Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Bush signs bill calling for study of reactor


The Hanford Nuclear Reservation's B Reactor near Richland is shown in this aerial photo taken in 1944 or 1945. The B Reactor began operating Sept. 26, 1944. President Bush signed a bill Monday  requiring the federal government to study the potential for adding historic Manhattan Project sites, including this reactor at the Hanford site, to the national park system.
 (File/Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
Shannon Dininny Associated Press

YAKIMA – President Bush has signed a bill requiring the federal government to study the potential for adding historic Manhattan Project sites, including a reactor at the Hanford nuclear site, to the national park system.

Former nuclear workers and concerned residents for years have been trying to preserve Hanford’s B Reactor as a museum.

The world’s first full-scale plutonium production nuclear reactor, B Reactor was built as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb.

The south-central Washington reactor produced the plutonium for the first man-made nuclear blast, the Trinity test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.

B Reactor also produced the plutonium for the bomb that was dropped that August on Nagasaki, Japan, during World War II.

“Hanford’s B Reactor is an important historical marker for our nation,” Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said in a news release Monday, after the president signed the bill.

“This site would be a tribute to both the scientific contributions and enormous sacrifices of those who labored at the B Reactor during its remarkable run.”

Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., also a supporter of the bill, said the B Reactor helps tell the story of a work force who contributed to the nation’s defense.

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

The reactor was shut down in 1968 and decommissioned.

Limited historical tours of the reactor were slowed by the 2001 terrorist attacks, but the federal Energy Department still allows tours for groups interested in historic preservation.

The Energy Department manages cleanup at Hanford, which is the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site.

Cleanup costs are expected to total $50 billion to $60 billion, with work to be finished by 2035.

Hanford’s eight other reactors are slated 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.

B reactor has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places as proponents work to save it.

A decision on its future isn’t due until 2006.

Other sites mentioned in the bill include Los Alamos, N.M., where the world’s first atomic bombs were designed and built, and Oak Ridge, Tenn., where the first uranium enrichment facilities and pilot-scale nuclear reactor were built.