by Steve Olson
The 1950s brought other ominous developments. By the end of 1949, Communist forces had driven the nationalists out of mainland China, and Mao had established the People’s Republic of China. On June 25, 1950, North Korea, confident of backing from the Soviet Union and China, invaded South Korea. Also that year, Fuchs, relocated after the war to Britain, publicly confessed that he had passed secret information on the US nuclear program to the Soviet Union, which triggered a panic in the West that other spies had infiltrated the government. During a speech in West Virginia, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy took a piece of paper from his pocket that he said contained a list of Communists working in the State Department.
The mood in America darkened. Two-thirds of Americans said in a poll that the United States should drop bombs on Russia first in any future war with the Soviets. More than half favored dropping atomic bombs on “military targets” in Korea to bring the war to an end. Some advocated a genocidal preemptive strike that would kill many millions of Soviet citizens and destroy their cities before the Soviet Union could fully arm itself with atomic bombs. Talk of international control had faded away and was replaced only by a desperate need to stay ahead. “In the brutal and strident climate of the early Cold War, hope shriveled,” wrote historian Paul Boyer. “What remained was fear—muted, throbbing, only half acknowledged—and a dull sense of grim inevitability as humankind stumbled toward the nothingness that almost surely lay somewhere down the road—no one knew how far.”
DEL BALLARD MOVED to Richland in 1951 to go to work as a Hanford engineer. He had grown up on a dryland farm northwest of Billings, Montana, and a childhood spent building things led naturally to a civil engineering degree at Montana State College in Bozeman. Ballard had two older brothers who had been in World War II, one serving in the Philippines when the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. When Ballard’s brother returned from the Pacific, he told his family he thought he would have been in an invasion force if not for the bombs. When Ballard was in college during the Korean War, he tried to enlist in the air force but was rejected for bad eyesight. Rather than entering the military through the draft, he took a job at Hanford to contribute to the war.
He arrived in Richland on July 3, 1951, moving into ramshackle barracks north of town. It was 105 degrees the next day. “I thought, my lord, what have I gotten myself into?” he recalled years later. “But I was young and willing to accept anything that came my way.”
His first job was to inspect the shielding for a new reactor, the C Reactor, that was being built right next to the B Reactor. By the time Ballard arrived in 1951, Hanford was a much different place than it had been just a few years earlier. When the Atomic Energy Commission decided that it needed to produce more plutonium, it quickly realized that the three existing reactors were not going to be enough. It therefore began to build new reactors. The H Reactor, which became operational in October 1949, sat on the shores of the Columbia midway between the D and F Reactors. The next reactor—the fifth after the B, D, F, and H Reactors—broke with DuPont’s spacing scheme. The D Reactor, built during the war, had developed problems. Subjected to a fierce bombardment of neutrons, the graphite in the core was swelling so badly that the process tubes were bending, causing the fuel slugs to get stuck inside the reactor. The Atomic Energy Commission decided to build the DR Reactor—for D replacement—next to the D Reactor, thinking that the new reactor could take over when the original one failed. Instead, Hanford’s scientists and engineers figured out a way to solve the problem. Counterintuitively, if the reactors were run at higher temperatures and then allowed to cool, the swelling of the graphite blocks subsided. Once the solution was implemented, both the D and DR Reactors churned out plutonium for the next two decades.
DuPont was gone by then. From the beginning, the company’s leaders had insisted that they did not want to operate the plant after the war, and the successful conclusion of the war had not changed their minds. DuPont had originally contracted to build and operate the plant for one dollar so that the company would not be seen as a war profiteer, but after the war a government accountant noted that construction had taken only two years rather than the anticipated three. The company therefore received a check for just 68 cents. A few months later, 32 members of the Pasco Kiwanis Club donated a penny each and sent the proceeds to DuPont’s president to make up the balance.
