Editor’s note: On Oct. 16, 2024, about 100 Tri-Cities area leaders and people who worked to preserve Hanford’s historic B Reactor as part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park gathered at the reactor to mark the 80th anniversary of the reactor.
The world’s first production scale reactor built at the Hanford nuclear site near Richland in Eastern Washington changed the course of history, as its operation launched the Atomic Age.
The Tri-City Herald went into its archives to republish this account of the reactor’s place in history. It was written by former Herald reporter and editor Chris Sivula and first published Aug. 29, 1993.
Nothing about the young officer would draw more than casual attention. It was February 1945 and the train he rode was crowded with men in uniform.
Col. Franklin Matthias had boarded the southbound train in Portland. Along with his luggage, he carried a small parcel wrapped in plain brown paper. The package was about 2 feet on a side, the sort of thing that might contain a gift for his wife or mother.
The conductor, the porter who showed Matthias to his private compartment, the passengers he squeezed past in the narrow corridor — none of them was aware that they had just glimpsed a piece of history.
“It looked like I was carrying something I had bought at the store,” Matthias said during a recent interview with the Tri-City Herald. He’s now retired from Kaiser Engineers after a lifetime in big construction and lives in Danville, Calif.
Matthias doesn’t recall being particularly nervous about the trip, although he had good reason for anxiety.
Inside Matthias’ package was a small test tube, suspended inside the box by a contraption designed at the Hanford Engineering Works. The tube held the first bit of plutonium created at the B Reactor, the world’s first nuclear plant.
Within weeks, Army ambulances would begin making regular plutonium runs, carrying the man-made element to Utah, where couriers from Los Alamos would take over for the rest of the trip to New Mexico.
But Matthias, who had headed the Hanford project since the beginning, wanted to make the first trip himself.
The small vial of plutonium Matthias carried was the culmination of an effort that had engaged about 150,000 construction workers and thousands of scientists and engineers over two years.
Those few grams marked a major turning point in the Manhattan Project. Until Hanford began cranking out plutonium, the only source was a microscopic supply produced at a few cyclotrons.
When Hanford began production, the entire world supply of plutonium totaled about 500 micrograms, enough material to form the head of a single pin. A microgram is 1/1,000,000 of a gram. A gram is roughly equal to the weight of a paperclip.
The team at Los Alamos designing the first nuclear weapons was anxious to get its hands on Hanford’s material.
Shortly before the train trip, the phone rang in Matthias’ Richland office. “It was the first call I ever had from Los Alamos,” Matthias said.
“They called desperate for a sample of plutonium, so we hurried up and brought it down. This was the first time we had any quantity available and they were begging for it.”
Matthias was met at the train station in Los Angeles by a courier from New Mexico. First, Matthias asked him if he knew what he’d be carrying. The man said no.
Then Matthias wanted to know whether the courier had secured a locked room on the train back to Los Alamos. Again, the man said no.
“It told him, ‘I think you better go ahead and get one because what you are going to carry has cost us $350 million.’ “
Just four months earlier, operators had started Hanford’s B Reactor for the first time on Sept. 26, 1944.
The moment came after 13 months of furious effort. Fifty years ago Friday, on Aug. 27, 1943, excavation began for Hanford’s first reactor. Although some preparation had occurred earlier in 1943, Friday marked the anniversary of the start of actual construction.
All that summer, construction workers streamed into the Hanford camp, filling barracks as fast as carpenters could nail on the roofs. The camp eventually would house 51,000 workers.
Between June 1943 and September 1944, construction crews on the B Reactor welded 390 tons of structural steel, poured 17,400 cubic yards of concrete and stacked 121,000 concrete blocks and bricks to complete the monolith and auxiliary buildings.
The reactor itself is a graphite cube, 36 feet at the base and 28 feet high. Some 2,004 aluminum tubes run from the front of reactor, where uranium fuel is loaded, to the back, where irradiated fuel is discharged.
The core sits on 23-foot-thick concrete slab. It’s covered with a 10-inch cast-iron thermal shield. On top of the thermal shield, construction workers stacked alternate layers of masonite and steel to create a radiation shield 52 inches thick.
On Sept. 13, 1944, the construction division officially turned over the plant to operations. That same day, Enrico Fermi, the Italian physicist instrumental in the development of nuclear technology, loaded the first uranium slug into the reactor’s core.
Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, likens the event to “the pope conferring his blessings.”
Two weeks later, the reactor was ready to start. The day had been hot at Hanford with the temperature hovering around 90, but it cooled off quickly after sunset.
About 40 people crowded into the control room that evening. Matthias was there with Fermi, John Wheeler, and Crawford Greenewalt, the Du Pont engineer who headed the company’s reactor team. He would later become president of Du Pont.
It was a Tuesday night, uneventful elsewhere in the Tri-Cities. Thirty miles away in Richland, folks were still talking about the high school football team’s 19-0 victory over Prosser a few days earlier.
All but a handful were blissfully unaware that up on the mysterious project, operators were starting to power up the world’s first full-scale nuclear plant, uncertain whether a runaway chain reaction might blow it up.
Most workers didn’t know exactly what they were doing. Ralph Whalen, now retired and living in Aloha, Ore., was on the crew responsible for charging the reactor with uranium fuel.
There was a sense of excitement and an urgency to the work. Everyone knew the plant had been built at an incredible pace and they knew most of the big shots associated with the project were gathered in the control room.
“Everybody guessed, but nobody would confirm your guesses, so you just quit guessing. We talked about bombs and ammunition, but you quit speculating after you were there awhile. You knew they were determined to keep it a secret, so you didn’t dwell on it,” Whalen said.
