It’s been 80 years since the world’s first industrial-scale nuclear reactor went live at Hanford

The National Park Service runs three different sites related to the World War II Manhattan Project. The one on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southeast Washington was the first full-scale nuclear reactor in the world. The B Reactor features hundreds of nozzles capping the metal process tubes on the reactor face and even a mint-green control room with all its 40s-era instrument panels. But it’s hearing about the human stories of struggle that make the history come alive. Sept. 26 marks 80 years since the B Reactor first went online. We get a tour from Terri Andre, a volunteer docent at the Manhattan Project National Historical Park at Hanford.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller.

Terri Andre: So here we are in the control room and the reactor is going to start up for the very first time. It’s September 26, 1944, almost exactly 80 years ago from when we’re speaking now. So the reactor is starting up, all of the brass are here. Enrico Fermi came from Chicago. Crawford Greenewalt from DuPont is here, Leo Sziliard is here. All of the top level scientists. What pressure on the guy sitting in the control room seat, but he knows what he’s supposed to do.

Miller: That engineer’s job, 80 years ago today, was to oversee the controls when the world’s first full-scale nuclear reactor went online at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. It was the dawn of the nuclear age and while it’s led to advancements in medicine and energy, it was born out of a desperate race. American scientists and engineers and military officials were sprinting to build the most destructive weapon ever created before the Germans had a chance to. The plutonium for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki was made at Hanford’s B-Reactor.

We got a tour of the reactor yesterday from Terri Andre. She is the docent with the Manhattan Project National Historical Park that we just heard. The B-Reactor is jointly overseen by the Department of Energy and the National Park Service. But the tours are managed by the DOE. We started in a nondescript hallway.

Andre: The people come off the bus and they come wandering and we tell them that the very first thing they’re going to see is the front face of the reactor. And most people can’t really visualize what that’s going to look like. And as they come around this corner …

Miller: Whoa.

Andre: They see … exactly what you just said. It’s the [makes noise of awe] moment or “wow, look at that.” And what I like to emphasize is this isn’t a movie set. This is the real thing. It is the actual reactor that made plutonium. It was the world’s first full-scale plutonium producing reactor. And here it is. It is immense.

You’re looking up at the front face. It’s about 38 feet tall, 38 feet wide and deep. It’s a huge cube. When you’re looking at it, what you see are 2,004 entry nozzles that have special tubes that go all the way through from one side to the other. But to give you a sense of how massive this is, the center of this is composed of 75,000, 4 feet long blocks of graphite. And each block of graphite is about 4 inches by 4 inches by 4 inches, and then 4 feet long, and they’re all piled together. That’s why we call it a pile. They’re piled together. Enrico Fermi did that back in Chicago. He’s, “We’re piling the graphite. It’s a pile,” and we still call them a pile.

Miller: So you’ve thrown a lot of info out there. But can you explain in very simple terms if possible, the basic idea that Fermi tested out in a much smaller way, that they did here for the first time?

Andre: OK. So they’re creating an environment where uranium can transmute just a minute amount of the uranium fuel that’s inside the reactor. We’re creating an environment that allows it to transmute and go through a few steps. Now, remember back when you were studying the planets, it’s a lot easier to remember the step by step if you remember your planets. So you’ve got uranium and then we have neptunium and then eventually we end up with plutonium. Not every single piece of fuel that’s in there is going to be transmuted through.

So for a visual, think of an elephant, a full grown elephant and that’s gonna be our uranium. By the time we’re done, we’re gonna get a little tiny kitten’s worth of plutonium. So the transmutation process happens, but it needs to be in an environment that allows that to happen.

Miller: Is the rest of the elephant, minus a small kitten, waste?

Andre: A good deal of the leftover material is waste product. It’s a simple process, but it’s also a complicated process and there are a lot of wastes within this whole process. Remember, this was all brand new. I mean, we had just barely identified plutonium, just a very short time before all of this came about. We were in a hurry. We were told that Germany was ahead of us and the people that worked here had a real sense of, we need to get this done and we need to get it done quickly. So whatever waste products there were, were set aside for later. We’re just gonna kick that whole process down the road and we’ll take care of it later.

Miller: How much is known about the moment when they realized that this vast experiment that had never been done before was actually gonna work? How much do we know about that moment?

Andre: There are quite a few first person interviews of the scientists, the engineers and the DuPont officials that took part in this. They were very confident going into it, though, because the brilliant minds that worked on all of this had been working on the process for a couple of years. Back in 1939, Albert Einstein wrote the letter to the president saying that these sorts of things, this experimentation, things are going on over in Europe that we’re concerned about. Leo Sziliard and Enrico Fermi – two of the main scientists involved in this – were the ones who came to Einstein and said, we need to be looking at this.

