During our journey, we have found all sorts of cool places out there that are hidden in plain sight. Most people pass them by without notice, or without realizing their significance in history. Sometimes it’s because the place was literally hidden from view or notice (blurred out on Google Maps), other times the circumstances that make the site notable are forgotten. Nowadays it’s trendy to find “hidden history” across the country, many mid-sized cities market “Underground This” or “Hidden That” tours. The Hanford Nuclear Reservation and the B Reactor are a little bit of both. Finally, a tour of a city’s hidden history that doesn’t involve speakeasies or whores.
I stumbled upon the Reactor B tour somewhat by accident. Every time we go to a new place, we spend a good deal of time on Google Maps just looking around the area. When we reached the Columbia River with all the hydroelectric dams that seem littered along it, I got on kind of a Civil Engineering kick. As a kid, I loved big construction projects and machines and all that kind of stuff. I started looking for things like that around our planned stops that might offer tours, and I came across the Hanford Reactor Site. Thankfully Hanford, WA was an easy drive from our campground in Hermiston, Oregon. As luck would have it the first tours of the season were starting the week we would be in town, so we extended our stay a couple nights to so everything lined up.
The tour is totally free but does require preregistration due to a tour bus ride with limited seating. Laine decided a tour of a nuclear site wasn’t in her wheelhouse (“She said, “One of us has to stay radiation-free.”), so I went alone. The tour begins in a visitor center with an orientation: where you’ll go, what you’ll see, and of course why the Hanford Site is notable. Then onto the forty-minute bus ride to the facility, with little tidbits of local knowledge and continuous Q & A from the knowledgeable tour guide.
To say the Hanford facility has a complicated history would be an understatement. The work that was done there (especially the early days during World War II) was critical to national security. The reactors were built to produce the fissile material necessary to build the atomic bombs. Many technological advancements and discoveries were made there; the reactors were built at the cutting edge of mid-century science and engineering with many unknowns. With all these achievements came at great cost to the environment. Many procedures, once thought to be safe, left behind messes that are now being cleaned. The tour material of B Reactor does not shy away from or hide this controversial history. Instead it is laid bare, with a nod to historical context and the marvels of engineering at the cutting edge of technology.
The Reactor tour begins looking at the face of the reactor, a massive wall covered in valves and pipes. This is where the fuel pellets are fed into the reactor and cooling water is injected via immense manifolds. The tour format is semi-guided, after an orientation in front of the reactor, you are free to walk around the building and look at the exhibits. There are two detailed talks that are given twice so you can hear both. One is a detailed description of the reactors operation and the other covers some of the engineering behind the supply of critical cooling water to the reactor.
Running the reactor is a very delicate balancing act. Several reactions must take place simultaneously to transform Uranium 238 fuel into Plutonium 239, and if the reactor gets too hot or not hot enough the process will fail. In fact, the initial design of the reactor pile did not include enough tubes for the Uranium fuel to maintain fission. During the first test run operators found they could not maintain the reaction and the process was “poisoned”. Fortunately, du Pont Engineers and included additional aluminum fuel tubes in the reactor pile’s construction allowing for a “hotter” sustaining reaction. Had they not done so it would have been necessary to build an entirely new reactor from scratch.
Not seen directly on the tour are the water conditioning and storage facilities. The need for plentiful water for cooling was one of the design requirements that made the Hanford site, next to the Columbia River, an ideal location. Numerous pumps, tanks and storage ponds were built to ensure a steady supply of purified water flowing over the fuel pellets to keep the reactor cool. Pure water does not really pick up radiation, rather impurities and particles in it do. Therefore, the purer the water used for cooling the less chance of contamination when the coolant is returned to the river. Even still, not much attention was paid to the outflow as the inflow, and water went from the reactor to a cooling pond and then back into the river. Modern reactor designs have been improved with closed loop heat exchanger cooling systems where the water passing over the fuel never leaves the reactors systems.
The plumbing in the reactor building is visible, and in fact needs to be. As part of “Trust but verify” access plates to the plumbing that cooled the reactor are bolted open so that Russian inspectors can see that the facility is no longer functional. Decommissioned cooling systems are documented annually, looking for any changes since the past year. In fact, Russian inspectors noted new tubular railings for the catwalks in the Valve Room after they were added to meet OSHA requirements.
Much of the honesty about Hanford’s past stems from the various interagency involvement in clean up at the site. The guides, who are predominantly former DOE (Department of Energy) employees, are quick to acknowledge that the public tours of this formerly classified site create awareness of the ongoing clean up and help maintain its funding. They are asked very direct questions and give very frank and direct answers. That directness combined with a smarter than average tour group made for a more enjoyable experience than I expected. You would be hard pressed to find a better back and forth explanation of the fission process in the Hanford reactors as compared to nuclear power plant reactors in an intro college level physics class.