Hanford plant, Washington State

Fermi s atomic pile was just a prototype. For manufacturing bomb plutonium, a plant was built at the tiny village of Hanford in Washington State. And so, drip by drip, the US war machine squeezed out its uranium-235 and plutonium, while the problem of how to build an atomic bomb was tackled by the physicists, chemists, and engineers at the Los Alamos complex in New Mexico. 

The fission product and encapsulation plant (FPCE) to be built by Isochem, Inc.y in Washington state will produce fully encapsulated fission products for the commercial market. Among these, all of which are extractable from Hanford s plutonium process residues, is cesium-137, a 600-kv. gamma emitter of interest to the process irradiation industry. Isochem will offer cesium in large production quantities and low cost to irradiators of foods, woods, chemicals, etc. Its 30-year half-life promises economies in source array replenishment to compensate for decay. Cesium thus becomes an economic contender for current and planned irradiation applications. 

But Fermi s reactor just demonstrated the principle. To produce the amount of plutonium needed for a bomb, the Hanford plant was built in the state of Washington. The scale and speed of the project were such that the contract was signed for Hanford before the Fermi reactor actually ran. For the Hanford plant Seaborg and coworkers had to devise separation schemes for kilogram quantities of plutonium... 

The HGP is located on the DOE-owned Hanford Site in south-central Washington State adjacent to the south end of the 100-N Area. The HGP was the first nuclear power project In the Pacific Northwest and the fourth in the Nation to generate electricity using a nuclear heat source. At one time, it was the largest nuclear steam electric generating plant in the world, with a capacity of 860,000 kW. 

The other three major activities within the waste isolation program are specific to particular sites. We are currently evaluating the potential of deep basalt flows below the Hanford reservation in the State of Washington. This work is managed by the Richland Operations Office and is being conducted by the Rockwell Hanford Company. An evaluation of a potential site is underway in southeast New Mexico for the location of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) which is primarily a facility for the placement of transuranium contaminated wastes (TRU) from the defense program. 

As of 1980, the world s nuclear power reactors were producing more than 20,000 kg of plutonium per year (Weast ]980). In addition to these, the United States Department of Energy (DOE) has operated nuclear reactors to produce nuclear materials for the nation s defense program. These include plants at Savannah River, South Carolina, and the Hanford Works in Richland, Washington. 

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