THE SELECTION OF HANFORD, WA

(1942-1943)
Places > Hanford Engineer Works

In spring 1942, Arthur Compton, head of the Met Lab and plutonium pile (reactor) research, began searching for a site suitable for building full-scale plutonium production reactors. He initially favored a site in the Indiana dunes close to the shore of Lake Michigan that would have been nearer to the Met Lab in Chicago and the nation's industrial heartland and thus could have been developed more readily. Convinced that the area was too exposed and not large enough, Compton in May visited the Oak Ridge, Tennessee, site proposed for the full-scale uranium enrichment plants and found it acceptable. The production reactors, along with a pilot plant and a laboratory, were to be built at Oak Ridge (officially known as the Clinton Engineer Works) at a site codenamed X-10.

By late fall 1942, Manhattan Project head General Leslie Groves and the DuPont Corporation, which he had brought in to build and operate the production reactors, had begun to reconsider the choice of Oak Ridge. Du Pont expressed great concern about the hazards of producing plutonium on a large scale, and Groves had misgivings about placing the facility adjacent to electromagnetic and gaseous diffusion plants. Furthermore, the site was uncomfortably close to Knoxville should a catastrophe occur, and, aside from potential hazards, sufficient generating power was not available at the site for yet another major facility.

On December 14, 1942, Army, DuPont, Met Lab, and S-1 officials met at the DuPont facility in Wilmington, Delaware, to discuss relocation of the production reactors. Compton and the Met Lab scientists established the criteria, assuming that the plant would require three or four helium-cooled piles and two chemical separation plants. Compton saw little need to isolate each reactor as a precaution against an operating accident, but he suggested that the reactors be spaced at least one mile apart to reduce the danger of sabotage. The greatest hazard appeared to be the accidental release of radioactive materials from the separation plants. To provide an exclusion area, the scientists prescribed a four-mile safety distance around each separation plant. They likewise determined that the nearest town, railroad, or highway should be ten miles distant, and the laboratories at least eight miles away. Around this exclusion area of roughly 225 square miles, they recommended a six-mile strip in which residential occupancy would be prohibited. Although many potential sites could meet these space criteria, few could satisfy the requirements for a large dependable supply of pure, cool water and 100,000 kilowatts of electric power. The Corps of Engineers proposed one of the large western river systems like the Columbia and the Colorado. Both provided large amounts of water and hydroelectric power and had the added advantage of being independent of coal or fuel-oil supplies. Both traversed desert areas that would provide the necessary isolation. Both were far enough inland to be safe from coastal air attack.

Two days after the Wilmington meeting, Colonel Franklin T. Matthias of Groves's staff and two DuPont engineers headed for the West Coast to investigate possible production sites. In a two-week period, they inspected two locations around Mansfield, Washington, near the Grand Coulee Dam. Moving south along the Columbia, they stopped at the broad, flat valley in the big bend of the river at Hanford. Then they traveled south to a site on the Deschutes River in Oregon and two locations on the Colorado in southern California. Among the sites, Hanford appeared clearly the best. The Columbia, with its dams at Grand Coulee and Bonneville, more than met the power and water requirements for the plutonium plant. The level valley between the west bank of the river and the foothills of the Cascades formed an uninhabited tract of the dimensions required. The underlying basalt formation with its overburden of shale and sandstone would make an excellent foundation for the huge concrete structures and could provide gravel for roads and concrete aggregate. Although the isolation of the site posed labor and transportation difficulties, these did not seem insurmountable. A branch line of a transcontinental railroad crossed a corner of the site and compared to other parts of the nation the labor supply was relatively ample in the Pacific Northwest. On December 31, Matthias and his team unanimously recommended the Hanford site.

On January 7, 1943, Groves directed that the Corps' real estate branch begin a preliminary appraisal of the site. On January 16, Groves made a personal inspection of the area and gave it his approval. He also sought and received the Bonneville Power Administration's assurance that it could provide adequate power when needed. On January 23, Groves went to Wilmington for a final review of the site data. During the first weeks of the new year, radiological hazards had become ever more important. Discussions with the scientists in Chicago seemed to confirm that a sudden release of radioactivity from the plant under certain atmospheric conditions might create a hazard as far as forty miles away. The isolation of the Hanford site was thus an advantage, but Groves wanted to be sure that DuPont carefully examined this factor in recommending the amount of land to be acquired. On February 9, the War Department gave final approval for site acquisition.

Sources and notes for this page

The text for this page is original to the Department of Energy's Office of History and Heritage Resources. Major sources consulted include the following. 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), and Manhattan District History, Book IV - Pile Project, Volume 4 - Land Acquisition HEW. Additional information about the region comes from Peter Bacon Hales, Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). For the history of the public works projects that were so vital to life in eastern Washington, see Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933-1956 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). The photograph of Vannevar Bush, James Conant, Leslie Groves, and Franklin Matthias is courtesy the DuPont Corporation; it is reprinted in Stephane Groueff, Manhattan Project: The Untold Story of the Making of the Atomic Bomb (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1967). The Hanford location map is courtesy the Hanford Site.