Reflecting on Hanford achievement

RICHLAND — Roger Rohrbacher gazed at the desert landscape of Eastern Washington and wondered what he’d gotten himself into.

The year was 1944, and Rohrbacher had joined thousands of young men who descended on the sagebrush-dotted desert to participate in a top-secret government project.

More than a year later, workers finally learned the significance of their work, when U.S. forces dropped the Fat Man bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945.

Today, those same workers and many others will celebrate the 60th anniversary of their achievement: construction of the Hanford nuclear site’s B Reactor, the world’s first full-scale plutonium production nuclear reactor that produced the plutonium for that bomb.

“We always like to look at Hanford as it ended World War II sooner than otherwise,” Rohrbacher said. “We didn’t know until the bomb was dropped. We knew it was part of the war effort. We knew it was big, different. We just didn’t know how big.”

With the start of World War II, several nations were battling the clock to be the first to develop nuclear weapons. In the United States, the top-secret Manhattan Project was created to build an atomic bomb.

Government officials searched across the West for a proper site for the first reactor. They settled on Eastern Washington, where the Columbia River provided the large amounts of water needed to cool the reactors.

The dry desert also was sparsely populated, which was crucial in the event of an accident, and offered three railroad lines.

Construction began June 7, 1943, just six months after physicist Enrico Fermi turned the theory of nuclear power into the reality of the Atomic Age.

Government officials scoured the nation for workers. Some recruits got off the train in nearby Pasco during a dust storm, only to ask when the next train left.

Rohrbacher, who had grown up in the Midwest, didn’t shy away when his company offered him a new job in the Northwest. He just didn’t know what the job was, and he wasn’t alone.

Construction workers reviewed blueprints for just their part of the project. They had no idea what they were building.

Rumors abounded. One child boasted in school that workers were making toilet paper, which was in short supply during the war years, because his father brought two rolls home in his lunch pail each day, Rohrbacher said with a laugh.

He had wondered about the job after the FBI conducted a background check on him. Over time, he learned the project would play a significant role in the war effort — heartening news because his brother was away battling the Germans in Europe.

Rohrbacher watched as the number of employees grew to nearly 50,000 during the next 15 months. From July 1943 to October 1944, workers consumed 4 million box lunches.

Finally, on Sept. 26, 1944, B Reactor started up for the first time, just yards from the Columbia River.

“They knew that if things got away, it’d be a disaster,” said Dee McCullough, 90, who helped to install the safety system.

Roughly three months later, plutonium from the B Reactor was delivered to Los Alamos, N.M. On July 16, 1945, that plutonium was used in the world’s first nuclear explosion at the Trinity Test in Alamogordo, N.M.

Less than a month later, U.S. forces dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, hastening the Japanese surrender and the end to World War II.

B Reactor was shut down in 1968 and decommissioned. While some parts of the reactor are sealed off because they are radioactive, the control room and the face of the reactor, where fuel rods were inserted, can today be viewed safely.

The reactor has been open for limited historic tours since the mid-1980s, but those were slowed by the 2001 terrorist attacks. The Energy Department, which manages cleanup at the Hanford site, still allows tours for groups interested in historic preservation.

Rohrbacher ended up working at the site for more than 30 years before being laid off in 1971. Hanford’s nine reactors had been shut down, and Rohrbacher left to find work elsewhere.

He retired to the Richland area several years later. Now 84, he marvels at the accomplishment of the thousands of workers who descended on Eastern Washington more than 60 years ago.

“Ingenious,” he said.

The reactor has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places, but its future has remained in doubt as cleanup progresses at the site.

The other eight Hanford reactors are expected to be cocooned, which involves removing extra buildings around the reactors and demolishing all but the shield walls surrounding the reactor cores and sealing them in concrete.

The same fate could befall the B Reactor unless it is saved as a museum, something retired workers at the site and others have been seeking for more than a decade.

Del Ballard, president of the B Reactor Museum Association, calls the reactor the most advanced technological development this country ever had.

Said Ballard, “Our primary objective is to see that this reactor is preserved for history.”