RICHLAND — A series of events are planned this month to mark the 70th anniversary of the Manhattan Project and Hanford’s role in the start of the atomic age.
Weekend tours are being offered through October of Hanford’s T Plant, which rarely is open to the public, and B Reactor.
The Tri-City Herald reports that 70 years ago the world’s first full-scale nuclear reactor began to rise among the grass and sage of the desert near the Columbia River.
Over 30 months, construction crews at Hanford built hundreds of buildings, miles of road, three massive chemical plants and the world’s first three production-scale nuclear reactors, starting with B Reactor.
Plutonium produced at B Reactor was used in the world’s first nuclear explosion, a test in the New Mexico desert, and the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.
