史上最悪の原発事故の真実…「チェルノブイリ」第1話が無料放送 via シネマトゥデイ

Posted on 2019/08/29 by yukimiyamotodepaul

史上最悪といわれる原発事故の真実に迫る実録ドラマ「チェルノブイリ」の第1話が、9月25日に映画専門サービス「BS10スターチャンネル」で無料放送されることが明らかになった。

(略）

原子力発電所の爆発事故という前代未聞の事態に直面し、さらなる事故と被害拡大の阻止に向けて対応に追われる科学者たちの緊迫感や、冷戦下における旧ソ連政府の隠ぺい工作、そして大量の放射線を浴びた消防士らの深刻な被害状況などが赤裸々に描きだされる。

今年5月にアメリカ、イギリスで放送・配信されると話題を呼び、原子力発電を利用中の諸外国からも注目され、放送国以外にも反響が拡大。再現度の高さに驚嘆する声のほか、事故や被曝被害の描写をめぐって世界各地で反論や議論が巻き起こった。また、現在も立入禁止区域となっているチェルノブイリ事故現場の見学ツアー参加者が放送後に急増するなど、一大現象となっている。（編集部・大内啓輔）

全文は史上最悪の原発事故の真実…「チェルノブイリ」第1話が無料放送

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HBO’s Chernobyl Sparks Questions About US Nuclear Power Safety via Union of Concerned Scientists

Posted on 2019/08/28 by nfield

AUGUST 27, 2019

Physicist Ed Lyman discusses new safety threats to US nuclear reactors and why risks here are different than in Russia.

[…]

Colleen: Given the publicity of this mini-series I was really surprised to see here just in the news in the past couple of weeks the nuclear industry pushing for less oversight of nuclear power plants. And I’m just curious what’s up with that?

Ed: Nuclear power plants in the country today are under great financial pressure, mostly due to the low cost of fossil fuels and their inability to compete. So, the owners of the reactors are looking for any way possible to cut their operating costs. And one expense that the operators see is due to the oversight of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC conducts inspections that not only requires staff time at the reactors to prepare for those inspections, but it also could result in discovery of violations, which have to be fixed and that means spending money.

So if there are fewer inspections, if the inspections don’t look as hard, they may miss problems. And the plant owners may have longer to address them because the regulators didn’t catch them.

[…]

And that’s really the problem with the changes that are being proposed now. It’s not clear that they’re actually solving any problems. There’s no real rationale for doing them except to reduce oversight of the industry. And in that particular case, there were substantial objections from some NRC staff about reducing the frequency of these inspections without first assessing what the impacts could be. In other words, doing a comprehensive analysis of what those inspections do, and how frequently do you really need to do them to make sure they’re effective. That study has not been completed yet, yet the staff is going ahead and recommending that they reduce the inspection frequency anyway.

Colleen: Are there currently nuclear power plants that you are concerned about?

Ed: I’d say that every plant, you know, is unique and has its own concerns. Certainly, some make me worry more than others. For instance, the Indian Point nuclear plant in New York State, it’s only 25 miles from the boundaries of New York City where I grew up. That plant should not have been located where it is because the number of people within 50 miles, last time I checked is over 16 million, is really too great.

If you’re gonna have nuclear power, you should make sure that there’s a sufficient region around every plant that’s low population density. So that if evacuation or other emergency measures are needed, they can be carried out effectively. And by simply suburbanization and development, a lot of plants around the country that were originally sited in rural areas now find themselves in suburbs and the population’s increasing.

