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