The B Reactor Tour: Walking Through the World's First Industrial Nuclear Machine

The B Reactor sits on the Hanford Site in a secured federal zone, accessible only by shuttle from the Manhattan Project National Historical Park's visitor center in Richland. Tours run on specific days by advance reservation. When visitors arrive at the reactor building and walk through its primary doors, they enter a structure that has not been meaningfully changed since it was shut down in nineteen sixty-eight.

The front face of the reactor, a wall of graphite blocks penetrated by more than two thousand aluminum process tubes, rises in front of you. Each tube was loaded with uranium slugs, cooled by Columbia River water, and irradiated to produce plutonium. The geometry of the face is both industrial and, in a way that is difficult to articulate in advance, strange. It is a machine. It is also the thing that made the material that destroyed Nagasaki, in a building designed and built in about fifteen months by workers who had no idea what they were making.

The control rooms are preserved as they were operated. The instruments the reactor operators used to monitor the production process are in place. The National Park Service's interpretation at the site is explicit about what the reactor produced and what that production resulted in: the Fat Man bomb, the death of sixty thousand to eighty thousand people on August ninth, nineteen forty-five, and the beginning of the nuclear age that has not yet ended.

The designation of the B Reactor as a National Historic Landmark in two thousand eight was not without controversy. Historians and some survivors' advocates questioned whether a weapons production facility should receive landmark designation before the full scope of Hanford's environmental legacy had been addressed. The National Park Service interpretation attempts to hold both the engineering achievement and the human cost simultaneously. Whether it succeeds is something each visitor decides.