And Indian point’s the poster child for that. It is shutting down in the next few years. But certainly, the potential impact of Indian Point, both from a safety and a security perspective has always been a concern. Then there are plants that are vulnerable to seismic events, that are vulnerable to flooding. And again, it’s really highly dependent on the location of the plant and how it was designed in the first place. But I would say every plant has its own risks and they have to be considered in their own context.C[…]

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France Is Still Cleaning Up Marie Curie’s Nuclear Waste via Bloomberg Business Week

Posted on 2019/08/28 by yukimiyamotodepaul

 Her lab outside Paris, dubbed Chernobyl on the Seine, is still radioactive nearly a century after her death.
By Tara Patel

In 1933 nuclear physicist Marie Curie had outgrown her lab in the Latin Quarter in central Paris. To give her the space needed for the messy task of extracting radioactive elements such as radium from truckloads of ore, the University of Paris built a research center in Arcueil, a village south of the city. Today it’s grown into a crowded working-class suburb. And the dilapidated lab, set in an overgrown garden near a 17th century aqueduct, is sometimes called Chernobyl on the Seine.

No major accidents occurred at the lab, which closed in 1978. But it’s brimming with radio­activity that will be a health threat for millennia, and France’s nuclear watchdog has barred access to anyone not wearing protective clothing. The lab is surrounded by a concrete wall topped by barbed wire and surveillance cameras. Monitors constantly assess radiation, and local officials regularly test the river. “We’re proof that France has a serious nuclear waste problem,” says Arcueil Mayor Christian Métairie. “Our situation raises questions about whether the country is really equipped to handle it.”

Nuclear power accounts for almost three-fourths of France’s electricity, vs. a fifth in the U.S. There’s no lasting solution for the most dangerous refuse from the country’s 906 nuclear waste sites, including some of what’s in Arcueil. Low-level material is to be sent to an aboveground storage site in northeastern France. But radium has a half-life of 1,600 years, and there are traces of a uranium isotope at the Curie annex with a half-life of 4.5 billion years. 

[…]

 A wake-up call came in 2010, when thieves broke in and stole copper wiring. Police who entered the confines, like the intruders, risked radiation exposure because they lacked protective garb—spurring protests from the police union. The cleanup has so far cost about €10 million, Métairie says, though the final bill will likely be much higher as the buildings are dismantled and the site is decontaminated in coming years. 

[…]

In the 1920s her work captured the public’s imagination, leading to a craze for radium face creams, water fountains, razors, and even underwear—all aimed at treating ailments from hair loss to impotence to gout. Although most of those have long been proved bogus or toxic, radiotherapy remains a key cancer therapy, and Curie’s work led to breakthroughs in the use of X-rays. 

Read more at France Is Still Cleaning Up Marie Curie’s Nuclear Waste

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佐世保市長、核廃絶の署名「好ましくない」　原爆展巡り via 朝日新聞

Posted on 2019/08/28 by yukimiyamotodepaul

長崎県佐世保市で４日に開かれた「原爆写真展」の後援依頼を市教育委員会が断った問題で、同市の朝長則男市長は２７日の定例会見で「（写真展に付随して核廃絶を求める）署名活動をするのが好ましくない」と述べ、市教委の判断を支持する考えを示した。

写真展の会場では、核兵器廃絶の署名活動が計画されていた。会見では、市教委の担当者が、改めて「原爆展や平和は否定しないが、一つの考え方への同意や反対を求める署名活動は応援できない」と説明した。

これに続き、朝長市長は「核廃絶は理想的だが、核の傘の中にいて抑止力を利かせるのが現実」と発言し、核兵器禁止条約の署名・批准をしていない日本政府を支持する考えを示した。また、すべての国に条約への参加を求めるヒバクシャ国際署名について「署名するつもりはない」と述べた。

（原口晋也）

続きは佐世保市長、核廃絶の署名「好ましくない」　原爆展巡り

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Is the push for nuclear power a covert push for nuclear weapons?via Renew Economy

Posted on 2019/08/27 by nfield

Mark Diesendorf and Richard Broinowski

A recent push for nuclear power in Australia has been promoted by the usual public advocates and amplified by the Murdoch press.

The arguments are predictable both in their optimism and inaccuracy: nuclear power reactors are claimed to be safe and cheaper than electricity generation from wind and sun; new generation mini-reactors are claimed to be even cheaper and safer and can be adapted to power a factory or a town.

Australia has uranium, and can easily acquire the technology. Advocates for nuclear power are calling for ‘informed’ public debate to quell public fear about nuclear power.

