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B Reactor Building

Washington, United States of America

B Reactor Building

The B Reactor at the Hanford Site, near Richland, Washington, was the first large-scale nuclear reactor ever built, at 250 MW. It achieved criticality on September 26, 1944. This reactor was of vital importance to the Manhattan Project, the United States nuclear weapons development program during Wo

rld War II. Its purpose was to convert part of its natural uranium fuel into plutonium-239 by neutron activation, for use in nuclear weapons. Pure plutonium was then chemically separated at the site's T Plant, as an alternative to the Project's uranium enrichment plants in Tennessee. The B reactor was graphite moderated and water-cooled, via a contaminating open cycle with the Columbia River. It was preceded by Clinton Laboratory's X-10 Graphite Reactor, a pilot plant for reactor production and chemical separation of plutonium, which by mid-1944 had reached a capacity of 4 MW. The B reactor thus represented a massive leap of two orders of magnitude in reactor design. Primarily constructed by DuPont, the operation was assisted by scientists including Enrico Fermi, John Archibald Wheeler, and Chien-Shiung Wu. Two identical reactors, the D Reactor and F Reactor, were launched in December 1944...

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