Old Reactors Now Monuments to ‘Manhattan Project’ : Atomic Age Ghost Town Awaits Its Fate

The eight reactors that helped put the punch in America’s nuclear arsenal today make up the first ghost town of the Atomic Age.

Once buzzing with thousands of plutonium production workers, the Hanford nuclear reservation now has only a handful of employees and the occasional group of tourists curious about the origins of the bomb that devastated Nagasaki.

The idle reactors, set a few miles apart on the desolate reservation, are columns of gray concrete and rusted metal ducts that date from the Manhattan Project of World War II and the Cold War era of the 1950s. Whether they will be buried forever or preserved as relics of the dawn of the Nuclear Age will be debated soon, when Westinghouse Hanford Co. issues its environmental impact statement on their disposal.

One thing appears certain: the outdated plants will never operate again.

‘All Surplus’ Now

“The main reason they were shut down was they didn’t need the plutonium,” said William Heine, manager of decommissioning and decontamination for Westinghouse Hanford. “They’re all considered surplus.”

Four options will be identified in the government contractor’s statement. The choices range from doing nothing to burying the radioactive reactor blocks at the present site, Heine said.

Or, the reactors could be moved on huge tractors to another site for burial. Another option would be to wait 75 years for the radiation to diminish enough that workers can dismantle the reactors for burial.

The outcome on Hanford could be an indicator of the nation’s response as more and more aging reactors go out of operation.

The eight reactors, designed solely for defense production and shut down between 1964 and 1971, represent the largest single concentration of closed nuclear plants in the country, Heine said.

Some think their history is worth preserving.

The richest legacy belongs to the so-called B Reactor, built in a fevered 15 1/2 months during 1943 and ‘44, as the United States worked frantically to beat Germany in the race to develop the atomic bomb.

Doubts Modern Ability

“We’d be lucky to do it in 10 years now,” said William Klink of Westinghouse Hanford.

The Manhattan Project had uranium-producing facilities at Oak Ridge, Tenn., as well as the three plutonium reactors at Hanford, because no one was sure which material would produce the best weapon, Heine said.

The Hanford site, with its processing facilities and accommodations for 51,000 workers, was built for $350 million by Du Pont, prime contractor to the Army Corps of Engineers.

The bombs were assembled at Los Alamos, N. M.. The Oak Ridge uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and the Hanford plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, to knock the Japanese out of the war.

The lore of B Reactor has it that on the night of Sept. 26, 1944, a team of scientists met to bring the reactor to critical mass. Enrico Fermi, who had first demonstrated 20 months before in Chicago that a nuclear chain-reaction could be sustained and controlled, was on hand to supervise the loading of fuel.

The start-up went well, but after a few hours reactor power began dropping.

Legend of Start-Up

The story is that Fermi went into an office adjacent to the control room, pulled out his slide rule and began calculating. He emerged a short time later with the news that xenon gas, produced during fission, was shutting the reactor down, and that adding more uranium would solve the problem.

The control room, which resembles the set of a 1950s science-fiction movie, is now open to tours.