So the scientific community was aware of the different processes, aware of the things that needed to happen. It just was all theoretical from that point on. But sometimes I get a little skeptical when I hear that the government’s going to form a committee, but the government formed a committee and they did what a committee was supposed to do. Scientists all over the country were working on this process. And these problems with the focal point being at the University of Chicago, and some brilliant people were there. They knew what was supposed to happen and it did, it worked the way they anticipated.

Miller: At this point, I turned to Robert Franklin, the history professor at Washington State University Tri-Cities, who we talked to at the beginning of the week. He was on the tour with us.

Miller: How many times do you think you’ve been in this room?

Robert Franklin: Over 100 … easily over 100.

Miller: Does it still hit you when you walk in?

Franklin: Yeah. Harley Cowan, who is a Manhattan Project photographer and in the Guild of Atomic Photographers who’s done some heritage documentation of this building and T Plant, he has a shot of the front face that he titled a “Cathedral of Science.” And that’s exactly the vibe, the feeling that I get when I’m in here. It looks like some sort of technoscientific, nuclear pipe organ in this large … and it’s really this large room we’re in, which does feel cathedral-like, and it’s grand. It’s here for a reason. You need all this space to get all these process tubes installed. The rear face of the reactor isn’t like this at all, but it does give this sense of awe and importance. And if you look even above the reactor, you see how much higher the building actually goes and you can see a little bit of light up there and every time I see it, I’m just as impressed as the first time.

Miller: What about you, Terri?

Andre: Oh, the same. I walk in here and I’m amazed at what came together, how quickly it came together and the process. Groundbreaking to first production [was]11 months – amazing, absolutely amazing. And also the fact that so much of this was so secret. The people that worked here, they didn’t even use the word plutonium. They loaded the metal and then the plutonium was the product. And you can see there is an elevator where you take the slugs that go inside the reactor and they brought them up. There’s an elevator that goes all the way up the front face. So each one of those processed tubes can be loaded up with the metal.

They were dedicated. The war was raging. They knew that they had to do something to help win the war. And so it was a very focused time frame. Sometimes they were building even ahead of the plans coming from Chicago. But it worked. They did it. They did it quickly. They did it well and they did it safely.

Miller: Who are some of the people that you think about the most who took part in those early years?

Andre: Well, Crawford Greenewalt with DuPont, I think he fancied himself to be as intelligent as the highly skilled scientists and engineers. He was very skilled. He was a master of project management, making sure that things were going the way they were supposed to, from the building perspective and from the staffing perspective. And of course, there’s General Groves, very much the task master. He wasn’t here all the time, but when he was here, you wanted to make sure things stayed on task.

Miller: He was the head of the entire Manhattan Project.

Andre: He was, he was. But we had Matthias here and from all accounts, Matthias was also a very methodical man, but a very likable man who made sure that things got done the way they were supposed to get done, but that people weren’t lost in the process.

Now, of course, my favorite person to talk about is Leona Woods Marshall, at the time. Later on, she marries Doctor Libby after she divorces Marshall. But when she was here, she called herself a babysitter of the reactor. In just a little while, we’ll take a walk into the control room, and I’d love to tell you a little bit more about her because she was here the day the reactor came up to power or went critical for the very first time. And she was confident, but yet also in awe of the entire process.

Miller: Should we see the control room?

Andre: Sure. We’re on our way to the control room and on the way there, there’s a little poster of Leona. You have to consider the times. Back at that time frame, they couldn’t even conceive that a woman would be working here. So they didn’t have a women’s restroom facility. When Leona wrote her book called “The Uranium People,” she was pretty casual about the whole thing. She said, “They didn’t need to give me a restroom. I could just go out the back door, there’s 10,000 sagebrush. I can just go back there.” But fortunately for her, the government decided she really did need a restroom and they refurbished one of the men’s rooms.

So now we’re entering the control room and the first thing that hits you here is there are so many knobs, dials, and it just has this real industrial feel. You wonder how can anybody know what all of these are for?

Miller: You also hope that they do know. [Laughter]

Andre: Exactly.

Miller: Yeah.

Andre: So most of the time when I talk about this room, I always use the masculine pronoun because, as I mentioned, Leona was the only woman that was allowed to work here in a professional capacity. And out here at the reactor during World War II, she was the only woman that was here.

So we have a control panel here where we have a chair for the operator that’s going to be in charge. So the operator sits at this chair and he can tell what’s going on in most of the different areas of the reactor. And he’s being fed information from these other panels by other people that are in the room. Now, in the beginning, we would need about 10 people to help feed him the information and keep track of everything. But as time went on, the processes got more and more sophisticated, they were able to cut that down. So you didn’t need that many people in here. You could operate the whole thing with about half dozen people here.

And one of the most impressive walls is this great big wall. And on top though, it has a warning. It says, ‘“Caution, bumping panel may cause scram.”

