Encyclopedia
The
Hanford Site occupies 1,517 km
2 in
Benton County, south-central
Washington. It was established in 1943 during
World War II as the Hanford Engineer Works, part of the
Manhattan Project, to provide the
plutonium necessary for the development of
nuclear weapons. During the Manhattan Project, Hanford was codenamed "Site W". The Federal Government bought the
towns of White Bluffs and
Hanford and all of the surrounding farmland and orchards and evacuated the residents to make room for the site.
The plutonium manufactured at the Hanford site was used to build the first nuclear bomb that was tested at
Trinity site near
Alamogordo, New Mexico, and used to build
Fat Man, the
bomb that was dropped on
Nagasaki,
Japan.
Currently, the Hanford Site is engaged in the world's largest environmental cleanup, with many challenges to be resolved in the face of overlapping technical, political, regulatory, and cultural interests. The cleanup effort is focused on three outcomes: restoring the
Columbia River corridor for other uses, converting the central plateau to long-term waste treatment and storage, and preparing for the future.
Although most of the original Hanford Site is in
Benton County, approximately twenty percent was once across the
Columbia River in Grant and Franklin counties. This land has since been returned to private use and is now covered with orchards and irrigated fields. In 2000, large portions of Hanford were turned over to the
Hanford Reach National Monument.
History of the Hanford Nuclear Site
The Uranium Committee of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development decided to sponsor an intensive research project on
plutonium. At this time, plutonium was a rare element that had been isolated in a
University of California laboratory only nine months earlier. The OSRD placed the contract with the
University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory .
Selecting the Hanford site
In June 1942, the
Army Corps of Engineers formed the
Manhattan Engineer District to construct industrial-size plants to manufacture the plutonium and uranium for the
Met Lab scientists. In November 1942, the
DuPont Company signed on as the prime contractor. DuPont recommended that the plutonium production facilities be located far away from the existing uranium production facilities at Oak Ridge,
Tennessee, and described the ideal site:
- A large and remote tract of land,
- A "hazardous manufacturing area" of at least 12 by 16 miles ,
- Space for laboratory facilities at least 8 miles from the nearest reactor or separations plant,
- No towns of more than 1,000 people closer than 20 miles from the hazardous rectangle,
- No main highway, railway, or employee village closer than 10 miles from the hazardous rectangle,
- A clean and abundant water supply,
- A large electric power supply,
- Ground that could bear heavy loads.
Although General
Leslie Groves considered five other locations, the Hanford Site was chosen in December 1942 as "ideal in virtually all respects" , except for the farming towns of White Bluffs and Hanford. General Groves then established the Hanford Engineer Works. Beginning in February 1943, the Federal Government acquired the land within the Hanford site and evicted the landowners. Because of wartime food shortages, the
Manhattan Project used American prisoners to harvest the fields and orchards.
Construction begins
The Hanford Engineer Works broke ground in March 1943, and immediately launched a massive construction project. Before the end of the war in August 1945, the HEW Built 554 buildings , including:
- Three reactors ,
- Three 250 meter long plutonuium processing canyons ,
- 64 underground high-level waste storage tanks,
- Many uranium fuel fabrication facilities ,
- 386 miles of roads,
- 158 miles of railway,
- 50 miles of electrical transmission lines,
- Four electrical substations,
- Hundreds of miles of fencing.
The Hanford Engineer Works used 780,000 cubic yards of concrete and 40,000 tons of structural steel and consumed US$230 million dollars between 1943 and 1946.
Building the reactors
The
DuPont Company started to build the first Hanford
nuclear reactor,
B pile , in October 1943. Construction was completed less than a year later, on September 13, 1944. Testing started on July 12, 1944, and B pile was charged with hot dog-sized slugs of mixed U-235 and U-238 on September 13, 1944.
Plutonium production began on September 26, 1944. Despite some initial problems, B pile produced its first plutonium on November 6, 1944. This plutonium was refined at Hanford and shipped to
Los Alamos on February 5, 1945, where it was used to build the
Trinity Test bomb and
Fat Man, the bomb that was dropped on
Nagasaki, Japan.
After starting construction on B pile, DuPont started construction on two identical reactors, 100-D, which started production in December 1944, and 100-F, which started production in February 1945. All three reactors operated at 250 megawatts .
Plutonium separation plants
Plutonium was produced in the Hanford reactors when a
U-238 atom in a fuel slug absorbed a neutron to form U-239.
The U-239 rapidly undergoes
beta decay to give Np-239, which rapidly undergoes a second beta decay, giving
Pu-239.
The irradiated fuel slugs were transported by rail to three huge remotely operated chemical separation plants called "canyons", that were located 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.
After the plutonium was extracted and refined in these plants,
it was delivered to
Los Alamos for use in the
Trinity test device and the "
Fat Man" bomb eventually dropped on
Nagasaki, Japan.
Cold War era
During the
Cold War, the HEW built H-Reactor, with 400 MW, that started in 1949, and DR Reactor, with 250 MW, started up in 1950. C-Reactor , at 600 MW, was located next to B-Reactor and started in 1952, and soon became the chief development and testing machine at the Hanford site. Within three months of its startup, C-Reactor's primary function was experimentation for the design of the "twin" K-Piles - the 1955 "jumbos", each outputing 1,800 MW.