In reality, informed public debate has been going on for some time. The latest iteration was the South Australian Royal Commission of 2015-16, which found that “nuclear power would not be commercially viable to supply baseload electricity to the South Australian subregion of the NEM from 2030 (being the earliest date for its possible introduction).”

But advocates are not deterred, claiming, despite the evidence to the contrary, that nuclear power is cheaper and cleaner than other forms of electricity generation.

The fact is that electricity from new wind and solar farms is much cheaper than from nuclear power stations. According to the multinational investment consultancy, Lazard,the costs of energy from on-shore wind farms in the USA are in the range 29-56 USD per megawatt-hour (US$/MWh), from solar farms 36-46 US$/MWh and from conventional nuclear 112-189 US$/MWh.

In Australia, the CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator have jointly found that the cost of a wind or solar farm in 2020 will be approximately half of that from new coal-fired power stations, and about one-fifth of that from nuclear power in the form of the non-commercial small modular reactors currently being promoted by nuclear enthusiasts.

Adding sufficient storage to solar and wind to provide equivalent dependability of supply to base-load coal and nuclear will lift the cost of wind and solar in 2020 to equivalence with new coal, but nuclear is still at least 2.5 times the cost of wind and solar.

In 2019 the German Institute for Economic Research found that of 674 nuclear reactors built for electricity generation since 1951, all suffered significant financial losses. The (weighted) average net present value was around minus 4.8 billion Euros. The Institute concluded that “nuclear energy has always been unprofitable in the private economy”. So why were 674 reactors built around the world, and why do nuclear advocates want more?

One motivation has been to facilitate the covert development of nuclear weapons. It is well documented (e.g. here and here) that India, North Korea, Pakistan and South Africa all used civil nuclear power to assist their respective covert developments of nuclear weapons, while the UKused its first generation nuclear power stations to supplement weapons-grade plutonium it produced in military reactors.

[…]

There are two main pathways to nuclear explosives –either by enriching uranium in the isotope U235 or extracting plutonium Pu239 from spent reactor fuel.At various times Australia has flirted with both. In the 1960s, under the Gorton government, Australia started to build a nuclear power station at Jervis Bay with the purpose of producing electricity for the grid and Pu239 for nuclear weapons.

[…]

Australia ratified the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1973 and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1998, but in the early 2000s pressure was again exerted on the government by elements in the foreign policy and security establishment to revive a nuclear weapons program.

[…]

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AMERICA’S DECADES-OLD OBSESSION WITH NUKING HURRICANES (AND MORE) via WIRED

Posted on 2019/08/27 by nfield

By Gerrett M. Graff

SUNDAY NIGHT, AXIOS’S Jonathan Swan broke news that Donald Trump—among his many often random musings—appears to have considered one of the worst-but-most-persistent ideas in public policy: Nuking hurricanes.

[…]

The truth, though, is that Donald Trump’s apparent brainstorm—as terrible an idea as it is—actually has a long history. Seventy years ago, it was at the forefront of American scientific thought. What makes Trump’s embrace of nuking hurricanes unique is that, broadly speaking, no policymaker has seriously considered it a good idea since the days that the 73-year-old president was wearing diapers.

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—when the US unleashed a destructive technology more powerful than anything in history—at first spurred unbridled excitement over the power of the atom, an era where the very idea of the “atom” was so new that many people mispronounced as “a-TOME.”

Books flourished touting the newly acquired power of the sun. “When the bomb was dropped,” writer Isaac Asimov explained, “atomic-doom science-fiction stories grew to be so numerous that editors began refusing them on sight.” Cereal giant General Mills got into the act with an offer that children could mail in 15 cents’ postage and a Kix cereal box top in exchange for an “atomic bomb ring,” where kids could “see genuine atoms SPLIT to smithereens.” (General Mills “guaranteed” that the ring was not actually able “to blow everything sky high.”) Some 750,000 children were soon running around their neighborhoods pretending to launch nuclear explosions in all directions. Atomic-themed music became its own genre, atomic cocktails filled American bars—the first, at the Press Club in Washington, DC, was a mix of Pernod and gin—and advertisers embraced the moment. As historian Paul Boyer recounts in his early cultural history of the atomic age, By the Bomb’s Early Light, one jewelry company advertised a “pearled bomb” pin and earring that were “as daring as it was to drop the first atom bomb.”

