Hanford plutonium separation plant

In only 30 months, the Manhattan Project built 554 buildings including reactors, separation plants, laboratories, craft shops, warehouses, and electrical substations. The Hanford Site plutonium production reactors (B, D, and F) were rectangular, measured 36 feet long by 28 feet wide by 36 feet high, used 200 tons of uranium metal fuel and 1200 tons of graphite, were water cooled, and operated at an initial power level of 250 million watts (thermal). They dwarfed the reactors at other sites. 

With the abandonment of the plutonium gun bomb in July 1944, plaiming at Hanford became more complicated. Pile 100-B was almost complete, as was the first chemical separation plant, while pile D was at the halfway point. Pile F was not yet under construction. If implosion devices using plutonium could be developed at Los Alamos, the three piles would probably produce enough plutonium for the weapons required, but as yet no one was sure of the amount needed. 

In 1942, the Mallinckrodt Chemical Company adapted a diethylether extraction process to purify tons of uranium for the U.S. Manhattan Project [2] later, after an explosion, the process was switched to less volatile extractants. For simultaneous large-scale recovery of the plutonium in the spent fuel elements from the production reactors at Hanford, United States, methyl isobutyl ketone (MIBK) was originally chosen as extractant/solvent in the so-called Redox solvent extraction process. In the British Windscale plant, now Sellafield, another extractant/solvent, dibutylcarbitol (DBC or Butex), was preferred for reprocessing spent nuclear reactor fuels. These early extractants have now been replaced by tributylphosphate [TBP], diluted in an aliphatic hydrocarbon or mixture of such hydrocarbons, following the discovery of Warf [9] in 1945 that TBP separates tetravalent cerium from... 

One other example. During the war a major achievement using chemical engineering was the chemical plant which was used to separate plutonium made in the Hanford pile. 

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... 

---