Producing Plutonium

The plutonium production process at Hanford was developed from what Enrico Fermi and his team proved when they constructed the world’s first, albeit small-scale, nuclear reactor in Chicago in 1942. If a reactor could be built sufficiently large, the intense flow of neutrons within it could, almost magically, change uranium into plutonium. This process of transmutation would not be creating gold from straw or lead but would be creating something much more valuable.

The B Reactor on the Hanford Site in south-eastern Washington state is the first full-scale nuclear production reactor in the world. At the height of the Manhattan Project, over 45,000 people from all walks of life and all 48 states worked at the Hanford Site. While many of the workers did not know their mission, their combined efforts proved that plutonium could be produced on an industrial scale.

Built during the Manhattan Project, Hanford’s T Plant was the first separations plant in the world constructed to chemically separate radioactive materials. Much of the separations work was done remotely to protect workers from the tremendous amount of radiation given off by the irradiated uranium fuel slugs. Separating a man-made material from a highly radioactive fuel slug at an industrial scale had never been done before.

The 300 Area was home to the fuel fabrication operations for Hanford. Here, hundreds of thousands of tons of raw uranium were formed into fuel slugs that were irradiated in the Hanford nuclear reactors to produce plutonium for the war effort. Many of the buildings in the 300 Area have been demolished as part of the Department of Energy’s cleanup efforts.

The B Reactor is the world's first full-scale nuclear reactor. The plutonium produced here was used in the Trinity Test and in the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945. Visitors can only tour the B Reactor via tours offered by the Department of Energy.

T Plant, Hanford’s first and largest chemical separation plant, began operations on December 26, 1944. T Plant was designed to process about a half-pound (250 grams) of plutonium metal from one ton (907kg) of irradiated uranium each day.

On December 2, 1949, the Atomic Energy Commission and the United States Air Force conducted the “Green Run” experiment at the Hanford Nuclear production complex outside Richland, WA. It was the largest single release of radioactive iodine-131 in Hanford’s history, covering vegetation as far north as Kettle Falls, WA and as far south as Klamath Falls, OR.

The X-10 Graphite Reactor was the world’s first plutonium-production reactor. Operating from 1943 to 1963, it became a National Historic Landmark in 1965. Located on the secure grounds of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), X-10 is only accessible via guided tours.

Karen Dorn Steele is an environmental journalist known for breaking the story of nuclear experiments causing potential public health damage at the Hanford Nuclear Site.

The Hanford Federal Facility Agreement and Consent Order, the Tri-Party Agreement (TPA), was signed on May 15, 1989, between the US Department of Energy, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the State of Washington. This was a critical milestone in history of the Hanford Site, which produced nearly two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program from 1943 through 1988.