Hanford Site Washington: Manhattan Project Location Hanford Nuclear Reactor B

We spent the day visiting the Hanford Site Nuclear Reactor B, a Manhattan Project location just outside of Richland, Washington.

The Hanford site is a decommissioned nuclear reactor built in 1943 by the Manhattan Project. Hanford's B Reactor was the first full-scale plutonium production reactor in the world, and the plutonium manufactured there was used in the first Atomic Bomb used in the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan.

The National Park Service only does tours in summer, and releases tickets once a year. If you sign up for their newsletter you will be notified when they are released - because they are gone quickly.

The Hanford Site was built in only 18 months, and most of the workers did not know what they were constructing. At the height of construction, there were more than 45,000 workers working on the site. Richland, Washington was established by the Manhattan Project and workers on the site brought their entire lives to Washington, and lived in barracks and trailers. The entire site was segregated, with workers of different races rarely coming into contact with each other.

Once construction was complete, there were thousands of workers who remained on site to operate the reactors. By 1946, the site had nearly 5,000 employees. Those employees and sometimes their families lived on site and created their own social environment with dances, bowling alleys, and more.

The site also caused the town of Richland to grow. By 1950, its population was around 22,000.

The Hanford site produced their first batch of plutonium between December 1944 and February 1945 and sent the results to Los Alamos on Feb. 5, 1945. The site also added two new reactors: Reactor D and Reactor F, between 1944 and 1945.

The reactors were also in use during the Cold War, and actually expanded to produce plutonium for many of the nuclear bombs the US has in their arsenal today.

The Hanford site was decommissioned between 1964 and 1971, but Russian inspections continued up to 2018. Due to a treaty, Russian officials were able to inspect all US reactors, and US officials were able to inspect all Russian reactors.

The Hanford Site is still used today for research, and also hosts numerous sites including the Columbia Generating Station, an operating nuclear power plant, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the LIGO Hanford Observatory. Because of this, there are still a lot of places near the site that are off limits to civilians.

The Hanford Site Reactor B was designated as a part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park in 2015.