Hanford B Reactor: Making plutonium for nuclear weapons

this is known as a single cast graphite moderated reactor will talk about those terms because they're crucial as to how this thing was built and how it operated the Army Colonel Franklin Matthias is out here in selecting or recommending selection of this site in January of 43 by the summer of 43 people were gone construction began this plant construction began in October of 43 and on September 26 1944 eleven months later you now we want to start the reactor up which means we want it to start getting hot all we do is we got to take that cookie monster and cookie crumb monster out we got to get that boron out of there so the operator would sit here press the rod there's only nine of them and here they are and he said okay one is pull rod number two press the button and if you look very closely this is pretty darn simple it says in out so he holds the knob to out and as long as he's holding it there rod number two is that say to there we'll go okay then he pulls ninety number four outs and same thing down here I want out now hold it there and rod number four go hmm and he does this and get some you know all of them some partial way out so now as you can see this part of the fuel has no boron in it so nothing's eating those cookie crumbs so it starts getting very very hot and we want to get the power level up to some certain point that's monitored by these gauges here these are the positions of the rods where they were at and that in the core so have they come out you know one inch two inch a foot how far out if they got okay so now the reactor is hot but those cookies are breaking and eventually there can all break and the reactor will stop being hot at that point right so we have to expose more of the fuel so we sit here and over the next couple months we keep doing this every hour we say okay I'm seeing the powers dropping a little bit so here at and then that rod goes in and this goes on every hour for the next you know like two months and so you're you know operators sitting there and every now and then does and that's called bumping a rod if you're being told how hard about that run no he can tell by his various gauges imma show you short video there's gauges here that tells he's looking at them and he's had training to know what that means highroad was like dropping a little bit in a certain segment so he knows to pull that when I will them connect up to one of those pop tubes and the little numbers on there tell you what tubes it is like this one says 24 52 the first two numbers just represent the row so it's 24 rows up 1 2 3 4 5 24 and once you get to 46 then they start doing the columns 47 48 49 54 so 52 so 24 rows up 52 across it's that particular tube Oh take this reactant apart this like on video from the inside out what do we start with we start with the red light seventy-five thousand blocks of graphite actually there this is grant light it's a particular grade of graphite it's called nuclear graphite extraordinarily pure spur nearly pure and tell you why fundamentally pure carbon is what you're looking at the graphite reflex or moderate to the neutrons why is that important because the fuel is used in this reactor which would have looked like this would have been a a hunk of pure uranium metal encased in aluminum in the encasement was to prevent water getting on the uranium because if it did it would swell the uranium so that's the ocean protected but if you put uranium in a suitable moderator like crap like the graphite reflects the neutrons that are coming off the 235 and it reflects them and slows down how much the estimates from physicists calculations are from anywhere from fourteen thousand to twenty thousand kilometers per second is the normal speed of a neutron down to maybe two kilometers per second at that low speed what happens is another 235 nucleus has a great Congress for those neutrons and the neutron going into that nucleus instead of speeding through and moving on spends there now we're talking time like millionths of a second regardless it sets up the potential for that Neutron to split that out and that's exactly what happened is going to get in a suitable moderator and when that Newton when that atom splits it sends off two neutrons two or three neutrons and because of the moderator those two or three can find another nucleus and it sets up a multiplication to the fourth take and suddenly you've got a chain reaction that's what they call it and when with suitable controls you can call that take reaction and now you've got a nuclear reactor of the way those same neutrons were also impacting that greater mass 238 and in then for a small amount of the 238 goes to a transmutation so you've got the vision process to support the reactor and then you've got the seen neutrons banging away 22:38 into a different element so 2:38 transmutes to tune rhenium to 39 then to neptunium to 39 and then to lutonium to 39 with a different atomic number in a different atomic weight it'll actually continue that transmutation can continue if you don't control it but that's what the reactor does and that's what this building that is how the total weight and if otherwise does not naturally exist under your all right off the science and back to the reactor so outside of the right is the thermal shield and these are 10 aging cast iron blocks you see here and if you pull out this reactor and flying pig tails going up the side across 50 see the light you can see them very easily that's where the cast iron blocks so that again defines the parameter of the reactor putting fuel in the reactor this is a segment of a process - those are full length process students you see up there again let's give you an idea size the length of the reactor so as you saw on the video this process - that they look at it has an epigram those rails would be at the bottom of the tube and the reason for that is when we put fuel in this is a perk you wanted to maintain a very small but very important annulus around that's where the water went the water surrounded the fuel and went through there so to load this reactor as you saw on the video we put 16 of these perfs in and we put 32 of the fuel elements in and then we put 16 Hertz again this when we were going up with reaction what you would see where the process to made it up against the head so that's that's they would open that here and then put that essentially voting what you're looking at these would come off and you would load the reactor through those tubes 2004 profit would they fill the whole thing and when they feel the whole thing and running answer is yes well I'll talk a little bit more about that so in operating this reactor for the very