Miller: S-C-R-A-M. What’s scram?

Andre: It means to shut down the reactor, to shut it down quickly. Now, if you Google this, you’re going to come across a story, we’ve not been able to verify it. So I’m not going to tell you it’s real. I’ll tell you parts of it that are real, but not the whole thing. We’re pretty skeptical.

When Enrico Fermi did his first little test reactor, the one that showed that we could control our chain reaction out in Chicago under the bleachers at Stagg Stadium … University of Chicago, can you imagine that, right in the middle of the city? But anyway, he had his first pile and the story goes is that it had control rods, it had safety rods just like we have safety rods. But the main safety rod was attached to the ceiling and it was attached with a rope. And one of the scientists was assigned to be on a platform up there as a safety measure just in case something went wrong. If something had gone terribly wrong, which it didn’t, but if something had gone wrong, Enrico Fermi would have yelled to him, “Cut the rope, cut the rope!” And he would have cut the rope with an ax.

People look back at that story and they always used the word “scram,” meaning to shut down the reactor. But people looked back at that and went, “Oh, that word scram, it’s an acronym: Safety Control Rod Ax Man. SCRAM.” It’s a great story. We cannot verify it. I would consider it a backronym. Let’s look back at history and it makes a good story.

However, this is great. Look at this control panel. Now, every single one of these knobs and dials are attached to those 2,004 process tubes. And what this is measuring, it’s measuring the water flow. So you would have a couple of people looking at every single one of these, calling out the numbers and checking the flow of the water. It’s not a rocker switch inside. So when you look at it, you see a dial, you can adjust the dial to where it’s supposed to be with one of the knobs. But as you’re checking it, you’re going to look at it and you’re going to call out the numbers as it’s flowing. Generally, you’re going to call out two numbers: the high number and the low number. Then somebody else has to write it down. This is all analog.

Miller: And there’s over 4,000 of these. Would it have been possible that if one of these didn’t get checked and it went too high, there could be a meltdown?

Andre: Well, you notice also there are red lights along the side. So if something goes wrong within this row, a red light will come up. We have backups. So in an eight hour shift, your two man team would oversee about a third of these. You had to switch off on jobs because after a while, your job is 99% boring and you don’t want the 1% not boring.

Now, once in a while, one of these tubes, it would look like something was stuck. But remember this is analog and if you have a hot, humid day – which doesn’t happen very often here because we’re a very dry heat area – it might get stuck. So an operator might come over here and very gently rap on this, and try to see if it’s just a problem with the rocker switch or is it actually a problem within the process tube.

If you’re to hit it too hard, if you accidentally bump into it, well, it could scram the reactor which means to shut the reactor down. And shutting the reactor down isn’t a huge problem, if you can figure out what’s going on right away and fix it right away. If it takes you longer, it’s going to take a while to restart up. If you can restart within 30 minutes, very little production time is lost. But if you can’t restart within 30 minutes, you could lose up to 10 hours of production time. And remember we’re in a hurry because we’re worried that the Germans have gotten ahead of us. And then during the Cold War …

Miller: You say “we’re in a hurry.” I mean, that’s the way this feels to you. You put yourself back there in 1944, 1945?

Andre: I do. I automatically feel like I’m part of it. I feel caught up in the anxiety and the hope that we can win this war, that things can be over with, that the boys can come back.

Miller: Do you also then put yourself in the mindset of everything that followed? The Cold War, immense ramp up of production, the nuclear arms race that followed. I mean, everything else that was not only born here, there was also Los Alamos where bombs were created, other parts of New Mexico where the first one was tested. So it’s not like this is the only part of the Manhattan Project or the only part of the birth of the nuclear age. But it’s where the fuel was made.

It’s an incredibly important piece of human history. And that history is both about extraordinary science and engineering and these people who did something amazing, and it’s about death and destruction on previously unimaginable scales. How do you think about that other part?

Andre: I have a real hard time with it. That’s why I tried to put myself in the mindset of why did we feel like we needed to do this in a hurry? Why did we feel like we needed to end the war? It was sudden, it was horrible, and it ended the war. Now, though, we have to live with the legacy that our country did this. Our country is the only one who has done this. And we also have to live with the opening of Pandora’s box and we have to hope and pray that these terrible weapons are never, ever used again.

But personally, I feel like I am convinced that if we weren’t the ones to develop this weapon, it would have been developed anyway. The technology was there. We were the ones that had the wherewithal, the resources, the people, the natural resources to be able to do it first. And I’m hopeful that the international community now will help developing nations or will help other developed nations that have the same technology, greater technology than what we did here, that the safeguards are in place. And I have to believe that. I have to believe that or else I’d be anxious all the time.