Engineers dreamed of the day when nuclear engines would replace gasoline-powered automobiles, when a lump of Uranium-235 the size of a vitamin pill would power the family car for years at a time.

In those heady early years of the atomic age, many scientists imagined a world where humans could routinely use nuclear weapons to cleave the earth and remake its climate. Decades before climate change became a major concern, one book, Almighty Atom: The Real Story of Atomic Energy, suggested using atomic weapons to melt the polar ice caps, gifting “the entire world a moister, warmer climate.”

Thought experiments exploded over how harnessing the power of the atom would finally unleash humans’ ability to control and reshape their environment through geo-engineering. “For the first time in the history of the world, man will have at his disposal energy in amounts sufficient to cope with the forces of Mother Nature,” science writer David Dietz explained. Atomic artificial suns, mounted on tall steel towers, would ensure crop growth and guarantee good weather. Radiation was a problem “merely one of detail” to be sorted out later, Dietz said.

Julian Huxley, brother of novelist Aldous Huxley and a renowned biologist who would become the founding director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, was particularly enthusiastic. He suggested at one point that nuclear weapons could be used to flood the Sahara, allowing the arid landscape to “blossom.” He argued in favor of “atomic dynamite” for “landscaping the earth.”

[…]

On the other side of the burgeoning Cold War, the Soviet Union was no less enthusiastic about the geo-engineering possibilities of nuclear power and atomic weapons. In fact, the Stalin-era Soviet government was particularly enthused with the idea of hurrying climate change along for the possibilities of opening its frigid Siberian east to thriving agriculture and bringing subtropical crops to the shores of the Black Sea. In a 1956 book called Soviet Electric Power, Arkadii Borisovich Markin suggested that, “Atom explosions will cut new canyons through mountain ranges and will speedily create canals, reservoirs, and seas [and] carry out huge excavation jobs.” The author brushed aside the obvious concerns, assuming that science would soon “find a method of protection against the radiation.” Soviet scientists proposed how to dam the Bering Strait and use massive nuclear-powered pumps to heat the Arctic Ocean.

America’s public fascination with nuclear weapons continued into the 1950s. In fact, for much of that decade, the United States regularly exploded atomic bombs in the deserts north of Las Vegas, adjacent to what is now Area 51. One of the first tourist attractions in Las Vegas was the chance to wake up early, stand outside your hotel, and watch the flash and mushroom cloud from the bombs rolling into the sky.

The after-effects of radiation—the invisible and inescapable poison spread by nuclear explosions—became clear soon enough. With that awareness, early atomic enthusiasm waned, particularly as bombs leapt from nuclear to thermonuclear, the atomic bomb’s power of kilotons—that is, a thousand tons of TNT—growing to the hydrogen bomb’s megatons, the equivalent of a million tons of TNT.

During a brief window during the Eisenhower era, the US government still seriously explored the peaceful uses of the atom—a program known as PLOWSHARE, after the Biblical phrase about beating swords into plowshares.

[…]

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Unreported Deaths, Child Cancer & Radioactive Meat: The Untold Story of Chernobyl via Democracy Now!

Posted on 2019/08/27 by yukimiyamotodepaul

Following a mysterious nuclear accident in Russia that left seven dead, we look back at the 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl. It sent a cloud of radioactive fallout into Russia, Belarus and over a large portion of Europe, but the death toll from Chernobyl remains unknown. Chernobyl is considered the worst nuclear accident in history, but Kate Brown, an MIT professor of science, technology and society, says much of what we understand about the disaster is inaccurate. Her new book, “Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future,” chronicles the devastating and underreported impact of radiation on tens of thousands in the Soviet Union that went unreported for decades. Brown says, “After about five years of research, I realized that much of what we know about Chernobyl is just either incomplete or fully incorrect.”

