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The 'B-Reactor' at Hanford Site, Washington, was the first large scale plutonium production reactor ever built. The project was commissioned under the Manhattan Project, during World War II, to develop the first nuclear weapons. The reactor was designed and built by the DuPont company based on experimental designs tested by Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago. It was designed to operate at 250 megawatts. The reactor was graphite moderated and water cooled. It consisted of a 28 by 36-foot, 1,200-ton graphite cylinder lying on its side, penetrated through its entire length horizontally by 2,004 aluminum tubes. Two hundred tons of uranium slugs the size of rolls of quarters and sealed in aluminum cans went into the tubes. Cooling water was pumped through the aluminum tubes around the uranium slugs at the rate of 75,000 gallons per minute. The reactor produced plutonium-239 by irradiating uranium-238 with neutrons.
The B Reactor was one of three reactors—along with the D and F reactors—built about six miles apart on the south bank of the Columbia River. The B-Reactor started production in September, 1944, the D-Reactor in December, 1944 and the F-Reactor in February, 1945. Each reactor had its own auxiliary facilities that included a river pump house, large storage and settling basins, a filtration plant, huge motor-driven pumps for delivering water to the face of the pile, and facilities for emergency cooling in case of a power failure.
The plutonium for the Trinity device, tested at Los Alamos in New Mexico, and the Fat Man bomb, later dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, was created in the B, D and F reactors. Additional reactors were constructed later, but the first three reactors ran for two decades. The B-Reactor was shut down in February 1968. It is now in "interim safe storage" mode. The D and F reactors were shut down in June, 1967 and June 1965, respectively. In a process called cocooning or entombment, the reactor buildings are demolished up to the four foot-thick concrete shield around the reactor core. Any openings are sealed and a new roof is built. The D and F reactors have already been entombed, as have the C and DR reactors. Most auxiliary buildings at the first three reactors have been demolished, as well. The H, K-East and K-West reactors and the N-Reactor are scheduled to be entombed in that order. There is interest in turning the B-Reactor into a museum, but if it is not, it will meet the same fate as the other reactors.

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Sources

External links

Sources

★ Washington Closure Hanford - Newsletter (PDF)

★ Hanford Site - Timeline 1943-1990 (PDF)

★ United States Department of Energy - B-Reactor

External links

★ B Reactor Museum Association A collection of Hanford-related documents from a group fighting to preserve the B-100 Reactor at Hanford.

★ Reactor 105-B (museum) location: