{"id":2180,"date":"2012-05-05T18:28:03","date_gmt":"2012-05-06T01:28:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathpirate.net\/log\/?p=2180"},"modified":"2012-05-06T11:41:04","modified_gmt":"2012-05-06T18:41:04","slug":"inside-the-b-reactor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathpirate.net\/log\/2012\/05\/05\/inside-the-b-reactor\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the B Reactor"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the height of WWII, the US government took over a stretch of desert along the Columbia River in southern Washington.\u00c2\u00a0 They kicked out the residents of Hanford and White Bluffs, then moved in thousands of builders, engineers, and scientists, and embarked on one of the largest construction projects in history.\u00c2\u00a0 Practically overnight, Richland became one of the largest cities in the state.<\/p>\n

And almost no one knew what they were doing there.<\/p>\n

Everything was secret.\u00c2\u00a0 You didn’t talk about what you did and you didn’t speculate about others.\u00c2\u00a0 Your phones were tapped and your mail was read.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0You knew that your work was vital for the war effort in some way, but you had no idea what you were doing.\u00c2\u00a0 Until, that is, you opened up the newspaper on August 6th, 1945, and saw the headline:<\/p>\n

“IT’S ATOMIC BOMBS”<\/a><\/p>\n

The desolate patch of sand and scrub brush had been home to the plutonium production facilities for the Manhattan Project, the secret project to build atomic bombs.<\/p>\n

The first full scale reactor built on the site was the B Reactor, overseen by Enrico Fermi.\u00c2\u00a0 Formerly one of the most secret facilities in the entire world, the B Reactor is now open for public tours.<\/p>\n

The tour starts at a small business park north of Richland.<\/p>\n

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You sign in and are given a Hanford Visitor Guide.\u00c2\u00a0 The guide, among other things, talks about the dangers of beryllium, has a convenient graphic about how to react to different types of alarms, has about six pages of information on radiation safety (out of a 20 page pamphlet), and starts off by saying “We expect that every individual\u00c2\u00a0will go home in the same condition that brought them to the Hanford Site.”<\/p>\n

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It’s somewhere around this point that you realize that when normal people go on vacation, they typically don’t\u00c2\u00a0go\u00c2\u00a0someplace where\u00c2\u00a0the brochure tells them to \u00c2\u00a0“Move upwind of the facility”.<\/p>\n

You then head into the waiting room, where a video is playing about the history and cleanup efforts of the Hanford site.\u00c2\u00a0 Around the walls are old photos of life in\u00c2\u00a0the Hanford area\u00c2\u00a0before, after, and during the war, as well as miscellaneous sciencey artifacts.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s also a slightly creepy pair of scale mannequins of Enrico Fermi and Leona Libby, who were scientists on the project.<\/p>\n

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From there, you’re loaded onto the bus for the 40 minute ride out to the reactor.<\/p>\n

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The trip passes through unremarkable desert.\u00c2\u00a0 Along the way, a guide will tell you of the history of Hanford.\u00c2\u00a0 (Our guide was a retired\u00c2\u00a0Hanford engineer.)\u00c2\u00a0Occasionally, in the distance, you catch a glimpse of some large, mysterious buildings.<\/p>\n

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As you approach the Vernita Bridge across the Columbia River, you turn off the main road, and pass through a gate and into the Hanford\u00c2\u00a0site.\u00c2\u00a0 A short time later, you pass a large\u00c2\u00a0yellow and magenta sign\u00c2\u00a0letting you know that you are entering a radiologically controlled area.<\/p>\n

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Your destination is a\u00c2\u00a0blocky concrete building surrounded by a chain link\u00c2\u00a0fence topped with barbed wire.<\/p>\n

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They unload the bus and collect everyone inside a sterile industrial\u00c2\u00a0hallway.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Pipes and conduits line the walls and\u00c2\u00a0ceilings.<\/p>\n

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Above the doorway at the far\u00c2\u00a0end is a sign with flashing red lights.<\/p>\n

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Through the\u00c2\u00a0door is the reactor chamber.\u00c2\u00a0 From the hallway, it looks a bit like a school gymnasium.\u00c2\u00a0 An American flag hangs\u00c2\u00a0along one side of the large open room.\u00c2\u00a0 As you enter, you’re unsure of what you’ll\u00c2\u00a0be able to see.\u00c2\u00a0 Nuclear reactors are always hidden behind\u00c2\u00a0ten foot thick concrete, right?\u00c2\u00a0 There might\u00c2\u00a0be a super-thick lead glass window into the core.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe there’s one of those hot-box things with the remote controlled arms.\u00c2\u00a0 Whatever is there, it’s probably hidden behind so much protective shielding that there’s not going to be anything\u00c2\u00a0to see really, right?<\/p>\n

