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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.
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 ...
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.
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.
B Reactor also produced plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, Aug. 9, 1945, just weeks after the Trinity Test. Japan surrendered Aug. 15, 1945, ending World War II.
Plutonium could be produced by irradiating uranium-238 in a nuclear reactor, [4] but developing and building a reactor was a task for the Manhattan Project physicists. The task for the chemists was to develop a process to separate plutonium from the other fission products produced in the reactor, to do so on an industrial scale at a time when plutonium could be produced only in microscopic ...
The 580-square-mile Hanford site in Eastern Washington adjacent to Richland was used from World War II through the Cold War to produce nearly two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear ...