Hanford Project Paper

Vanesa Romero

History 105

September 10, 2015

Hanford

        Everything was a complete and utter mystery. Questions were arising, and concern ascending. Hanford; a place that started off as a research project to develop the first nuclear weapons during world war II, but what did it become with time? Hanford was a “necessity” and the government needed an isolated location to start what they called the Manhattan project. There were other potential locations for the project but somehow the tri-cities were the perfect fit, the region was empty enough to seem attractive, a couple years later, to army officers looking for an isolated locale for manufacturing plutonium. (13) In Atomic Frontier Days by John M. Findlay and Bruce Hevly they give the people a complete incite on both perspectives on the Hanford site. Findlay and Hevly the authors argue that Hanford is a place that solved problems but also created them.

        They argue that it is crucial to recognize Hanford’s industrial character, partly because confusion persists about whether to assign it to a culture of production or one of research. (4) All that was knows was that World War II was in its second year and the army had attained 670 square miles of land in what is now known as the Hanford site for a project related to the war effort. During the early 1940s and the mid-1960s the Hanford site’s only focus was producing plutonium the key factor in creating the bomb to end World War II. There was a need of national security and the consequences yet to come were ignored or not prioritized. There was an importance of beating the Nazis to the atomic bomb and predicting that the new weapon would save thousands of lives. (23)

        The army and DuPont (the site’s contractor) built and operated three reactors which transformed uranium-238 into plutonium-239. Once the plutonium was created they would transport it to Los Alamos where they would use the plutonium and create nuclear weapons. The first bomb created at site B was used on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 where it killed as many as 70,000 people. (36) The plutonium in the second bomb came from Hanford and the war ended soon after that. The war effort brought an arrival of people into the region and boosted the economy. The Production of plutonium slowed down after that but still remained. During the cold war Hanford went from having three reactors to nine. As the United States had reacted or overreacted to one cold war crisis after another, it had looked to Hanford to accelerate its output of fissionable material for atomic weapons. (63) When the cold war came to an end there was no need to have the production still going so the facility was closed down and changed its focus to another matter.

        Everything seemed positive up to this point but no one truly knew the impact that this facility had on the environment and the occupants of the tri-cities. When producing plutonium there is a lot of waste and toxics that result from this procedure. The site produced about seventy-five tons of weapons-grade and reactor-grade plutonium between 1944 and 1988- approximately one-fourth of the world’s supply. It also produced tremendous amount of waste so much that during the 1990s Hanford became identified as the most toxic place in the United States. The level of contamination was surpassed only at the site’s Cold War counterpart in the Soviet Union, Chelyabinsk-65, known as “the most polluted spot on earth”. (43) Not only was it pollution also there was so much secrecy behind the project that neither the public knew what was going on in the site nor did all the employees working in the facility. All that was known was that they were doing what they were doing to help the war effort. Several of radiation that was released into the atmosphere were most likely absorbed by people working at Hanford, residing in the tri-cities, and lying tens or hundreds of miles downhill. (38) The release of toxins in the air and wastes into the environment were done on a regular basis and were referred as “doing business”. The Hanford management was more focused on the production rate rather than the consequences of it. To keep the production rate going they tried keeping the employees content as much as they could. Again, they remained more worried about a major accident than about the emission of wastes from normal operations. (58) When it all came to an end and the reactors where shut down the employees and local townspeople had no idea of what was next. All that time during the war their lives had revolved around the production of plutonium. A major concern in Richland, as well as Kennewick and Pasco, was that the local economy revolved too much around plutonium production. (61) As time went by and the wars ended people became aware of what was happening in the site and became alarmed not only were their life’s endangered but they were part of a project and had no clue what they were producing. At Hanford the new era dawned in May of 1989 in the form of the Tri-Party Agreement. (72) The agreement said that the site would be all cleaned up within 30 years and the cost would be around 57 billion dollars all of which were not quite accurate.