B-Reactor declared a National Historic Landmark

Hanford’s B Reactor, the worlds first industrial-scale nuclear reactor, has been designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service. The announcement was made at the reactor on August 25, 2008, by U.S. Department of the Interior Deputy Secretary Lynn Scarlett and U.S. Department of Energy Acting Deputy Secretary Jeffrey F. Kupfer. The National Park System Advisory Board had voted unanimously on July 21, 2008, to nominate B Reactor to the Landmark status, and the nomination was subsequently approved by Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne.

B Reactor had previously been recognized as a National Engineering Historic Landmark and a Nuclear Historic Landmark. It now joins Mount Rushmore and the White House as one of America’s most important historic sites. National Historic Landmark recognition has been granted to fewer than 2,500 sites in the United States.

B Reactor was built in 13 months as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project during World War II to produce plutonium for an atomic bomb. Construction began on June 7, 1943, six months after physicist Enrico Fermi demonstrated the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago. B Reactor produced plutonium for the first atomic explosion, the Trinity test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, and for the bomb that was exploded on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, helping to bring an end to World War II.

Four other Manhattan Project sites also have been recognized with Landmark status: Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory where the atomic bombs were developed, the Trinity test site in New Mexico, the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Enrico Fermi’s Chicago Pile 1.

B Reactor operated until 1968, when it was shut down and decommissioned. Although the eight other defunct Hanford plutonium production reactors are being “cocooned” as part of the ongoing cleanup of the Hanford Site, efforts have been underway since 1989 to preserve B Reactor as a public museum. Improvements to the facility have been made with that goal in sight. The new recognition of its historic significance opens the door for increased public tours and moves it closer to becoming a museum. Seasonal tours of B Reactor offered by the Department of Energy draw visitors from around the country and world. The tours are so popular that online registration fills up in a matter of minutes. For tour information, see: http://www5.hanford.gov/publictours.

Michele Gerber, a Hanford historian, said, “Before B Reactor there was nothing like it, and since B Reactor nothing has been the same.”