THE TRINITY TEST: "Hanford nuclear reservation - the largest contaminated area in the world!"

FOR THOSE who grew up after World War II, the prospect of nuclear annihilation was an indelible part of the era. I and my classmates practiced kneeling by school lockers with our coats over our heads to protect us from flying glass, laughing at the absurdity. We watched first-aid films in health class showing bodies strewn in radioactive rubble. There was a fallout shelter in my junior-high basement, and another in the basement of The Seattle Times.

THE FIRST PLUTONIUM to leave the Hanford nuclear reservation was a nitrate syrup sealed in a heavy stainless-steel container and carried in the back seat of a sedan along the Columbia River to a train in Portland. As shipments increased, the Manhattan Project switched to more formal military escort.

The bomb's development was incredibly rapid, and no state was more intimately involved than Washington.

Shortly before World War II began, German physicists discovered that atoms could be split, or fissioned, resulting in the release of huge amounts of energy. The news electrified physicists around the world. By 1940, researchers in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union and Japan were working on the problem of sustaining a chain reaction for a possible weapon.

Japan did not have the uranium to make a bomb, but its investigation of the possibility of building one did not end until physicist Yoshio Nishina's laboratory was firebombed by U.S. planes on April 12, 1945.

Not only did physicists almost immediately recognize the military potential of nuclear fission, but they also began in 1942 the theoretical work on a hydrogen bomb based on the fusion of hydrogen into helium, which powers the sun and stars. The H-bomb would have the power of a thousand Hiroshima bombs. Because of its technical difficulty, it was 10 more years before that new escalation in destructive power was tested.

Since the United States had the world's biggest economy and was remote from the actual battlefields, only America had the ability to sustain an atom-bomb project during World War II. Germany never vigorously pursued the project, and top Nazis remained relatively ignorant of the bomb's potential. When physicist Werner Heisenberg held a briefing for Hitler's leadership in 1942, a secretary sent the wrong agenda and as a result key leaders didn't bother to show up.

American scientists, in contrast, convinced political leaders of the incredible latent nuclear power in matter. But even with Einstein lending his prestige by signing a letter to Roosevelt warning of the military implications of nuclear energy, the project languished until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

That it subsequently succeeded is one of the most amazing science and technology stories in history. Making the necessary bomb fuel was enormously difficult.

The most common radioactive element in nature is uranium-238, making up about 99 percent of the earth's supply of uranium. Because U-238 has a half-life of about 4.5 billion years - about as old as Earth - only half of what was present when Earth was formed has decayed away. That is why the planet still has so many uranium deposits and the United States could open 400 mines during the Cold War and extract 60 million tons of ore for weapons alone.

Uranium-238 does not sustain a fission chain reaction, however, and must be modified into an isotope that can. U-238 fuel can be bombarded in a nuclear reactor to make U-235, the fuel for the Hiroshima bomb.

That isotope was made and separated at labs in Oak Ridge, Tenn., during World War II.

There was an alternative. In 1941, a University of California chemist named Glenn Seaborg created an element with an even bigger potential for explosive power. Since the previously discovered uranium had taken its name from Uranus and neptunium from Neptune, Seaborg named his discovery plutonium: after the planet Pluto and, coincidentally, the Greek god of the dead.

Not knowing which fuel could be successfully manufactured or fabricated into a bomb, the United States decided to pursue both. While Oak Ridge would make U-235, a secret complex near the remote Eastern Washington hamlet of Hanford would make plutonium.

Fuel rods of uranium were irradiated in Hanford reactors to make about a dime-sized button of plutonium for every two tons of fuel. The elusive substance then had to be recovered by dissolving the fuel rods in acid and isolating the plutonium in a complex, messy series of steps.

Read more:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/special/trinity/articles/part1.html