By the early
1960s, extensive modifications and upgrades had allowed the five reactors that were built in the 1940s to achieve power levels ranging from 2,015 to 2,210 MW each, C-Reactor achieved a power level of 2,500 MW, and the K-Piles achieved power levels of 4,400 MW each.
The Hanford B-Reactor continued to operate during the
Cold War and produced tritium for the
Hydrogen Bomb. B-Reactor was deactivated on February 12, 1968. Since then, most of the surrounding structures have been removed and buried and the other Hanford Reactors have been entombed to allow radioactivity to decay. Fortunately, B-Reactor has been saved from this fate and is slated to become .
All eight nuclear reactors were built along
Hanford Reach on the
Columbia River. With an average individual life span of 22 years, the reactors were closed down between 1964 and 1987.
The Hanford reactors required a huge volume of water from the
Columbia River to dissipate the heat that was produced by the nuclear reaction. Huge water systems drew cooling water from the
Columbia River and after treating this water for use by the reactors, returned water to the river. Before being pumped back into the river, the used water was held in large tanks known as retention basins for up to six hours. Longer-lived isotopes were not affected by this retention, and several terabecquerels entered the river every day. By the early
1960s, there were protests from the health departments of
Oregon and
Washington, as well as the
U.S. Public Health Service.
Because of the demands for increased plutonium production, the Hanford Reactors had an increasingly severe problem with "slug failures"—the undesirable penetration of a fuel element's
aluminum jacket by cooling water that caused the uranium to swell and block the coolant flow within the process tube and melt the slugs within that tube. No slug failures occurred during World War II, but by December 1945, 125 slugs with "blisters" had been found by visual inspection in the irradiated fuel storage basins at the rear of the three reactors. For the next seven years, blistered and ruptured fuel elements were opened and examined using a special underwater
lathe in
steel tanks located in the 111-B Test Building. After the 327 Radiometallurgy Facility was ready, with its hot cells, the 111-B Building continued to be used as an examination facility for sections of
corroded and failed process tubes.
When fuel ruptures did occur, the process tube containing the failure was emptied into the irradiated fuel storage basin. Sometimes, severe ruptures had to be removed with a rotary reamer and a
hydraulic ram, with the damaged process tube then split with a special tube splitter, and then pulled out and chopped into short lengths with a unique Hanford Site instrument known as the "
guillotine".
During the 25 years that the site operated, many puzzles relating to the practicalities of nuclear piles were solved and new machines developed to improve operating efficiencies. However, while technical operating challenges progressed well, waste disposal solutions remained elusive, and effluents continued to be released to the Columbia River.
Most of Hanford's reactors were shut down in the 1960s but
nuclear waste still remains at the site. About 11,000 workers work to consolidate, clean up, and mitigate waste, contaminated buildings, and contaminated
soil. Cleanup to a nationally accepted level will likely take until 2030.
Under the present cleanup plan, lower-level hazardous wastes are buried in huge lined pits that are sealed and that will be monitored with sophisticated instruments for many years. The high-level nuclear waste, as well as tanks full of highly toxic chemicals, pose a much more difficult problem. As an example, plutonium has a half-life of
24,100 years, and a decay of ten half-lives is required before a sample is considered to be safe. Disposal of plutonium and other high-level radioactive wastes and toxic chemicals is a difficult problem that continues to be a subject of intense debate. Currently, the
Department of Energy is investigating
vitrification, a method that would combine these dangerous wastes with glass to render them stable, but a final decision has not yet been made.
Contemporary Hanford
Although uranium enrichment and plutonium breeding have been slowly phased out at Hanford, its strong legacy remains in
Richland, Washington, which was transformed from a sleepy farm town to a bustling city by the Hanford project. As the nearest city to the
PNNL, the Herculean feat of feeding the United States' vast nuclear program in an analog world created a strong community of highly skilled scientists and engineers.
Hanford became the location of the
Department of Energy Pacific Northwest National Laboratory owned by the United States government and operated by
Battelle Memorial Institute just north of Richland. A map of the site can be found on the Benton County Emergency Services web site.
Other facilities located at Hanford Site:
- LIGO's Hanford Observatory, an interferometer searching for gravitational waves, operates in tandem with another observatory in Livingston, Louisiana.
- Columbia Generating Station is a commercial nuclear power plant operated by Energy Northwest.
References
- D'Antonio, Michael, Atomic Harvest: Hanford and the Lethal Toll of America's Nuclear Arsenal . ISBN 0-517-58981-8
- Weisskopf, Gene, "Historic American Engineering Record B Reactor ," HAER No. WA-164 This Report has been scanned but is not yet online.
- Gerber, Michele et al., National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form - Historic, Archaeological and Traditional Cultural Properties of the Hanford Site, Washington, DOE/RL-97-02,
External links
- A collection of Hanford-related documents from a group fighting to preserve the B-100 Reactor at Hanford.
- A map of Manhattan Project Era Hanford, Washington
- Historic Preservation of Manhattan Project Sites at Hanford
