EINSTEIN GAVE THE WORLD THE THEORY that E=mc2 — the Manhattan Project gave us the proof. Scientists disagreed about how to go about releasing all that energy. One school thought that the answer was enriched uranium, U235, the other believed it was plutonium. It hardly mattered — U235 was extremely rare in the world and plutonium didn’t even naturally exist!
The guts of B Reactor, fuel rods, monitoring and cooling aparatus
So while Robert Oppenheimer and his staff at Los Alamos, NM were doing the math another group of scientists worked on refining uranium ore to extract U235 in Oak Ridge, TN. Meanwhile, on the banks of the Columbia River in eastern Washington, the DuPont company was building the Hanford Reactor to produce plutonium. To the detriment of Japanese citizens, both methods worked. The Trinity test at Los Alamos used the plutonium method as did the Nagasaki bomb. The uranium bomb destroyed Hiroshima.
Master control
Not much remains of the Hanford site, just the shell of B Reactor, in the desert 25 miles from Richland . Although Hanford was the CERN of its day, it is shocking indeed to see how low-tech such a complicated undertaking was. Miles of wires, manual switches, analog gauges, hand-operated valves. Most of the docents for our visit to this NPS site are former employees, not during the war but in subsequent years when keeping up with the Soviets was the mission. Their pride and enthusiasm still shows after all these years.
State-of-the-art for the day
BTW, power for the plant came from Grand Coulee Dam and water to cool the reactor from the Columbia River, once again bringing us full circle.
IT IS NEARLY 3 MONTHS LATER and the Nobel Prizes are being awarded in Stockholm. The big breakthrough in science was the discovery of gravitational waves, also postulated by A. Einstein. And one of the discovering teams was working at — wait for it — Hanford!
