No More Bombs But Work Aplenty

September 11, 2008 - New York Times

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

 RICHLAND, Wash. - When the bombs were dropped and World War II came to a sudden atomic conclusion far across the Pacific, at last it could be revealed that the end had begun here, in the vast and unmapped empty.

Richland had been a company town where the company did not tell its 50,000 employees what they were manufacturing. "The war effort" had been the only explanation for the sudden rush of work out on a remote curve of the Columbia River.

Now, 63 years later, the place and its purpose have been publicly affirmed. Last month, B Reactor, the world's first major nuclear reactor and the source of plutonium for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, was designated a national historic landmark.

Of course, it is not as if anyone would have just leveled the joint had the application for landmark status been rejected. Although the federal government no longer produces plutonium here at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, it expects to spend the foreseeable future cleaning up after it, very carefully. Winning the war, and making history, also made a toxic mess.

"I'm going to retire out there," said Clayton Howell, 41, a local carpenter who is among more than 9,000 people making their living on the cleanup effort. "This is the best job I've ever had. ‘Safety and quality, safety and quality, whatever you can do safely.' That's all you hear. They don't rush you. They've got people watching the people who are watching the people watch the people."

Indeed, the project, undertaken by the Energy Department, is thought to be the world's largest environmental cleanup. The department is now building a huge plant where nuclear waste, currently held in "tank farms" on the 586-square-mile reservation, will be converted into glasslike logs that are ultimately to be shipped for storage at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The budget for the entire project, including work to restore much of the riverfront for public use, is about $2 billion a year.

Although the riverfront is expected to be ready within a decade, no one is really sure when the cleanup will be completed in full. But people of Mr. Howell's age can realistically hope to find work for the rest of their lives.

"It's a very long-term mission," said Colleen French, an Energy Department spokeswoman.

As for B Reactor, historic landmark status means that unlike other reactors on the reservation, it will not be put into a cocoon - actually, four-foot-thick concrete walls known formally as Interim Safe Storage - where it would have been encased for up to 75 years while the government determined the method of final disposal.

Though the other reactors at Hanford played a role in the cold-war nuclear buildup, only B produced plutonium for a weapon that was detonated in wartime. The reactor, which went out of service in 1968, is one of five Manhattan Project facilities designated as historic landmarks, including the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico and the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Several sites offer tours to the public, though they are limited. Tours at Hanford began in the late 1990s - they were stopped for three years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 - and last five hours. They must be reserved weeks in advance, however, and are restricted to United States citizens.

(Starting next March and running through October, the Energy Department plans to open the reactor to the public three days a week, no reservation required, although visitors will have to be screened at a secure entrance to Hanford, as they are now, and escorted to the reactor.)

"We basically have nuclear tourists that are making the circuit," Ms. French said. "They went to Oak Ridge last year and Hanford this year, and they tell us, ‘By God, we're going to Savannah River next year,' " a reference to the old South Carolina nuclear weapons plant that, like Hanford, is now engaged in a vast cleanup.

From the outside, B Reactor is an isolated stack of concrete cubes, bland and brutal, without the vaselike silhouette associated with newer commercial reactors. Inside, it feels like an enormous submarine, forbidding and mysterious and mostly monochromatic, with tour guides stopping at the massive reactor block to explain (or try to) the complex science of nuclear fission.

Then there is the main control room, a windowless burrow where workers monitored everything from the temperature of water pumped from the Columbia to cool the reactor, to which of the 2,004 processor tubes in the reactor needed a new slug of uranium. There is also the small, plain office where the reactor's mastermind, the physicist Enrico Fermi, met with assistants to troubleshoot.

B Reactor "is not completely contamination-free," as Robert Egge, former manager of the Hanford plant, put it during a recent tour. But the important thing to know, Mr. Egge said, is that the contamination "is not smearable." That means it will not rub off on you, and so people who are not working around it regularly have little to fear.

Until recently, the control room included a frayed copy of an old local newspaper published just after the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, its banner headline bursting with the news of what had been happening right here in the backyard. Suddenly, people in Richland knew what they had been doing for a living. And it all made sense, including those strange jobs testing chemicals no one had heard of and those "alphabet houses," worker residences that had risen almost as if by magic on newly laid streets.

"You'd go to work in the morning and come back, and they'd have a whole new row of houses," labeled Design A, Design B and so on, depending on the architecture, recalled Helen Robinson, sipping a whiskey and water at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall here.

Ms. Robinson began working at Hanford in the late 1940s, after World War II but just as the cold war was getting under way. There were still secrets to be kept.

"We just said we worked out in the labs," she said.

In some ways, not much has changed. Mr. Howell, the carpenter, snatched a piece of paper from a young co-worker who had begun diagramming for a reporter the restricted area at Hanford where the glass-log plant is being built.

"You can't do that," Mr. Howell told his colleague.

Mr. Howell's father worked as a carpenter at Hanford when it still produced plutonium. That era ended in 1988, but the work goes on. Mr. Howell's 20-year-old son just applied for an apprenticeship with the local chapter of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America. He hopes to be hired out at Hanford.