What the document says
This volume reports the work of the Operations Division at the Hanford Engineer Works from about 1 January 1944 to 31 December 1946. It lays out the plant in three steps. Raw uranium billets arrive at the Metal Fabrication and Testing (300) Area, where they are extruded into rods, machined into pieces called slugs, and sealed into aluminum cans. The canned slugs go into graphite piles in the 100 Areas, where part of the uranium becomes plutonium-239. Separation plants in the 200 Areas then dissolve the irradiated metal and pull the plutonium away from the uranium and the radioactive fission products.
Section 4 lists what went wrong and what the staff changed. Canning the uranium slugs was the hardest early job, and an arc weld was developed for it. Graphite in the piles expanded under irradiation, stretching aluminum cooling tubes and tilting the shields, and annealing and mechanical alterations were used as corrective measures. Slugs blistered during 1946, and tests with specially extruded and cast slugs failed to remove the cause. Waste tanks filled with sludge toward the close of 1946, so a by-pass to empty tanks was used as a stopgap while bids for more storage went out.
Later sections cover the rest of plant life. Richland Village housed the operating staff, with schools from the nursery level through high school, churches, a government-owned bus system at a five cent fare, and medical and hospital service. A safety program ran through a Central Safety Committee, with medical checks on anyone liable to exposure to radioactive dusts or emanations. Finished product travelled under an armed Military Police escort, first by government automobile and later in a special railroad car. The du Pont contract passed to the General Electric Company on 1 September 1946.
Key points
- 01Three pile areas, 100-B, 100-D and 100-F, each hold a graphite block about 36 feet wide, 36 feet high and 26 feet long, pierced front to rear by 2004 holes carrying aluminum cooling tubes.
- 02The 100-B pile reached its rated power level of 200 megawatts, and each pile area occupies about 686 acres.
- 03At rated capacity the radiation energy inside each pile is roughly equal to that from 5,000,000 pounds of radium, so the piles sit behind shielding about five feet thick.
- 04Monitoring stations recorded stray radiation for workers and for inhabitants within a radius of some fifty miles, and those records were kept as possible evidence in future legal actions.
- 05Canning quality was such that fewer than one slug in 2000 failed the final test, forty hours of steam at about 100 pounds per square inch.
- 06The decay period for irradiated metal was increased from 35 to 60 days, and polonium was made by charging bismuth slugs into the 100-B pile.
From the original
Following the abandonment of Hanford Camp in February 1945, no further need was felt to exist for the facilities in the camp and a contract to demolish the greater part was awarded.
Source: U.S. Department of Energy, OpenNet declassified document archive, OSTI ID 1128917. The summary is written from the document’s own text. Old scans can be hard to read, so check the original for anything you plan to cite.