In the fall of 1946, the General Electric Company took over Hanford. As with DuPont, General Electric had to be persuaded to take on the job, but Groves wore the company down. Charged by the Atomic Energy Commission with building three new reactors to produce plutonium, General Electric basically copied the designs developed by DuPont and the Met Lab. As with the B, D, and F Reactors, the new H, DR, and C Reactors pumped water out of the Columbia River, through aluminum tubes to cool the chain-reacting slugs, and then back into the river. But they operated at higher power levels than had the three wartime reactors, which meant that more water had to move faster through the process tubes to keep the reactor cool. As a result, more radioactivity entered the river, and the temperature of the river slowly rose as more of it passed through the reactors’ cores.
With more reactors operating, General Electric also needed to increase Hanford’s chemical processing capacity. At the Met Lab during the war, Seaborg and the other chemists had started thinking about a different way of separating plutonium from the irradiated fuel slugs. Known as redox—a contraction of the term reduction-oxidation—the process used a highly flammable solvent to draw plutonium and uranium away from the dissolved slugs. Perfected after the war, solvent extraction was at the heart of a fourth gigantic canyon building erected by General Electric on the central plateau. The solvent extraction done at the REDOX Plant was much more efficient than the batch processing that had occurred in the earlier canyon buildings. But the wastes it generated were even more toxic and radioactive than the earlier wastes. General Electric dumped the less radioactive wastes into the soil near the canyon buildings, as DuPont had done during the war. For the most toxic and radioactive chemical wastes, it built 30 new single-shell tanks and began to fill them up.
By the 1950s, even the REDOX Plant was not enough to meet the plutonium production demands, and a fifth canyon building rose on the central plateau. Known as the PUREX Plant—for plutonium-uranium extraction—it went online in January 1956. Dutifully, General Electric built more single-shelled tank farms to hold the wastes until someone could figure out what to do with them.
Even the six reactors operating at Hanford by the early 1950s were not enough to produce the plutonium the government demanded. In 1952, the Atomic Energy Commission announced that General Electric would build two new reactors at Hanford. Known as K-West and K-East, these plants were much larger than the first six reactors, operating at energy levels almost eight times the design level of the B Reactor. They also used the heat from the cooling water, before it was dumped back into the river, to heat the reactor buildings. It was the first, albeit modest, use of nuclear energy in the United States for purposes other than warfare.
Even as Hanford was growing, the Atomic Energy Commission was building new facilities elsewhere to meet the needs of the Cold War. In Ohio, 20 miles northwest of Cincinnati, the Fernald Feed Materials Production Center had been producing uranium fuel elements for Hanford’s reactors since 1948. In 1952, a new plant to separate uranium isotopes came online near Paducah, Kentucky, about 40 miles up the Ohio River from Cairo. In the high desert between Idaho Falls and the small town of Arco, scientists, engineers, and technicians at the National Reactor Testing Station built and tested experimental reactors, including the reactors now used in nuclear-powered submarines. The government began building the Pantex Plant near Amarillo in the panhandle of Texas in 1951 to assemble nuclear weapons. It set aside the Nevada Test Site northwest of Las Vegas to test nuclear weapons, detonating more than a thousand bombs there between 1951 and 1992.
Of greater long-term consequence for Hanford, the Atomic Energy Commis
sion decided that it needed another place to produce plutonium. Hanford was within range of Soviet bombers coming over the poles from Siberia, which meant that it could be wiped out in a surprise attack. After a quick review of potential sites, the Atomic Energy Commission announced that it would build two new reactors on the Savannah River near Aiken, South Carolina, which soon were followed by three more. Constructed and run by DuPont, which had decided to get back into the nuclear business, the reactors were moderated by heavy water, not graphite, but nevertheless were devoted entirely to plutonium production.
Still, Hanford led the charge. Built to beat Germany to the bomb, then used to end the war with Japan, Hanford had become an indispensable engine of the Cold War.