[…]

KATE BROWN: Yeah. You know, we feel like we know a lot about Chernobyl, and that’s what I thought when I started this project. And I worked my way through 27 archives and talked to three dozen scientists and farmers and people who worked with the Chernobyl accident, and I followed biologists around the Chernobyl zone who work there twice the year. And after about five years of research, I realized that a lot — much of what we know about Chernobyl is just either incomplete or fully incorrect.

For example, we think of there’s just one Chernobyl zone. Tourists stream in there every day. But what few people know is that there’s a second Chernobyl zone that’s nearly as radioactive as the first Chernobyl zone. It’s in southern Belarus. And it was created because a couple of days after the accident, Moscow leaders realized that a big storm front was brewing, and it was heading northeast toward several large Russian cities, including Moscow. So they sent out pilots, and the pilots manipulated the weather so it rained radioactive fallout on rural Belarus to save the big Russian cities. Now, this successful triage operation probably prevented the exposure of millions of urban dwellers, but, at the same time, they didn’t tell anyone in Belarus, not even the Belarusian Communist Party leader, that they had done this. So people lived in — about 200,000 people — in these rural areas in southern Belarus in terrifically raging hot conditions of radioactivity.

Another misconception we have about the Chernobyl zone is that about 300 people were hospitalized. These were mostly nuclear plant operators and firefighters. That was only one count from one hospital. What I found, working through the archives, is that 40,000 people, with 11,000 of them being children, streamed into hospitals in the summer after the accident for Chernobyl-related exposures. Especially people in the southern territory of Belarus were wondering, “What’s going on? Why are my children fainting? Why are they nauseous or have dizzy spells? Why can’t all of us get out of bed in the morning?”

So, that’s another misconception, is, you know, how — what kind of fatalities. If you look at U.N. records, they say from 35 to 54 people died from Chernobyl exposures. They project that in the future 4,000 people might die of cancers. What I found is that Belarus and Russia, where most of Chernobyl radioactivity went, have not been brave enough to make a count, but that in Ukraine, 35,000 women receive compensation for their spouses who died of Chernobyl-documented exposures. Now, these are just men who died. These are not children. It doesn’t — the count doesn’t include women. It doesn’t account anybody who wasn’t married. Off the record and at the Chernobyl visitors’ center, they give a number of 150,000 Ukrainians dead from Chernobyl exposures. Not 35, but the number is at least 35,000.

[…]

KATE BROWN: We might wonder, you know, why is there no real conclusive science. We know a lot about high doses of radioactivity and what that does to humans. That’s just like that accident that just happened in Russia on August 8th. People die from acute radiation poisoning. That is easy to detect. It’s fully documented. And we have a big study from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. But what scientists will tell you today is we really don’t know what happens to people exposed to low doses of radioactivity chronically over long periods of time. And that’s the Chernobyl syndrome, right? And this is far more likely, let’s hope, in the future, that people will not be exposed to nuclear bombs again, but that we probably will have, on this globe, more nuclear accidents at nuclear power plants. We have dozens of power plants that are over 40 years old that are operating. So we need to know what happens when people are exposed in a Chernobyl-like situation to a slow drip of low doses of radioactivity.

And what I found, working through the agricultural records in the Soviet archives, is that, quickly, radioactivity saturated the food chain. It was in the wheat, tea, honey, milk, meat. They had 100,000 livestock that had been severely contaminated. They butchered these livestock. And loath to throw this out as radioactive contaminants, as just nuclear garbage, they sent manuals — and this is why I call my book Manual for Survival — they sent instruction manuals to the packing houses in Belarus and Ukraine, and they said, take — “Grade the meat in three levels: low, medium and high levels of radioactivity. The low and medium levels, take that meat, mix it with clean meat and make sausage. Send that sausage all over the Soviet Union. Label it as you normally would. Just don’t send any,” the instructions say, “to Moscow.”