first time this is not the way they did it the first time they took it up in stages Fermi took it up dry with about 100 tubes in middle of September 44 and then once he was satisfied the least calculations off his 6-inch slide rule married up to the instrumentation they took it up went critical to 900 tubes on September 26 1944 so they took it up in stages this reactor didn't get to full power 250 megawatts thermal until January of 1945 this was the experimental baby the other two reactors that were being built right behind the daf-2 months two months later they went operational almost instantly because of what they were learning about because the reactors were identified so first time let's assume for the first time for getting what actually happened coming closer you load the reactor by having your controls in so you have the water turned off you use these slices called charging machines this is an operating elevator with the floor it's down there's another charge machine in the early days that are done by hand but if we move fast forward to the mid 50 60 you use the charging machines and you would push the 16 spacers in the 32 fuel elements 16 more spacers and you shut that tube and you go through the entire reactor so now the reactor is charged and fundamentally even today open those tubes and throw in some uranium you'd have a mess on your hands because the graphite is still there and it would instantly react with the graphite as a moderator and you have a mess we don't now you've gotten out of the reactor charge we've got your controls in now you raise verticals and then you would start to articulate out horizontal I didn't probably mention but what's in these that makes this happen is these contain a mixture of boron into steel or above neutrons so boron acts as a poison while the rods and and verticals are in that boron is absorbing that Neutron flux that's already occurring regardless of what you do so now we want to get that clutch to come up you want your reactor to go critical on sustain you raise your verticals and then your operators and this is what John will talk to you more about when you when you go to the control room begins to move out the horizontals and as you do that the reactor come on it's a delicate operation bringing a lot of technical reasons for that but it was always very very measured operation one time one more thing about backup systems in the event that the reactor because of swelling you could not get a vertical they were prepared in the early days they had to 105 gallon tanks or s opposite corners of the reactor and they could feed into the thimbles and the thimble is that opening in the graph and the graph I can see it over there if that particle could not go in but they realized that by the early 50s firming it it got very concerned we ever dumped a solution in there they may not ever get it all out and therefore we poison the reactor forever so they came to a new system using nickel coated more on balls these are examples these are real if you would evolve on top of the reactor you would sneak big coppers surrounding and inside those hoppers tens of thousands for eyeballs and they did use those in the sixties when they scram the reactor or for other reasons but they never use the boric acid so this was a third safety system they call it the ball three X system because it was the third safety system in the event they needed a rapid shutdown of the egg so that's how the reactor operator there are other types of reactors that use other than graphite but if you were going to you if you would producing plutonium for weapons you needed a material where he could put the fuel in and then hit the fuel out how did you get the fuel out nobody's asked the question when was the cook done how do you know what it was done well with that tremendous Neutron flux going on in the reactor you Dre had the greatest flux it would get irradiated to the point they would go through a discharge much quicker than the perimeter the perimeter might fuel in the perimeter might stay in there a year in the middle six to eight weeks would have been an average so the rear face of the reactor looks exactly like this except it's only about entity deep and then there's this massive concrete wall for radiation protection so when it's time to discharge they would identify the process tubes they're going to discharge and usually be rows of them maybe 40 50 60 maybe 90 they would turn the water greater reactor down turn the water off to those process tools the workers who go around rear face just like this go up you move the mouse attached from them and get out of there raise the elevator so it doesn't hit that come back around here remove the nozzle pack and use machines would begin to push the fuel out at the same time loading new few live so the fiscal 16 spacers would go out and fall in down into a channel into 20 feet of water 32 fuel elements wouldn't do this follow the same the front 16 spacers would then become the new rear spacers fresh fuel 32 fresh kerfs 16 button it up and begin to bring the real academia oversimplify but that's essentially what went on maybe this to a liquid sludge if you will and then through chemical processes they've had chemicals remove chemicals centrifuge they finally end up with a what they call a plutonium nitrate paste that then went and was baked in a little hockey-puck sized piece of solid atonium metal that's what then went to the labs to be form into nuclear weapons how many of those hockey pucks would have been and say one of their families how many a little million in the of those hockey pucks I don't know that I'll answer that in a different way and the show gin deduce between the uranium bomb Newtonian bomb the critical mass for rhenium if it's a perfect sphere is about 52 kilograms something over under 100 pounds 110 pounds or so the critical mass of atonium is around 10 kilograms and 10 and the plutonium women had a much greater yield in terms of explosive force than uranium so would they use that mass in a weapon you're getting in stuff that I don't know even if I do I would talk about but that that is tells you what what you can what you

Channel: Studio McGraw

Views: 190,829

Rating: 4.6977663 out of 5

Keywords: History, Bomb, Washington, uranium, World War II, radiation, Manhatten Project, Fermi, Fission, Chernobyl, tourism, Oppenheimer, nuclear bomb, plutonium, Atomic, WWII, World War, factory tour, oppenheimer, Chicago pile

Id: 8rlVHEY7BF0

Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 25 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/FalseAnimal]

A very worthwhile tour if it ever opens up again.

[u/lapislazulismeepmorp]

Got to tour there once, very interesting!