AFTER BALLARD FINISHED his job inspecting the shields for the C Reactor, he did field engineering in the 300 area just north of Richland. Then he helped oversee the laying up of graphite in the K-West and K-East Reactors, after which he served as project engineer for a facility to test the lattice spacing in graphite-moderated reactors. Even as different contractors replaced General Electric in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, he stayed on at Hanford, designing new projects and overseeing their construction. The only thing that changed was the color of his paychecks.
In the early years, the only way to get to Seattle, Spokane, or Portland—all at least 150 miles away—was on slow, two-lane roads clogged with farm traffic. The residents of Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco therefore tended to rely on each other and on the vast surrounding landscape for entertainment. They formed bridge clubs, Bible study, gardening groups, outing organizations, gun clubs, and all the men’s business groups found in small towns across America: Eagles, Rotary, Elks, Kiwanis, and Jaycees (along with their female auxiliaries). Among the first dramatic groups were the Richland Players, followed by the Richland Light Opera Company, the Community Concert Association, and the Mid-Columbia Symphony Guild. People went to drive-in movies, rodeos, baseball games, and picnics. Wages at Hanford were good; people in the area bought boats to fish on the lakes and rivers, pickups to drive into the country, and comfortable homes on large lots.
Right after the war the population of Richland dropped from more than 15,000 to less than 13,000 as wartime employees drifted away. But by the time Ballard arrived in 1951, Hanford’s Cold War expansion had sparked a population boom. Richland had more than 23,000 residents, with another 25,000 construction workers and their families in a temporary trailer camp north of town. Kennewick and Pasco also were growing—up to about 10,000 people each. In 1947, a new newspaper decided to call itself the Tri-City Herald and began promoting the label. Today, people from outside the Tri-Cities are more likely to use that term than the names of the individual towns.
But the three towns have always remained proudly and defiantly independent. From the beginning, Richland embraced its atomic heritage. Local businesses christened themselves Atomic Cleaners, Atomic Bowl, Atomic Ale Brewpub, and Fission Chips restaurant. Most of the people who lived in Richland worked in a Hanford facility or were a family member of a Hanford worker, so everyone had that in common. But the town was filled with people from all over the United States who had come to Hanford looking for good jobs—even today, Richland has a reputation as a welcoming place because of its history of people gathering from across the United States and building a community. It contained virtually no old people, no minorities, no one who was poor, and no one who was rich. According to historian Michelle Gerber, postwar Richland had the highest birthrate in the nation, “and maternal deaths, infant deaths, and deaths from other causes confounded national averages by being so far on the low side.” By 1948, more than 2,000 babies had been born at Kadlec Hospital—named for an army engineer who suffered a heart attack at Hanford during the war and became the first person to die in the new hospital. Wags suggested that the high birthrate resulted from a lack of social activities. A more likely explanation is that the town was full of young men and women healthy and optimistic enough to uproot themselves from elsewhere and start a new life in a forbidding and empty landscape.
Kennewick, centered about 10 miles down the Columbia River from Richland, always had a very different feel. Originally a service town for the surrounding agricultural community, it swelled with overflow Hanford workers and with people who provided services for Hanford workers—shopkeepers, mechanics, barbers, accountants. Kennewick was always the shopping center for the region—no one was surprised when the first shopping mall in the region went up there in later years. Well into the 1960s, Kennewick was a sundown town, where African Americans had to leave before nightfall to avoid run-ins with the police and residents. Jack Tanner, regional director of the NAACP in the Northwest, once called Kennewick “the Birmingham of Washington.” But Richland, ostensibly less prejudiced, was not much different: in 1950 it had seven Black residents.
The African Americans and Hispanics in the area usually lived in Pasco, the old railroad town across the river from Kennewick. Even there, most minorities lived in East Pasco, on the other side of the railroad tracks from the rest of the town, in shacks or trailers that often lacked access to water or sewer lines. Pasco was always less connected to Hanford than Kennewick or Richland. When the Atomic Energy Commission began pressuring General Electric in the early 1950s to hire more minorities at Hanford, less than a dozen African American clerks and custodians worked for the company (though contractors employed about 250 Blacks who were helping to build new facilities, jobs that would last a few years).
