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Think of Hanford in 1943 as a huge chemistry set, a giant version of
Glenn Seaborg's laboratory in Chicago, where Manhattan Project scientists
had worked furiously to create submicroscopic bits of plutonium.
The dusty desert military complex a half-continent away from Seaborg's lab
would soon produce priceless plutonium by the pound instead of the microgram.
The trick was to duplicate on a massive scale what had only been done on
a lab table. It meant solving a myriad of large-scale problems in physics,
chemistry and engineering.
Quickly.
Secretly.
With a new science not fully understood.
With a new substance still a mystery even to specialists.
And at a pace driven by fears the Nazis would build the bomb first.
The task was to build the world's first full-scale nuclear reactor - where
uranium fuel would be transformed into plutonium 239 - and a massive chemical
complex to extract the plutonium.
Incredibly, the nation pulled it off.
It took the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the DuPont Corp. a little less
than two years to build Hanford from scratch and send the first shipment
of plutonium to Los Alamos, N.M., where scientists assembled the atomic
bomb.
Brig. Gen. Leslie Groves - a University of Washington graduate and a member
of West Point's class of 1918 - was tagged to head the Manhattan Project.
Groves was brusque, sarcastic and routinely described as a "son-of-a-bitch"
and "bastard."
But he also was brilliant, hard-driving and universally credited as the
man who got the job done.
Parts of the Manhattan Project were spread across the globe. Major labs
were in Chicago, Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Los Alamos. The production sites
were at Oak Ridge and Hanford. Bomber crews trained in Utah and the South
Pacific.
In 1942, Groves handpicked Lt. Col. Franklin Matthias to find a site for
the massive reactors and chemical plants needed to create bomb-grade plutonium.
Groves was impressed by the young officer's success in keeping the Pentagon's
construction costs under control.
Just before Christmas 1942, Matthias was sent west with two DuPont engineers
to find a vast and isolated tract, with access to abundant electricity and
water.
On Dec. 22, Matthias flew in a small plane over the tiny villages of Richland,
Hanford and White Bluffs - farmland snuggled inside a big bend of the Columbia
River.
Matthias knew immediately he had his spot.
The Mid-Columbia was sent on a collision course with the nuclear age. Events
would unfold rapidly, events that would define the Tri-Cities and Nagasaki
for the next half-century and beyond.
By March 1943, the farmers and villagers were evicted from the 560 square
miles that would become Hanford.
A boom town of construction workers and scientists sprouted in the sagebrush
- growing to 50,000 workers in 1944.
The hours were long. The work was hard and complicated. Workers and their
families had to cope with summer heat, isolation, strict security and wind.
The Mid-Columbia's dust storms - unhindered even today by thousands of irrigated
acres - were dubbed "termination winds" because they sent many
workers packing.
By the war's end, about 150,000 people worked at Hanford at one time or
another.
Obie Amacker, a retired Hanford chemist living in Kennewick, was one of
the few people who knew what workers were building on Washington's desert
shrub steppe.
Originally a DuPont chemist in an Alabama gunpowder lab, Amacker was transferred
to Oak Ridge in 1943, where his supervisor told him he was working on an
atomic bomb.
Amacker remembered, "I was astonished that something like that was
feasible."
A small version of a plutonium separation plant, about the size of a one-story
house, was created at Oak Ridge. It mimicked the Chicago lab's processes
on a bigger scale.
Amacker's job at Oak Ridge was to help work out the bugs before a full-scale
version of the plant was completed at Hanford. He tested plutonium solutions
at each step of the chemical process, ensuring specifications were met.
In 1944, he transferred to Hanford, where he did the same thing on a larger
scale.
Most Hanford workers knew nothing about the aim of their labors. Larry Forby
of Richland -a fireman during the war - knew uranium was involved because
he was trained to fight fires in a uranium-filled environment.
"We kind of figured (we were making) some sort of explosive powder,"
Forby said. "We never sat down and discussed it among ourselves. Every
time we turned around, we were drilled on security.
"If you sat down at a bar and drank a beer, you never talked to the
guy on either side unless it was about the weather. We partied with the
people we worked with and we still didn't talk shop."
Workers with technical knowledge made guesses, but didn't share them. Health
physicist Roger Hultgren of Richland was told plutonium and uranium were
involved.
And his future wife, nurse Idelle Hanson, guessed radiation exposure was
a concern because she had to keep an eye out for elevated white blood cell
counts.
Hultgren even wondered if Hanford was creating an atomic bomb.
"We suspicioned it. You'd have to suspicion it if you were a physicist,"
he said.
While the bulk of workers was left to guess at the project's purpose, the
relative few who knew were struggling to bring the pieces together.
Enrico Fermi, head of the reactor project, and his team tried to crank up
B Reactor on Sept. 26, 1944. It sputtered and died and then restarted again
on Sept. 28.
Scientists huddled and diagnosed the problem - radioactive xenon gas that
shut down the nuclear chain reaction in the reactor's core by absorbing
neutrons.
And they devised a fix - adding more fuel to overcome the effect of the
xenon.
Three massive plants were built to chemically extract the plutonium from
the uranium slugs that came out of Hanford's reactors.
Seaborg visited Hanford in May and again in December 1944. During the later
trip, he wrote in his journal: "Looking down at the control boards
the length of the canyon, one sees nothing but 860 feet of valves, meters,
indicators, controls - a fantastic sight."
On Feb. 2, 1945, Matthias boarded a train in Portland and took the first
few grams of Hanford plutonium to Los Angeles, where he turned it over to
a junior army officer from Los Alamos.
By May, convoys were set up. The plutonium - which was like partly set Jell-O
- was carried in one-kilogram jugs that looked like big thermos bottles.
Each convoy consisted of three vans and two cars with 10 men armed with
shotguns and submachine guns.
They would drive to Fort Douglas at Salt Lake City, where they would transfer
the jugs to a similar crew from Los Alamos.
Los Alamos scientists labored until they were ready to detonate the world's
first atomic bomb -fueled by a core made of Hanford plutonium - on a tower
at Alamagordo, N.M.
The explosion that signaled the beginning of the nuclear age occurred at
5:30 a.m. July 16.
"A brilliant yellowish spurt of fire was first seen. ... It mushroomed
at the top," wrote scientist Joe Kennedy, who witnessed the blast.
"The red and black fireball grew rapidly to several times its size,
and rose continuously, reaching about 14,000 feet in 100 seconds. As it
grew, it changed quickly from red and black flames to a mass of white, billowing
smoke interspersed and surrounded by a purple-blue glow."
Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head scientist of the Manhattan Project,
remembered a line from the Bhagavad-Gita, the Hindu text that he had been
studying: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."