Miller: That was Terri Andre. She’s a docent at the B Reactor of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park.

As I mentioned, the reactor is jointly overseen by the Department of Energy and the National Park Service, but the tours are managed by the DOE. So after the tour, we wanted to get that other agency’s perspective. We met up with Becky Burghart. She is the Park Service’s Hanford site manager.

Miller: My understanding is that the Park Service is committed to telling a “complete” or “full version” of both what happened here, as part of the Manhattan Project, and also Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Los Alamos, New Mexico – those sort of three big parts of the Manhattan Project. What do you mean when you say “complete” picture?

Becky Burghart: Yes. And that’s really what we’re committed to. So just kind of back up a little bit of the history of the park – the Manhattan Project National Historical Park was established in 2015 to share the sites, stories and legacies of the Manhattan Project. And when the park was established, Congress set the Department of Energy and the National Park Service as partners, legislative partners to manage this park. Roughly the duties fall that the Department of Energy manages the facilities like the B Reactor here and access to those facilities. And then the National Park Service tells the story, because people like to refer to the National Park Service as America’s storytellers. So with the tour, where you heard from Terri, that is under the Department of Energy because that falls under their responsibility of providing access.

Miller: Are there ways in which these two huge federal agencies – Department of Energy and Interior, your parent agency at the Park Service – where your desires or inclinations, in terms of telling this history, are at odds?

Burghart: They are at odds. We are fundamentally two very … I mean, we’re a land management agency and DOE’s the Department of Energy. We are fundamentally at odds, but that’s where we really have to work very closely.

Miller: You have no choice.

Burghart: We are legally obligated to work together.

Miller: But I guess I’m wondering if you can just help us understand the specific ways in which you are at odds. I mean, what’s the story that you most want to tell and how is that different from the story that the Department of Energy most wants to tell?

Burghart: I would say you see it here are the tours. The tours are an opportunity to share the scientific achievements. And that has been the dominant narrative of the Manhattan Project for 80 years.

Miller: Kind of triumphalist story of human ingenuity.

Burghart: Right. Exactly. It is that exact story.

Miller: So what do you want to tell?

Burghart: We want to provide opportunities for those with the lived experience – the African Americans, the atomic bomb survivors, the downwinders, all of the different Tribal communities, stakeholders – [to tell] their story. We can provide an opportunity through our website and different digital tools, whether it’s a podcast, an education program, a curriculum that we upload to our website, and teachers around the Pacific Northwest or around the country can get access to. So what we’re really searching for is how do we elevate those with the lived experiences and making sure that that story is told correctly? And when we have that first person narrative, that personal telling, then can we start incorporating it into like the B Reactor tour narrative?

Because the visitors want diverse stories. We hear it very, very often. Well, what about the deployment of the atomic weapons that killed more than 200,000 people by the end of 1945? And simply creating this reflection room has given us a little bit of space to be able to lean in and share that. And the Department of Energy has been a great partner in being able to say, OK, here’s some wall space. How would you share the story? And like I said, this was our first time we kind of dove into it and [were] like, where do we start? How do we share this?

So we’re looking at maybe other exhibit spaces. We have a lot in the digital realm, like on our website and even on social media. That’s an opportunity for us to figure out how to share stories and elevate those diverse perspectives. But when we say diverse perspectives, we mean building relationships with Tribes and stakeholder communities, and really hearing from their perspective.

Miller: What goes through your mind when you walk into the big front face of the reactor room?

Burghart: My perspective has definitely changed over the years that I’ve been here, because [when] I first walked in, I didn’t know a proton from a neutron. I was trying to figure out the science and [was] kind of like, “OK, well, this is an amazing feat of architecture and engineering.” But as I’ve had the opportunity to interact with a variety of stakeholders and hearing those many, many different perspectives, I see this as a deeply meaningful story. And this is a physical representation of the space. This is that Cathedral of Science that you heard about, but it is also, this is the proof of concept. We can produce plutonium on an industrial scale for weapons of mass destruction. And there’s so many perspectives along that continuum.

So when I walk in, I hear the different voices and the complicated … there’s no one easy narrative. And so really for me, it’s a place to stop and think about, and then as an interpretive ranger, like how do I help elevate these stories and really provide an opportunity for visitors to connect to this history, because it’s relevant today. It did happen 80 years ago. But to provide those opportunities like this is connected to today, [it’s] very relevant. And why should we all know about the Manhattan Project? Because we all live and future generations will continue to live in a nuclear world. What is our responsibility in that?

So when I walk in and I see all of those things, those many different narratives, and this is a place that is a tangible resource to connect those many, many different stories.

Miller: That was Becky Burghart, the U.S. Park Service’s Hanford Site manager for the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. The world’s first full-scale nuclear reactor, the so-called B Reactor, went online for the first time 80 years ago today.

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