Gone ‘fission’
May 21, 2007 Leave a comment
I worked on a DOE contract at Hanford some years back, doing IT support for technical staff. At the time, the site was just becoming more ‘open’, as various ‘hot’ sites were shutting down, their contents consolidated into other sites.
i was tickled to see an post in Wired about bus tours to various places in the Hanford site, including a few I worked in myself. From the post:
The main attraction at Hanford is B Reactor, which was built in just 13 months spanning 1943 and 1944 in the sprint to supply plutonium for the Manhattan Project. Before we enter, a woman in jeans and a US Marines sweatshirt assures us that we "won’t get contaminated on this tour." What we really need to watch out for, she warns, is lead paint, uneven floors, and the occasional bat or spider. Walking inside, the air is cool, and the entryway is decorated with poster-size photographs of Hanford operations from the 1940s. Also on display: a copy of Einstein’s 1939 letter to President Roosevelt recommending research into a new resource — a nuclear chain reaction — that could produce "extremely powerful bombs of a new type."
Read the entire article: "Fission Trip".