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The Hanford Site occupies 586 square miles (1,518 km 2) – roughly equivalent to half the total area of Rhode Island – within Benton County, Washington. [1] [2] It is a desert environment receiving less than ten inches (250 mm) of annual precipitation, covered mostly by shrub-steppe vegetation.
The building, known as the 236-Z Building, was four storeys high, with a two storey penthouse, and made from reinforced concrete. Concrete walls 10 inches (250 mm) thick permitted plutonium was as much as 20% plutonium-240 and 10% plutonium-241 content to be handled. Glove box shielding allowed for 12% plutonium-240 and 3.2% plutonium-241.
Fat Man, the nuclear bomb that was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945, also contained Hanford's plutonium. The bomb killed an estimated 50,000 people in Nagasaki, The BBC reported.
Chemically separating plutonium from uranium fuel irradiated in Hanford reactors, has left 56 million gallons of radioactive and other chemical waste stored in Hanford underground tanks.
The Hanford Site is currently storing 56 million gallons of radioactive waste in aging underground tanks, legacy waste from plutonium production efforts during World War II and the Cold War. The majority of the waste in the tanks is low-activity waste liquids. [4]
Hanford’s B Reactor supplied the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb and launched the Atomic Age. How a small reactor in Eastern WA became the world’s first nuclear plant 80 years ago Skip to main ...
The Hanford nuclear reservation adjacent to Richland, Wash., was used from WWII through the Cold War to produce nearly two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program.
During the Cold War, the Hanford Site facilities were expanded to include nine nuclear reactors and five large plutonium processing complexes that produced plutonium for most of the more than 60,000 weapons built for the US nuclear arsenal. After sufficient plutonium had been produced, the production reactors were shut down between 1964 and 1971.