Part 25: Hanford Engineering Works

20190624-26

The Trip

We left NWOR and returned to Wenatchee and stayed at the Confluence State Park to do laundry and other associated chores.  From Wenatchee we headed south along the Columbia River toward Richland, WA to visit my friends Mike and Rachel.  Mike, having worked at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation (previously called the Hanford Engineering Works) arranged a tour of the historic "B Reactor".

The Photos

The photos below are what we saw.

We passed yet another dam on the Columbia River.  This one is the Rock Island Dam downriver from Wenatchee.

Further south, we came upon a viewpoint that gave us a nice view of the Columbia River gorge.

Another low dam on the Columbia River near Desert Air, WA.

We met our friends Mike and Rachel in Richland, WA.  They took us on a walk around the neighborhood and we came upon this sign.  General Leslie Groves was the "father" of the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb.  Richland is the town where the plutonium for the bomb was created.  Richland was chosen for a variety of reasons including access to plenty of cool water (Columbia River); sparse population; easy access to electricity (Grand Coulee Dam); and access to gravel and aggregates for the large amount of concrete that was needed to construct the facilities.

The park was really nice, right along the banks of the Columbia River.  While walking, I spotted this fellow having fun doing doughnuts on his jet ski.

Mike is a fraternity buddy from Colorado School of Mines and having worked at the Hanford Reservation offered to get us on a tour of the "B Reactor" at Hanford.  Our response was "hell yes!"  This reactor created the first usable amounts of plutonium that later become the core of the Nagasaki bomb.  The reactor was taken out of service long ago and has been cleaned up to allow visitors to tour the facility.  The building is very unassuming and plain but it was built in only 11 months and then used from 1944 to 1968.

There were a number of nice displays in the entry area of the reactor.  The chart above depicts the process of fission.

The tour started at the front face of the reactor.  The fellow in the blue shirt is the docent for the tour and one of Mike's work mates. Designed by Enrico Fermi, this reactor is a graphite-moderated design that uses water cooling.

The face of the reactor was a huge matrix of caps, plumbing and valves.  Each of the items above are the end caps to the so-called "process tubes" that contained both the atomic fuel (mildly enriched U-235) and the raw material for breeding plutonium (naturally occurring U-238).  Fuel and spacers were loaded into each tube and then the tube caps were installed to allow cooling water to be pumped through the tubes to keep the reactor from melting down.

At the side of the reactor face was a huge pipe manifold that carried the cooling water to the process tubes.  The labels on the pipes were used to locate individual process tubes.

This display showed the various kinds of spacers used in the process tubes.

The fuel was contained in aluminum "slugs" and consisted of natural uranium or enhanced uranium.

Working with enriched uranium presented many risks and one issue that could not be ignored was the physical geometry of "criticality"  Stated simply, it was possible to arrange the fuel in a pattern that would cause the material to start reacting outside of the reactor.  If this happened, the results would be catastrophic and fatal for anyone nearby.

The B Reactor itself was actually dwarfed by the support equipment needed to operate it.  Running a reactor like this was all about keeping it cool and keeping the reactor cool required huge amounts of ultra-clean water.  Clean water was needed for a variety of reasons including preventing unwanted absorption of process neutrons and creation of radioactive byproducts.  The bulk of the facility was water treatment for the reactor.

The tour took us over the valve pit that was used to control the influx of purified, de-mineralized, de-aeriated water.  The caps on the valves were removed to show that the plumbing is not being used which was a requirement of on-site inspections as part of one of the nuclear treaties signed with the Soviet Union during the cold war.

A sound that you never want to hear.

One of the safety features included in the design of the reactor plant was high flow ventilation fans to remove contamination from the air.  These fans were powered by both steam and electric motors to provide some redundancy.

A close-up of some of the complex plumbing.

Early in the development of atomic energy there arose a need to determine the strength of radiation fields.  The strength of these fields determined the exposure that humans would suffer in the presence of radioactivity.  Instruments were developed to detect and quantify the danger.

A display of some of the radiation detection devices that were employed at the Hanford site.  The cutie pie is at the upper left of the photo above.

Signs, signs, everywhere are signs.

One of the displays showed the masks used as part of the PPE (personal protection equipment) of the era.

The tour included a visit to the reactor control room.  Obviously, the original control room did not include video displays.

Back in the day, it was all about analog dials and strip chart recorders.

While not clearly visible in the photo above, each of the strip chart recorders had the word "unclassified" on each display.  That would lead me to believe that any display that was not marked "unclassified" was, in fact, classified as it would allow a knowledgeable person to deduce the plutonium production rate.

SCRAM is the term used to describe an emergency shutdown of the reactor.  Each of the white squares above is a pressure display for the associated end cap.  These pressure readings would allow determination of the operating status of each process tube.

The rear portion of the display board was a huge matrix of piping.

On the other side of the aisle was additional plumbing with micro-valves to route the pressure information to the display board.

This sign caused my skin to crawl as it clearly states the danger of the whole process.



The backside of one of the display panels was opened to expose a huge bundle of hair-fine wires used to carry the signals from the sensors to the display.



Running the reactor was a complex process but recall that the objective of the system was plutonium production.  Periodically, based on the position of a process tube within the reactor core, the fuel slugs needed to be removed.  These slugs were highly radioactive having just been in the reactor core.  Long rods were used to push the slugs out the back side of the reactor into a water pool.  The slugs were left in the pool "awhile" to allow them to cool thermally and radioactively whereupon they were loaded into baskets using long tongs.  The baskets were weighed and then stored for additional cooling.  The baskets were then loaded into a specially designed train and transported to the fuel extraction facility.



The scales and transport monorails are visible in the photo above.



The baskets of fuel slugs were transported to the fuel reprocessing facility via diesel locomotive.



The lead-lined cask used to transport the fuel slugs to the processing facility.  The cargo in the casks was highly radioactive and could kill with only a short exposure.  Short exposure times and long set-back distances are the key to preventing a high dose of radiation.

Photos and Text Copyright Bill Caid 2019, all rights reserved.
For your enjoyment only, not for commercial use.