Hanford Nuclear Reservation Photos Emerge From Cold War Shadows

Everything used to be secret at the Hanford nuclear reservation. Thousands of people worked side by side at the Manhattan Project site, never talking about what they were doing and, often, not knowing themselves.

Loose lips, after all, sank ships.

In 1943, scientists in the United States and Nazi Germany were racing to build an atomic bomb.

In the isolated desert of Eastern Washington, miles from the population centers of Seattle and Portland, Ore., the federal government and its contractors built the first large-scale reactor to make plutonium.

Most of the 50,000 workers on the site were not told what they were making until after the first atomic bombs were dropped on Japan.

But government photographers were taking pictures of the work, and now some of those pictures have been released to the public.

“They wanted a living story of Hanford,” says Dave Briggs, manager of the national security analysis team for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “At the end of the war effort, it was supposed to be torn down and gone--then the Cold War came along.”

Some 90,000 negatives--glimpses into an archive of the remarkable and the mundane--detailed the once-classified life at Hanford from 1943 to 1967. It’s a relatively small subset of the 2 million photographs taken at Hanford since Day One.

Some photos are available now for public viewing on the Hanford Web site. A photo disk of the images should be available by Oct. 1.

“They were classified because of the time period they were taken. Almost everything was classified just by definition,” Briggs says.

Briggs and Rick Stutheit, a classification officer for the U.S. Department of Energy, are among the dozen modern-day film detectives reviewing boxes and boxes of negatives, stored in aging manila envelopes, and compiling the photographic library.

The project is part of the Energy Department’s openness policy, and it also reduces costs of storing the material--classified storage is very expensive.

“We, the people, paid for this effort. We, the people, ought to see what we got for the money,” Briggs says.

The Hanford atomic works sprang out of the sagebrush in just a few months. The prospect of feeding, housing and entertaining 50,000 people in a place where there had been little more than a string of small farm towns and orchards was daunting.

The photographs reflect it all, from construction of the Plutonium Uranium Extraction plant for removing plutonium from irradiated uranium fuel to shots of people in the universal pastimes of fishing, cooking, dancing.

There are pictures of bandleader Kay Kyser, children learning to swim, Election Night 1944.

Some 50,000 negatives have been reviewed so far, and only about a dozen have remained classified--those dealing with weapons information and unit costs, Stutheit says. Some photographs that might be culturally sensitive for Native Americans also are being held for tribal review.

Lee Edgar, 86, was among those bearing photographic witness to history at Hanford from 1947 to 1967. He shot traffic accidents, crime scenes, U.S. presidents and new buildings. He was sent to peer into tubes and crawl around in tanks used for making plutonium and storing the deadly wastes from the process.

Once, he recalls, he was lowered 15 or 16 feet into a tank, with his arms raised above his head, to take pictures for signs of rust.

“When I went to come out, I couldn’t come out,” he says.

His lean frame had swelled--not unlike a diver in need of decompression--down in the tank, and he had to be yanked out with a harness and a crane.

“The camera went out first, of course,” he says.

His wife, Betty, 79, knew better than to ask what he did on the job.

“I never talked to her about anything,” Edgar says.

She recalls being curious only one time “because they kept him for so long.”

It turned out he’d been contaminated in the line of duty, accidentally touching his forehead to a “hot” spot and had to wash his hair and face several times before he could come home.

Hanford photographers worked with Graflex Speed Graphics, using 101mm or 127mm lenses, and typically producing 4-inch-by-5-inch negatives. All film was black and white, and no roll film was used until the 1950s, according to Daniel Ostergaard, another former Hanford photographer.

Hasselblads were used in the late 1960s, and the first use of color transparency film was about 1960.

All processing and printing was done on site, and Edgar remembers routinely turning over his film to someone for classification.

The pictures also have been helpful as the Energy Department and its contractors work to clean up the radioactive legacy of 40 years of plutonium production, providing minute details about the construction of leaking storage tanks, for example, in the absence of written records.

The negatives are being scanned, indexed and cleaned up for public display, improving the quality of some images dramatically.

For Angela Townsend, a Pasco native and a national lab employee, scanning the photos has been an education.

“I was born in 1970. I didn’t know what all of this was,” she says. “Actually, this is better than our history classes we had in school.”

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On the Net: https://www.hanford.gov/doe/culres/photos/