In 1952, Ballard met a woman named Virginia Kelly at a social event organized by the Young Women’s Christian Association, and they were married a year later. A few years after that, the federal government and General Electric began privatizing Richland. In the midst of a competition to demonstrate the superiority of capitalism over communism, the presence of a government-owned and -operated town, even if it was occupied with manufacturing weapons of war, was untenable. Ballard and his wife bought one of the first private lots offered for sale in Richland in 1957. The next year they constructed the third privately built house in Richland, not including the few prewar houses not demolished during the Manhattan Project.
They settled down and began raising a family during one of the most contradictory decades in American history. The parents of the baby boom generation had children while many of them were building, or at least were considering building, fallout shelters in which to survive the end of the world—the Ballards’ next-door neighbor had one in his front yard. On their black-and-white televisions, families watched images of mushroom clouds rising from the Nevada Test Site followed by the reassuring fare of I Love Lucy and Leave It to Beaver. The builder of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, lost his security clearance amidst accusations of disloyalty to the United States after he objected, on moral grounds, to the development of the hydrogen bomb. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and other state institutions had to sign loyalty oaths to the United States or be fired from their jobs. It was a time that combined innocence, insecurity, and injustice in equal measure.
Ballard and the other workers at Hanford lived at the heart of this contradiction. President Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, after Stalin’s death in 1953, were overseeing enormous expansions of their nuclear arsenals. Both Hanford and the Maiak plant in the Soviet Union maintained a frenzied schedule of construction and plutonium production. The Tri-Cities were ringed by Nike missile sites to shoot down Soviet bombers. Security was incredibly tight. Hanford workers were prohibited from talking about their jobs even with many of their coworkers, not to mention their families and friends. Levels of plutonium production were top secret, which meant that the amount of radiation being released into the air and water also had to remain secret. And the need to protect workers and the public often conflicted with the need for production.
Yet the residents of Richland considered it “a lovely place to live,” as Ballard recalled many years later. “Good schools, peaceful, no crime, good city systems,
everything very neat and clean.” The possibility of nuclear war “was common in your thinking,” he added, but “it was something you didn’t really dwell on. . . . We were in a competition to keep our deterrent in place, and that required additional plutonium.”
Chapter 21
PEAK PRODUCTION
ON SEPTEMBER 23, 1963, A MARINE HELICOPTER LANDED IN A CLEARED field on the bank of the Columbia River north of Richland. After the dust settled, President John Kennedy emerged from the helicopter surrounded by a gaggle of dignitaries, aides, and Secret Service agents. It was a fiercely hot day—over 90 degrees under a bright and cloudless sky. The men immediately began to sweat in their white shirts, thin dark ties, and wool suits.
Kennedy crossed the field and climbed a dozen stairs to a hastily constructed stage. He looked out at a crowd of more than 30,000 people, the men mostly in short-sleeved white shirts, the women in sundresses and hats. The Hanford nuclear site, normally inaccessible behind high fences, had opened to the public that day so people could hear the president. Schools in Richland were out for Kennedy’s visit; high school bands had kept the crowd entertained while people waited for the president to arrive.
Kennedy had come to participate in the dedication ceremonies for the ninth and final plutonium production reactor to be built at Hanford. Known as the New Production Reactor or N Reactor, it had the same basic design as the previous eight reactors—a massive cube of graphite pierced by aluminum process tubes. But the N Reactor had one major innovation. The water flowing through the reactor did not stream back into the Columbia River. Instead, it passed through a heat exchanger, where it generated steam. This steam coursed in pipes over the barbed-wire fences surrounding the reactor to a power-generating plant, where it turned turbines and produced electricity. Meanwhile, the cooled water looped back into the reactor to be reheated. When it began generating electricity in 1966, the N Reactor was the largest power reactor in the world and doubled America’s nuclear power capacity.