"On This Day" In Engineering History

On this day in engineering history, the Hanford Atomic Facility first produced weapons-grade plutonium for the Manhattan Project, a top-secret effort to produce an atomic bomb for Allied use during World War II.

Established in 1943 near Hanford, Washington, the Hanford site housed the world's first first-scale plutonium production reactor. Built by Dupont and based upon designs by physicist Enrico Fermi, the B Reactor produced plutonium-239 by irradiating uranium-238 with neutrons.

Fissile plutonium material from Hanford was used first at the Trinity test site in the New Mexico desert, and then in the Fat Man bomb that an American B-29 bomber dropped over Nagasaki, Japan.

What is Plutonium?

Plutonium, a silver-gray radioactive metal with six allotropic forms, occurs naturally but only in minute quantities. Like neptunium, another transuranium element, plutonium is produced by the radioactive decay of uranium, a very dense and radioactive metallic element present in rocks and soil and more common than gold, silver, or mercury.

In 1940, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley bombarded uranium with neutrons from a cyclotron to artificially produce first neptunium and then plutonium. The discovery of these and other transuranium elements by the Manhattan Project scientists remained highly-classified throughout World War II.

Plutonium Applications

Plutonium is used both as an explosive agent in nuclear weapons and in civilian applications for nuclear power. According to Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), a former Manhattan Project site that is now part of the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), one kilogram (kg) of plutonium yields approximately 22-million kilowatt hours (kWh) of heat energy. With regard to military applications, the complete detonation of a kilogram of plutonium is equivalent to some 20,000-tons of chemical explosive.

After the Hanford Atomic Facility began plutonium production on November 6, 1944, the spent fuel was reprocessed on-site. The Hanford B Canyon, the world's first large-scale reprocessing plant, used remote-controlled equipment to chop the spent fuel into pieces. After the pieces were dissolved in nitric acid, a corrosive and highly-radioactive acid solution chemically extracted the weapons-grade plutonium. During the Cold War, this gravity-fed chemical factory became one of eight such American reprocessing facilities for separating plutonium from spent reactor-fuel.

Resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site

http://periodic.lanl.gov/elements/94.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Production_during_the_Manhattan_Project

http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/atomic+number+94

http://www.hss.energy.gov/healthsafety/ohre/roadmap/achre/intro_9_3.html

http://www.uraniumsa.org/about/what_is_uranium.htm