B Reactor

I drove back toward Aiken on a flat state highway, with nothing on either side but dark treeline and the occasional reflector post.

Four hundred meters north of the old B Reactor outflow corridor, under an erosion barrier that looked like every other erosion barrier on that stretch of riverbank? Something old and patient continued doing whatever it had been doing since long before the 1969 team ever pulled a sediment sample.

The quarterly team would check it in three months.

They would log what they found.

Yeah.

They built the B Reactor there, which was the first full scale plutonium production reactor in the world.

Precisely.

They were transmuting uranium 238 into plutonium 239.

You can't brief 130,000 people, so you brief maybe a few hundred, and everyone else operates on need-to-know, which for most of them was nothing.

The workers at Hanford who loaded graphite blocks into the B Reactor didn't know they were building the world's first full-scale nuclear reactor.

They knew they were stacking very heavy black bricks to very precise tolerances.

The B Reactor.

That's the one they designed and built in about 18 months, right?

Yeah, and that's worth sitting with.