the separation
buildings were awesome canyon-like structures 800 feet
long, 65 feet wide, and 80 feet high containing forty
process pools. The interior had an eerie quality as
operators behind seven feet of concrete shielding
manipulated remote control equipment by looking
through television monitors and periscopes from an upper
gallery. Even with massive concrete lids on the
process pools, precautions against radiation exposure were
necessary and influenced all aspects of plant
design.
Given how new all of these
technological systems were, no one knew whether they would
work as anticipated. Excitement mounted at Hanford
as the date for the first operation of a plutonium
production reactor approached. On September 13,
1944, Enrico Fermi placed the first slug
into the pile at B Reactor. Final checks on the pile
had been uneventful. The scientists could only hope
they were accurate, since once the reactor was operational
the intense radioactivity would make maintenance of many
components impossible. Loading slugs and taking
measurements lasted two weeks. From just after
midnight until approximately 3:00 a.m. on September 27,
the pile ran without incident at a power level higher than
any previous
fission chain reaction (though only at a
fraction of design capacity). The operators were
elated, but their excitement turned to astonishment when
the power level began falling after three hours. It
fell continuously until the pile ceased operating entirely
on the evening of the 28th. By the next morning, the
reaction began again, reached the previous day's level,
then dropped.
Hanford scientists were at a loss to explain the pile's
failure to maintain a chain reaction. Only the foresight
of DuPont's engineers made it possible to resolve the
crisis. The cause of the strange phenomenon proved
to be xenon poisoning, wherein xenon (a
fission by-product) gradually built-up and absorbed
neutrons that were needed to sustain the
chain reaction. With shutdown, the xenon decayed,
neutron flow resumed, and the pile started up again.
Fortuitously, despite the objections of some scientists
who complained of DuPont's excessive caution, the company
had installed a large number of extra tubes. This design
feature meant that the pile in B Reactor could be expanded
to reach a power level sufficient to overwhelm the xenon
poisoning. Success was achieved when the first
irradiated slugs were discharged from B Reactor on
Christmas Day, 1944. The irradiated slugs, after
several weeks of storage, went to the chemical separation
and concentration facilities. By the end of January
1945, the highly purified plutonium underwent further
concentration in the completed chemical isolation
building, where remaining impurities were removed
successfully. Los Alamos received
its first plutonium from Hanford on February 2.
While it was still by no means clear that enough plutonium
could be produced for use in bombs by the war's end,
Hanford was by early 1945 in operation. Only two
years had passed since Matthias first set up his temporary
headquarters on the banks of the Columbia River.
To view the next "event" of the Manhattan Project, proceed to
"1942-1945: Bringing It All
Together."
Previous
Sources and notes for this page.
The text for this page was adapted from, and portions
were taken directly from the
Office of History and Heritage Resources
publications:
F. G. Gosling,
The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb
(DOE/MA-0001; Washington: History Division, Department
of Energy, January 1999), 32-35, 41-42, and Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E.
Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939-1946: Volume
I,
A History of the United States
Atomic Energy Commission
(Washington: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1972),
212-22, 304-10. See also Vincent C. Jones,
Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb, United
States Army in World War II (Washington: Center of
Military History, United States Army, 1988), 218.
Click
here for more information on the aerial photograph
of Hanford. The photograph of the mess hall is reproduced
from the
Department of Energy
report
Linking Legacies: Connecting the Cold War Nuclear
Weapons Production Processes to their Environmental
Consequences
(Washington: Center for Environmental Management
Information, Department of Energy, January 1997), 25. The photograph of B Reactor under construction is
courtesy the
Hanford Site. The
photograph of several Queen Marys is courtesy Richland
Operations, DOE -- Robley Johnson or his assistant,
photographer; it is reprinted in Peter Bacon Hales,
Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1997), 133. The photograph of the face of B
Reactor is reproduced from the History Office
publication:
The Signature Facilities of the Manhattan Project
(Washington: History Division, Department of Energy,
2001), 7. The photograph of the front face of F
Reactor was taken by Robley Johnson; it is courtesy the
Department of Energy (DOE), and it is reprinted in Rachel Fermi and Esther Samra,
Picturing the Bomb: Photographs from the Secret World
of the Manhattan Project (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1995),
71.
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