The NPS started having tours out to "the site" as it is locally called. I was especially interested because my father worked out at "the site" for decades and I was never able to go see where he worked or even hear about much of what he did. This reactor was long defunct before we arrived in Richland but it still gave me an idea of what my Dad worked on.
The B-Reactor
My Mom and I at the reactor front
After a 45 minute drive out into the desert we arrived at the B-Reactor. The reactor was developed by Dr. Fermi in Chicago. Materials came from Oakridge, Tennessee to Richland and then once the uranium was made in plutonium it was delivered to Los Alamos, New Mexico.
I wonder what this knob does?!
This made me laugh - one of my favorite finds. A hacksaw with a serious extender.
As a female engineer I was looking for the female influence for developing this technology. Well, of the 40,000 employees only 4,000 were women. They were mostly used for safety parades where managers would pick a "Queen of Safety" and the guys would attend to see who was selected. I'll admit this sounds (is) sexist. That being said a really cool thing I learned was that the second in line for the technology development was a woman physicist - Leona Woods Marshall who was Dr. Fermi's grad student. In fact, when they built the reactor there wasn't even a woman's restroom but the men respected her so much they took the last stall and made a bathroom just for her. While it doesn't negate the Queen of Safety, it did make me proud of Leona and her technical input and fortitude to working with all those men back in the 1940's.
Queen of Safety
The same people who built the reactor wrote this sign...makes you think twice?!
It was really neat to see the wall where the uranium was loaded with all of the cooling piping, the control room and the complexity of this big technical advancement. It certainly wasn't optimized but the fact that it worked was amazing. And, while there I found "the far side." Sorry Mr. Larsen!
For more information on the tour you can go to the national park service Manhattan Project.