The high-level meat was supposed to be put in freezers, so that it could decay. And over time, they hoped, that meat would be cleaner and safer to eat. But quickly I found in the archives that packing houses were writing Moscow, saying, “We need more freezers.” That’s how much high-level radioactive meat they had. They got no more freezers, so they found some train cars, and they stuffed tons and tons of high-level radioactive meat in refrigerated train cars and sent that meat to Baku. Nobody in Baku wanted it. They sent it on to Yerevan and etc. For four years, this radioactive train, filled with — you know, sort of a ghost train filled with radioactive meat circulated the western half of the Soviet Union, no one wanting to touch it. Finally, in 1990, KGB officers buried that train car back in the zone, the Chernobyl zone, where it should have gone in the first place. So, what we see are sort of a path of contagion, where people were ingesting radioactive contaminants in their food and taking it in on the dust. It was sort of an uncontrollable mix of radioactivity going all over the place.

Read more at Unreported Deaths, Child Cancer & Radioactive Meat: The Untold Story of Chernobyl

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「原発は不要」元作業員は太陽光に挑んだ　志半ばで急死 via 朝日新聞

Posted on 2019/08/27 by yukimiyamotodepaul

東京電力福島第一原発で長年働いていた遠藤浩幸さんが、避難先の鹿児島市で太陽光発電に挑戦したものの、完成間近で急死した。５０歳だった。妻の緒美（ちよみ）さん（４７）ら家族は「原発を使わず暮らせる世の中になれば」との思いを継ぎ、故郷から１千キロ以上離れた地で発電設備を動かしている。

浩幸さんは福島第一原発がある福島県双葉町で生まれ育ち、２０歳のころから第一原発などで保全や補修、営業として働いてきた。町の多くの人が原発で働き、緒美さんも原発構内で働いたことがある。

２０１１年３月１４日、浩幸さんは３号機の爆発を避難所のテレビで目撃。緒美さんと中学生の長男長女、１歳３カ月の次男を、緒美さんの親族がいる鹿児島市に避難させた。浩幸さんは「現場を知っている者でなければ作業できない」と３月末に福島に戻り、作業についた。

１分で２ミリシーベルトを浴びる高線量の現場。懐中電灯の光でネジを１本締めては戻らなければならず、線量計のアラームが鳴り続けた。数カ月で「線量がいっぱいになった（被曝（ひばく）限度を超えた）」と家族の元に戻ってきた。

自宅は第一原発から約２キロ。「福島は原発に占拠された。原発はいらないと実感した」。鹿児島市内で会社を立ち上げ、土地を確保し、緒美さんと長男、浩幸さんの両親の５人で太陽光発電の設備を造り始めた。

１６年５月１２日、発電出力は約３３０キロワットで、後はパネルをはめるだけという時だった。浩幸さんは家で突然「頭が痛い」と言い、救急車で運ばれて帰らぬ人となった。脳出血だった。次男はまだ６歳。緒美さんは「何からやっていいか、わからなかった」が、会社を受け継ぎ、義父母らとその年の秋、発電設備を完成させた。

（略）

双葉町の家は中間貯蔵施設の予定地になり、環境省が取り壊すことになっている。今春、向かいに住んでいた義父母から「解体の連絡がきた」と聞き、緒美さんは長男と長女に「取り壊しはそのうちだから、行こう」と声をかけた。

（略）

浩幸さんの死をきっかけに、遠藤家の墓は鹿児島市に造った太陽光発電設備の近くに移した。「追憶　東日本大震災に伴う原発事故により故郷・双葉町を追われ此処に移住する」。墓にはそう記されている。（青木美希）

全文は「原発は不要」元作業員は太陽光に挑んだ　志半ばで急死

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「８年のデータ施策に」　福島県民健康調査検討委星前座長　知事と懇談 via 福島民報

Posted on 2019/08/27 by yukimiyamotodepaul

東京電力福島第一原発事故に伴う健康影響を調べる県民健康調査検討委員会の星北斗前座長（県医師会副会長）は二十六日、県庁で内堀雅雄知事と懇談した。八年間の調査で得られたデータを県民の健康づくり施策に生かすよう提案した。

