Talk:Hanford Site

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is part of WikiProject Eastern Washington, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to Eastern Washington on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.

This article is within the scope of the National Register of Historic Places WikiProject, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of listings on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.
B This article has been rated as B-Class on the assessment scale.

Could someone add a google map to this? Thanks!


From the article: "Testing started on July 12, 1944, and the B-Reactor was charged with hotdog-size slugs of mixed U-235 and U-236 on September 13, 1944." This is probably incorrect, as U-236 has a half-life of a small fraction of a second; it is the nuclide that actually fissions in nuclear reactors and uranium-based nuclear weapons: {}^{235}_{92}\hbox{U}+{}^1_0\hbox{n}\to{}^{236}_{92}\hbox{U}\to \hbox{various} + (2\ \hbox{or}\ 3){}^1_0\hbox{n}. Perhaps it was U-238 that was mixed in with the U-235? That would make more sense, as {}^{238}_{92}\hbox{U}+{}^1_0\hbox{n}\to{}^{239}_{92}\hbox{U}\to{}^{239}_{93}\hbox{Np}+\hbox{e}^-+\overline{\nu}_\hbox{e}; {}^{239}_{93}\hbox{Np}\to{}^{239}_{94}\hbox{Pu}+\hbox{e}^-+\overline{\nu}_\hbox{e} is the series of reactions that is used in plutonium production.

  • Hmm, yeah, I'm betting that was supposed to be 238. I'm fairly sure the fuel they used was mostly U-238, in fact -- I don't believe the Hanford reactors used fuel which was enriched at all, because their enrichment efforts were directed at producing material for the Little Boy bomb exclusively. --Fastfission 23:31, 23 October 2005 (UTC
    • Fastfission: Actually, N reactor used slightly enriched fuel. Furthermore, Hanford plutonium was used in Fat Man, as Little Boy was exclusively uranium. --Woofles 02:27, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
  • The fuels were unenriched in B, so there was no "mixed with..." --Woofles 02:27, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

Add a reference to LIGO?

Contents

[edit] Missing Reference?

In the section titled, "Selecting the Hanford site" there is a reference to (Matthias 1987). This reference is not listed under the references.

Vjiper

[edit] HAER photos

There are a number of high-resolution photos of D reactor and related buildings in the 100-D area available from the Historic American Engineering Record collection in the Library of Congress. See [1] for the photos and some fairly involved historical descriptions of the functions of the buildings shown. There are also photos of the REDOX plant, and photos were apparently taken of B reactor but they are not yet digitized. 121a0012 06:31, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Last reactor decommissioning date

Changed it from 1971 to 1987 because that's when N-Reactor was shut down. See http://www.hanford.gov/information/sitetours/?tour=100N .

[edit] duPont role

Although I don't have any published literature to cite relative to my notes on the ammonia-based cooling system on the Manhattan Project reactors, this information comes from personal conversations with my grandfather, A.G. (Tom) Lambert, who was a duPont engineer assigned to Hanford precisely because of his experience with high-horsepower electric motors as used in duPont's operation in Birmingham. Granddad was the named inventor on the patent (held by duPont) for the variable-speed motor control used on these motors. Boomer 04:14, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] ammonia-based refrigeration

Deleted the following unreferenced material from the main text & reverted to the previous wording:

"As no one had ever built an industrial-scale reactor before, the scientists and the duPont engineering team were unsure how much heat would be generated by fission during normal operations. To provide the greatest margin of error, they concluded that they should use an ammonia-based refrigeration system to cool the reactors, which duPont engineers had successully employed at an industrial scale at other sites, such as their chemical plant in Birmingham AL."

Be happy to see it restored if you can provide a credible reference. Williamborg (Bill) 15:53, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ammonia cooling systems

Found a written source (Sanger) to back up what my Granddad had claimed. Boomer 21:59, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

See you mean Working on the bomb : an oral history of WWII Hanford / written by S.L. Sanger; editor, Craig Wollner; Portland State University, Continuing Education Press, copyrighted 1995? I'll look at a copy tommorrow. I've reserved a copy from the local library and will get it tommorrow. Look forward to reading.
I see from your addition that the ammonia system intended to precool the water entering the core. Did this system actually get used? Williamborg (Bill) 01:45, 2 January 2007 (UTC)that
I suspect it did, but was subsequently taken out of the cooling loop because it added unnecessary complexity. No factual backup for this statement though. My granddad was an interesting person to talk about with this stuff. Although I grew up next door to him, there was a very brief window between when I knew enough about the engineering to ask reasonable questions and his mind started to fail with Alzheimer's. When I first asked him about this stuff in the 1970s, he said that as far as he knew, most of his specific knowledge was still classified. I showed him diagrams in my books that discussed the principles, but his comment was that there's a world of difference between the theoretical stuff in a textbook and the real-world engineering problems they had to solve on site. It was a constant battle between the scientists and the duPont engineers on exactly that point. Apparently had the duPont engineers not put extra fuel element channels in the first reactors "just in case" and over the objections of the scientists, they would not have been able to overcome the poisoning problem without rebuilding the pile.
Another book you might be interested in is Thayer: "Management of the Hanford Engineer Works in World War II." My granddad was head of the engineering team responsible for the delivery of electrical power to Hanford, from Grand Coulee and Bonneville Dams to the operational buildings. I once gave him a tour of my place of business, and showed him one of the big Uninterruptable Power Systems. He remarked that they had a UPS at Hanford, but it was hydraulic. It consisted of a pump/generator system where water was pumped to a reservoir above the dam, which could be reversed and made to generate electricity if anything happened to the main powerhouse. He said the workers and the locals thought this system was for irrigation -- which indeed it was later used for -- but that it was constructed primarily as a backup source of power.
Granddad retired as the Electrical Superintendent of the duPont Belle Works (WV), which provided many of the engineers for Hanford because of their experience with very high pressure systems. Another accomplishment of the Belle team was the development of a schedule management system substantially the same as the Gantt chart.
So what is the protocol for including this kind of anecdotal information? Over the years, I've read most of the books which have to do with the Manhattan Project and with Hanford, and few include the kind of 'I was there' information that my Granddad relayed to me in a very few conversations? Boomer 21:50, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Just spent an hour reading through Working on the bomb : an oral history of WWII Hanford written by S.L. Sanger and seem to find no reference to use of ammonia cooling for the coolant water. And the standard Hanford design references do not mention it. Can you please direct us to the interview in Working on the bomb that you're citing in your reference? Thanks - Williamborg (Bill) 01:24, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

In my paperback version, it's on p70, last paragraph. This is the the chapter on Construction: "duPont called the reactors 'process units' and designed the three locations 100-B, 100-D and 100-F with the reactor building in each of the three complexes called '105 building.' Each 100 Area was about one-square mile in size and virtually identical, the only major difference being that D and F included refrigeration units for cooling the river water during the summer. While the book does not say that ammonia was used as the refrigerant, ammonia was the primary refrigerant medium for that period, and duPont was one of the largest producers of ammonina in the world (again, at their Belle Works). Boomer 13:26, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Yep, just where you identified it. Good show. Thanks - Williamborg (Bill) 22:49, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../h/a/n/Talk%7EHanford_Site_dfc4.html"