Experience & Lessons from My Visit to Hanford Reactor B

Hanford Reactor B National Museum

Summer is a time of adventure, a time where the normal structure of the days of school fall away and much of our culture runs around the countryside. This was me.  I ran to a place called  Hanford, and for those who don't know, this site was an important part of the Manhattan Project, the race to build the first atomic bomb.  

After a very long bus ride across a WHOLE lot of nothing in Eastern Washington, we come upon two buildings.  The larger is the reactor, shown above. They chose this place because they wanted something far away from population centers.  And believe me, it is still away from population centers ! 

Now, since this is Happy Wisdom, I'm not going to get into the politics of the events that surrounded the creation of this site.   I'm going to focus on this as raw human achievement.  It's all science and willpower here.  This is a monument to human creativity.  It is insanely awesome that the bold men and women who did this got it done.  

This is what the inside of a nuclear reactor looks like

The scale of Reactor B is hard to describe.   What you're seeing in the picture above is over 2000 tubes. These tubes, about the diameter of a baseball bat, would each have a fuel slug that would sustain the reaction and become even more radioactive in the process. This ultimately resulted in Plutonium.   Too rare in nature, it had to be made.  Any of these tubes leak - could mean a collapsed reaction or death, or both.  Water gushes through this thing so it doesn't overheat.    So much energy in the atom! 

The high level process is simple to describe 

1. Irradiate the heck out of those little silver tubes   ( not easy, there's over 2000 of these) and then there's Xenon gas messing with the reaction. 
2. Process those little silver slugs, and get the Plutonium out of them (not easy either) and ship the product to Los Alamos, and don't lose it, as it was worth over $20M dollars in 1940's money. 
3. Don't die or kill anybody while doing it

Lets see how their website describes it (1):

yikes, what if you did?

One of the most historic buildings at Hanford is the B Reactor, code named 105-B during World War II. The B Reactor was the world’s first, full-scale nuclear reactor and produced the plutonium used in the “Fat Man” bomb dropped over Nagasaki, Japan, in August of 1945. Five days after that bomb was deployed, World War II ended. 

B Reactor is an engineering marvel that was built in only thirteen months (1943-1944). As the world’s first nuclear reactor, drawings and blueprints were being developed at the same time the reactor was being constructed. 

It wasn't unusual for crews to be given hand-written notes or sketches to guide them during the construction process. Many of the specialized tools needed for the project hadn’t been invented, so Hanford crews often designed and built their own tools. Since there were no computers when the reactor was being built, calculations for the project were done using slide rules or a pencil and paper! 

Since this building is just recently getting money from the government to make it a real museum, you can still actually touch stuff!   I played with dials on a real reactor.  I saw their sketches, the signage, the insane emphasis on safety, and the intense patriotism. 

Bryce confused at the control panel..uh oh

Lessons:
Lesson 1 - Allow for Positive Deviance

They weren't sure it was going to work as designed by Dr. Fermi. Indeed it didn't.  An excellent example of  positive deviance, the engineers put over 500 more tubes than the design called for.   And, when the reactor just shut itself down over and over again  (due to Xenon gas buildup interfering with the reaction ) they were easily able to add more fuel.    Score one for engineers. 

Lesson 2 - The process was mostly iterative.   The site features a few relics that show the ingenuity of the workers. Like one really giant saw.  It was clearly homemade, and yet, without it their jobs would have been a thousand times harder.  Everything was being made up, invented, and used on site.  

Lesson 3  - It was focused.  DuPont did this basically for free.  The people donated a days pay to build an extra bomber for the struggle. Motivation was intrinsic to the mission. 

 People do astounding things when they set their minds to it.  The scientist, Enrico Fermi, had created a smaller one under the gym at the University of Chicago a few months prior to Hanford getting started. He did this to convince the US Government that this was possible and that the US better get on this because he was sure that the Axis powers were also aware of this possibility and were working on it. 

Not sure who got irradiated here....

There were so many countermeasures it was hard to believe. They had three or four ways to stop that reactor, and custom ways of monitoring it.  It generated over 200 Megawatts of power, but they didn't use it.  This reactor was for Plutonium, not energy.   They built 9 reactors on the site, and the 9th one actually generated both plutonium and energy for the surrounding towns. 

I recommend this tour.  I recommend it because it proves to me that the little projects in my life are doable.  I can change the fan in the refrigerator, get that garage organized, launch that business.  Our God-given intelligence exists to do great things out there.  That incredibly difficult problems can be solved.  The bus is nice, the docets are super friendly, and you can't help but learn stuff.  Its also like a trip back in time, with examples of newspapers and the such laying around in plastic.

Finally, the tour is free, until it becomes a real museum, potentially less tactile.  Get on the list, and bring water. 

Till next time - have both happiness and wisdom today!

1. http://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/BReactor