Then you enter the room and turn to your left.\u00c2\u00a0 What you see looks absolutely nothing like a nuclear reactor and absolutely everything like the crazy\u00c2\u00a0product of a top secret government science experiment.\u00c2\u00a0 If someone told you that it was a device that could open an interdimensional portal for travel to another planet, you would believe them.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s no shielding, no leaded glass, no thick concrete walls, just this:<\/p>\n

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No picture can do justice to the scale.\u00c2\u00a0 This wall of valves and pipes and caps is something like five stories high and 50 feet wide.\u00c2\u00a0 An elevator platform stretches across the front.\u00c2\u00a0 There are over 2000 individual process\u00c2\u00a0tubes on the reactor face, each one tagged and numbered.\u00c2\u00a0 Lights flash at the corners.\u00c2\u00a0 From holes in\u00c2\u00a0the ceiling above the reactor hang cables supporting something out of view.\u00c2\u00a0 The reactor core is made up of thousands upon thousands of graphite blocks, stacked up like oversized Jenga blocks, without nails, pins, mortar, or anything else to keep them in place.\u00c2\u00a0 This becomes even more impressive when you consider that the process tubes and holes for the control rods were pre-drilled in these blocks\u00c2\u00a0and had to be perfectly aligned to allow the fuel rods and control rods to pass through the core.<\/p>\n

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After about a half hour presentation, the group is split in two and taken on a tour of the rest of the site.\u00c2\u00a0 The highlight is the control room, with its walls full of knobs and dials and gauges and readouts, but not a single computer screen.<\/p>\n

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The valve pit is full of pipes and pumps which pulled water in from the Columbia River and pushed it through the reactor to cool it down.\u00c2\u00a0 The water was heated from the cold river temperature to almost boiling as it passed through the core.<\/p>\n

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The electrical room:<\/p>\n

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The “Hear-Here!” Telephone Booth:<\/p>\n

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The accumulator room.\u00c2\u00a0 These large metal drums were filled with rocks and lifted into the air.\u00c2\u00a0 In the event of a power failure the weight of the rocks pushing down would provide enough pressure in a hydraulic system to insert the control rods and stop the reaction.<\/p>\n

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Warning signs room.\u00c2\u00a0 These signs were originally located around the site, but have now been collected into this one room, along with some safety equipment.<\/p>\n

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This is one of the graphite blocks that makes up the core.<\/p>\n

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Leona Libby was one of the physicists working with Enrico Fermi.\u00c2\u00a0 She helped solve the “Xenon posioning” problem which was causing the reactor to shutdown shortly after it was started up.<\/p>\n

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Also, they had to carve out a stall from the bathroom to make a women’s restroom specifically for her.<\/p>\n

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Off of the control room were offices for some of the staff.\u00c2\u00a0 One of these belonged to Enrico Fermi.<\/p>\n

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Behind the reactor core is the fuel storage room.\u00c2\u00a0 This room sits above a pool where the fuel rods ended up after being thrown out of the back side of the reactor.\u00c2\u00a0 The rods were collected from here and shipped off to another facility on the Hanford site for plutonium extraction.\u00c2\u00a0 The pool room is only visible through a window, and the discharge area of the reactor (Which would have been the most radioactive part of the plant, when the reactor was operating) is not visible at all.<\/p>\n

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Operations at the B Reactor did not cease after WWII.\u00c2\u00a0 It continued to operate until 1968.\u00c2\u00a0 As a result, not everything from the reactor is as it was during the days of the Manhattan Project.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s difficult to tell what’s original and what was added later, unless, of course, it has a date on it.<\/p>\n

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After about three hours on site,\u00c2\u00a0everyone’s gathered back up and put on the bus back to Richland.<\/p>\n

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One thing I heard from some of the other people on the tour over and over, was how impressed they were that the scientists and engineers were able to build all of this\u00c2\u00a0from scratch, without computers,\u00c2\u00a0figuring it all out as they went.\u00c2\u00a0 That wasn’t what was truly impressive to me.\u00c2\u00a0 What I found the most impressive was the sense that somewhere, right now, there’s a group of people tucked away in a secret lab somewhere, doing pretty much exactly the same thing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the height of WWII, the US government took over a stretch of desert along the Columbia River in southern Washington.\u00c2\u00a0 They kicked out the residents of Hanford and White Bluffs, then moved in thousands of builders, engineers, and scientists, and embarked on one of the largest construction projects in history.\u00c2\u00a0 Practically overnight, Richland became […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[213,211,97,215,216,210,214,212],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathpirate.net\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2180"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathpirate.net\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathpirate.net\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathpirate.net\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathpirate.net\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2180"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/mathpirate.net\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2253,"href":"https:\/\/mathpirate.net\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2180\/revisions\/2253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathpirate.net\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathpirate.net\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathpirate.net\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}