Now that's a day off
Well I went to the tri-cities area of Washington. Now, I would agree that there is not much to Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland. They are your typical, medium sized city surrounded by agriculture. I went there today to take a public tour of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford
Now, before anyone asks, "Where are the pictures?" I must let you know that they did not allow any cameras, phones, or any other electronic device on the tour. You knew they meant business when a man with a gun led the dog to sniff your bag. First of all there was driving on a tour bus with lots of old people. Honestly 90% of the tour was 60+. I was not the youngest, but just by a "goth" looking couple in there early 20's. We drive by the public reactor and the 300 area (the place where they made the uranium in to fuel rods. They only talked about this, and there was nothing left of the cities they removed for the project. We drove by big buildings of entombed reactors. These reactors made the majority of the plutonium for all the the US's weapons.
We arrived to the B reactor. This reactor was not only the first working reactor, it produced all of the plutonium for the first atomic bomb and the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, it's still intact. You walk in and the first thing you see is the face of the reactor. It's huge. Now it's nothing more than graphite and tubes, but they are put together very carefully and with lots of engineering. I found out that Fermi designed this off of the first reactor made on a squash cort in Chicago. We were given a full tour and it's really creepy to see ropes and signs that said "Stabilized controlled radiation area." Basically when you run a reactor for a long time some parts of it become radio active and it's best to just leave them alone. It's good to know that even though public tours are rare, the reactor is a museum. The neat part is that it's right out of the 50's. Down to the phone booth with a phone with 16 numbers on the rotatory dial. The tour guide worked in the plant, and you could tell he was proud and casual about the plant's operations.
Unfortunately they only talked about the plutonium separation plants. They pointed out three buildings where they developed three processes for getting plutonium. They have very efficient ways of getting plutonium, and they talked about none of them. I can't blame them.
We then went to the burial ground for low level radio active materials. They do not mess around. One square mile wide pits, eight hundred feet deep store low level radioactively contaminated material. The tour guide for that part talked about a 1.6 million dollar compactor that used military GPS to make sure the fill of waste was compacted well enough. Yep, that's why it's so damn expensive to take care of these things. I also saw all of those scary placards on the trucks for radio active materials. I'm not even going to guess what it cost to put in the pumps, drainage and the big sheet to make sure nothing seeps under all of this waste.
Then we went to a place where the buried transuranic waste in steel drums. That's it. Drums in the ground. To there credit, this stopped in 1970 and they are pulling out the drums to properly deal and store the material. As a pop-quiz I was able to answer what transuranic materials are. Then I found out I only had four feet of dirt between me and the drums. Woah. They have about 22,000 drums and can safely pull out 17 a day.
Then we went by the glass vitrification plant. This is where they make waste into glass logs. This is to make the long term storage of waste possible. This was boring to me, but also pointed out how hard it is to understand the scale of things. This was a huge building where they used the largest crane in the world to build parts of it. When you are on a bus, you just can't understand how big it really is.
Overall this was a very cool day. I do recommend Chico's Tacos in Kennewick. They do sell viso http://www.drinkviso.com in a shell station I stopped at. I'm off to bed.
Now, before anyone asks, "Where are the pictures?" I must let you know that they did not allow any cameras, phones, or any other electronic device on the tour. You knew they meant business when a man with a gun led the dog to sniff your bag. First of all there was driving on a tour bus with lots of old people. Honestly 90% of the tour was 60+. I was not the youngest, but just by a "goth" looking couple in there early 20's. We drive by the public reactor and the 300 area (the place where they made the uranium in to fuel rods. They only talked about this, and there was nothing left of the cities they removed for the project. We drove by big buildings of entombed reactors. These reactors made the majority of the plutonium for all the the US's weapons.
We arrived to the B reactor. This reactor was not only the first working reactor, it produced all of the plutonium for the first atomic bomb and the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, it's still intact. You walk in and the first thing you see is the face of the reactor. It's huge. Now it's nothing more than graphite and tubes, but they are put together very carefully and with lots of engineering. I found out that Fermi designed this off of the first reactor made on a squash cort in Chicago. We were given a full tour and it's really creepy to see ropes and signs that said "Stabilized controlled radiation area." Basically when you run a reactor for a long time some parts of it become radio active and it's best to just leave them alone. It's good to know that even though public tours are rare, the reactor is a museum. The neat part is that it's right out of the 50's. Down to the phone booth with a phone with 16 numbers on the rotatory dial. The tour guide worked in the plant, and you could tell he was proud and casual about the plant's operations.
Unfortunately they only talked about the plutonium separation plants. They pointed out three buildings where they developed three processes for getting plutonium. They have very efficient ways of getting plutonium, and they talked about none of them. I can't blame them.
We then went to the burial ground for low level radio active materials. They do not mess around. One square mile wide pits, eight hundred feet deep store low level radioactively contaminated material. The tour guide for that part talked about a 1.6 million dollar compactor that used military GPS to make sure the fill of waste was compacted well enough. Yep, that's why it's so damn expensive to take care of these things. I also saw all of those scary placards on the trucks for radio active materials. I'm not even going to guess what it cost to put in the pumps, drainage and the big sheet to make sure nothing seeps under all of this waste.
Then we went to a place where the buried transuranic waste in steel drums. That's it. Drums in the ground. To there credit, this stopped in 1970 and they are pulling out the drums to properly deal and store the material. As a pop-quiz I was able to answer what transuranic materials are. Then I found out I only had four feet of dirt between me and the drums. Woah. They have about 22,000 drums and can safely pull out 17 a day.
Then we went by the glass vitrification plant. This is where they make waste into glass logs. This is to make the long term storage of waste possible. This was boring to me, but also pointed out how hard it is to understand the scale of things. This was a huge building where they used the largest crane in the world to build parts of it. When you are on a bus, you just can't understand how big it really is.
Overall this was a very cool day. I do recommend Chico's Tacos in Kennewick. They do sell viso http://www.drinkviso.com in a shell station I stopped at. I'm off to bed.