星氏は「甲状腺がんと放射線被ばくの関連は認められない」とする甲状腺検査二巡目への評価や、調査を通じて把握した県民の健康指標の推移に触れた上で「いろいろなことが少しずつ分かってきた一方、県民の中には子育てに関する漠然とした不安がある」と調査の現状を説明した。

また、「甲状腺検査だけが注目を浴びる状況は好ましくない」との見解を示し、今後の県民健康調査が担うべき役割として「調査で得られた知見を県民に還元する役割を果たしていく必要がある」と述べた。

続きは「８年のデータ施策に」　福島県民健康調査検討委星前座長　知事と懇談

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Visit the Reactor That Made the Plutonium for the “Fat Man” Nuclear Bomb via IEEE Spectrum

Posted on 2019/08/27 by yukimiyamotodepaul

The Manhattan Project’s B Reactor at Hanford is a fascinating, complicated monument to U.S. nuclear history
By Maria Gallucci

A literal pile of cylinders rises 11 meters high inside a graphite box, filling the dimensions of a cavernous hall. The towering grid of over 2,000 tubes is a jaw-dropping, neck-twisting display. Yet size and symmetry aren’t all that make this a humbling sight. This is the core of a nuclear reactor, one that produced the plutonium for the Trinity atomic bomb test—and for “Fat Man,” the bomb that razed Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945.

The B Reactor sits on a remote corner of the Hanford Site, a sprawling expanse in southern Washington state. Completed on 13 September 1944 after 11 months of construction, the reactor belonged to the secretive Manhattan Project, the United States–led initiative to develop nuclear weapons during World War II. Even Hanford workers were kept in the dark, learning only that their labor would support “the war effort” and yield an unnamed “product.”

Today the public can visit the reactor, at least some of the time. The U.S. Department of Energy and the National Park Service offer free toursfrom April to November, allowing visitors to roam the halls of the world’s first large-scale plutonium production complex, which shuttered operations in 1968. While the Hanford site grew to include nine reactors, only the B Reactor remains çaccessible—thanks largely to the former workers who fought to preserve it. Now it’s part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, which includes sites in Los Alamos, N.M., and Oak Ridge, Tenn.

[…]

The museum tour starts with the showstopper: the reactor core. The 2,004 aluminum tubes stretch back about 13 meters, though we can see only their front ends. During production, physicists took 22-centimeter-long slugs of naturally occurring uranium and slid them into the horizontal tubes. Surrounded by graphite, the uranium was transformed by nuclear fission into plutonium. Treated river water pumped through the reactor at a rate of 280,000 liters per minute.

To the side, in a narrow control room, thousands of tiny knobs cover the wall like red, black, and green polka dots. The mechanical gauges monitored water pressure inside each of the tubes. Engineers often worried that bumping a gauge would throw off the readings and cause an emergency “scram,” or the rapid insertion of 29 vertical safety rods to shut down the reactor. (It never happened.) Opposite the reactor, a gaping pit of metal pipes and manual valves shows how cooling water snaked into the pile.

Hundreds of original artifacts are sprinkled throughout the building. Rubber masks and thick gloves sit in a former decontamination room. Rotary phones and typewriters adorn wooden desks. Walls are covered in long-outdated calendars and hand-painted warning signs. It is a shrine to World War II–era ingenuity.

[…]

Yet the B Reactor tour doesn’t dwell on the consequences of the Manhattan project. Visitors hear little of how, when the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, hundreds of thousands of people died from direct impact and the lingering effects of radioactive fallout. And the contaminated soil, groundwater, and leaking tanks of waste just south of the reactor are framed as necessary by-products of national security.

Robert Franklin, president of the B Reactor Museum Association, acknowledges that the site is “a real Pandora’s box of history.” He says the tour does encourage visitors to engage in complex and difficult discussions about U.S. nuclear history.

“On the one hand, it’s a marvel of science and engineering,” he says of the B Reactor. “But on the other hand, it helped to create this world of uncertainty, fear, and anxiety.”

Read more at Visit the Reactor That Made the Plutonium for the “Fat Man” Nuclear Bomb

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