Matthias dwelt on little else in the hours leading up to the reactor’s start. Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Engineering District, advised him to jump in with both feet if anything went wrong. A quick death would be preferable to the years of investigations and hearings that would surely follow.
Bill McCue Sr., then a 35-year-old chemical engineer, was among the handful of Du Pont’s operations staff who fully understood what was about to happen. McCue, now 84, retired from Hanford in 1972. He still makes his home in Richland.
Du Pont had pulled him from a the Oklahoma Ordinance Works near Tulsa in July 1943 to be part of a core group that would run the reactors. “They told me to pack up and go to Wilmington,” McCue said.
At Du Pont’s headquarters in Wilmington, Del., the basic physics were explained to McCue and a select few tapped from Du Pont plants around the nation.
Despite his technical training, the possibility of creating an atomic bomb from plutonium was news to McCue.
“When I was in school, there wasn’t anything in the books about nuclear physics,” McCue said.
Du Pont officials told McCue and others in the little group that the entire project had a 60 percent chance of success. Later that evening, he discussed the situation with another Du Pont man selected for the project.
“We asked ourselves, ‘What business do we have in this kind of thing?’ Basically, we came to the conclusion that the Germans were already in it and if the bomb was going to be made, then we had better get there first,” McCue recalled.
He was sent to the Argonne Laboratory outside Chicago to train on the the Argonne Pile, the experimental reactor that replaced Fermi’s original. Data from operations there fed into the design of the Hanford plants.
Du Pont regularly dropped off bundles of blueprints and the Argonne scientists would pore over them, ordering changes based on the latest research.
None of it was fast enough to keep up with construction. “When the first batch of concrete was poured for the reactor building, the didn’t even have blueprints,” McCue said.
The fuel situation was more drastic. Du Pont started operations before a process was developed for producing the uranium fuel slugs. None of the so-called ‘cans’ encasing the uranium could withstand the intense radiation inside the reactor’s core. McCue estimates that 6,000 fuel elements were produced before engineers finally came up with a successful process.
When B Reactor started up, barely enough fuel was available for the initial load.
McCue doesn’t remember being particularly nervous that Tuesday evening as they began to pull the control rods from the reactor’s core, unleashing the uranium fuel’s incredible power.
“We had been working on it a year and this was what we expected. Basically, this was our whole purpose in being.”
At 10:48 p.m., power reached production levels. A short while later, the plant began to lose power. Operators continued to withdraw the control rods, hoping to sustain the chain reaction, but the reactor eventually shut itself down.
The scientists retired to an office adjacent to the control room. The puzzled operators watched through windows that ran from about waist height to the ceiling.
The group included Fermi; Eugene Wigner, head of the reactor’s design team, John Marshall; key physicist on Fermi’s staff; Wheeler and Greenewalt.
“They were sort of in a huddle,” McCue recalled.
Later, McCue pulled a supervisor aside and plied him for information about the conference. “It turns out they were in there making up a pool on when it would come back to life,” McCue said.
Matthias didn’t take the problem as lightly as the scientific team. “That was a terrible blow,” he said. “I know I immediately talked to Fermi and John Wheeler about how the heck we could find out what went wrong.”
Early Thursday morning, the reactor did come back to life. It was a critical clue in solving the mystery. Some byproduct of the chain reaction was creating a substance that absorbed the neutrons, bringing an effective end to the reaction.
The fact that it restarted indicated that the substance must be a short-lived isotope. By studying the power fluctuations, Wheeler was able to pinpoint the source, a radioactive gas called xenon.
“Wheeler and the Italian (Fermi) did a tremendous job of scientific detective work,” Matthias said. “The cure they specified was absolutely perfect. Once they figured it out, they were confident that the reactor would work.
“In fact, they left. They just outlined exactly what to do. They had no part of it after that. They were done for that reactor.”
Wigner’s team had designed the Hanford reactors to house 1,600 process tubes. Fortunately, Wheeler had fretted about something like the xenon problem.
The original reactor design had included some space near the outer edge of the core, a sort of graphite margin. Because of Wheeler’s concern, the extra space was used for another 404 tubes to the 1,600 in the original design, bringing the total to 2,004.
By loading the extra tubes, Fermi and Wheeler reasoned they could overpower the xenon’s effect.
Matthias didn’t share their confidence, however. “I was worried longer than they were. I had to depend on their knowledge and ability, but I didn’t know that their solution was right.”
The xenon problem put the project behind schedule, creating even more pressure to produce, but by the summer of 1945, Hanford had delivered enough plutonium for three bombs.
A portion went into the Trinity blast, a test that produced the world’s first nuclear explosion. More went into the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, the last nuclear weapon used in war.
The rest went into a third bomb. Plans for dropping it on Japan were scrapped when Emperor Hirohito announced his nation’s surrender Aug. 15, 1945.
Whalen wouldn’t learn what the excitement at Hanford was about until Aug. 6, 1945, the day a B-29 named Enola Gay bombed Hiroshima with “Little Boy,” which was built with uranium 235 produced at Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Newspapers erroneously reported that the uranium was made at Hanford.
Three days later, another B-29 named Bock’s Car would level Nagasaki with “Fat Man,” fashioned from Hanford’s plutonium.
McCue and his wife were on a fishing trip, staying at a little inn in British Columbia on Aug. 6. A woman from Spokane had noticed McCue’s hometown in the hotel’s register. She passed a folded newspaper to the Richland couple.
McCue can still recite the headline verbatim: “USA drops atomic bomb on Japan.” The banner was followed by a headline: “Richlanders celebrating their part in the effort.”
