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Old 04-12-2015, 07:25 AM   #8
NN5I
Carl, nn5i
 
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Location: Tallahassee, FL
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Manhattan Project Ites is right. It's the control room of B Reactor at the Hanford, Washington site of the Manhattan Project.

B reactor was the first fully functioning nuclear reactor ever built. It began producing plutonium in September 1944. Its core was a 36-foot-high, 36-foot-long, and 28-foot-wide graphite block with 2,004 water-cooled aluminum tubes running through it. Uranium slugs placed in the tubes started a chain reaction that created small amounts of plutonium.

That plutonium was was used in the July 1945 Trinity test (the first manmade nuclear explosion) at Alamogordo NM, and in the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9. The Little Boy bomb at Hiroshima three days earlier used uranium, not plutonium, and was a simpler design.

B reactor was shut down permanently in 1968; last December (4 months ago) it became part of the new Manhattan Project National Historical Park, which also includes sites at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. B reactor is apparently open for tours!

Learn more at B Reactor and DOE -- B Reactor Tours and by Googling Hanford B Reactor.
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