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The Manhattan Project National Historical Park, Hanford, WA—Oct 2017
Jim and Andrea Siscel

Slide Show of Photos with captions at end of trip information
 
The Manhattan Project was a top-secret program during WWI to build an atomic bomb.  The Manhattan Project National Historical Park is composed of the three principal locations where work was done:  Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico. 
 
The Hanford Engineer Works was built to create large quantities of plutonium at a roughly 600-square mile site along the Columbia River.  The site was selected for safety concerns, because of the distance from any population area.  The workers came together at Hanford to build and operate a massive industrial complex to fabricate, test, and irradiate uranium fuel and chemically separate out plutonium. The construction workers (who reached a peak of 44,900 in June 1944) lived in a construction camp near the old Hanford town site. The administrators and engineers lived in the government town established at Richland Village, which eventually had accommodation in 4,300 family units and 25 dormitories.  Richland Village was a secure location for only personal who worked at Hanford and their families.  Very few living there knew that materials for an atomic bomb were being produced at Hanford.  It wasn't until Hiroshima that the secret was let out.
 
Originally the project call for the building of six reactors.  When it was decided to make the initial reactor B much more powerful, only reactors B, D, and F were constructed.  When reactor B was shut down reactor C was built nearby.  Reactor B was then brought back on line and reactor C continued to operate.  Three additional reactors, H, K, and N, were built later.
 
Construction on B Reactor began in August 1943 and was completed on September 13, 1944.  The reactor produced its first plutonium on November 6, 1944.  Plutonium was produced in the Hanford reactors when a uranium-238 atom in a fuel slug absorbed a neutron to form uranium-239.  U-239 rapidly undergoes beta decay  to form neptunium-239, which rapidly undergoes a second beta decay to form plutonium-239.  The irradiated fuel slugs were transported by rail to three huge remotely operated chemical separation plants called "canyons" that were about 10 miles away.  A series of chemical processing steps separated the small amount of plutonium that was produced from the remaining uranium and the fission waste products.  This first batch of plutonium was refined in the 221-T plant from December 26, 1944, to February 2, 1945, and delivered to the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico on February 5, 1945.
 
Reactors D and F came online in December 1944 and February 1945, respectively.  By April 1945, shipments of plutonium were headed to Los Alamos every five days, and Hanford soon provided enough material for the bombs tested at Trinity and dropped over Nagasaki
 
Most of the reactors were shut down between 1964 and 1971, with an average individual life span of 22 years. The last reactor, N Reactor, continued to operate as a dual-purpose reactor, being both a power reactor used to feed the civilian electrical grid and a plutonium production reactor for nuclear weapons. N Reactor operated until 1987.
 
Our tour started at the visitor center located in Richland.  We were taken on a large comfortable bus to the B Reactor site, a 45-minute trip.  We were able to see much of the building.  The tour needs to booked in advanced at
http://manhattanprojectbreactor.hanford.gov.