Download or read book Atomic Geography written by Melvin R. Adams and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps the first environmental engineer at Hanford, Melvin R. Adams spent 24 years on its 586 square miles of desert terrain. His thoughtful vignettes recall challenges and sites he worked on or found personally intriguing--like the 216-U-pond, contaminated with plutonium longer than any place on earth. In what Adams considers his most successful project, he helped determine the initial scope of the soil and solid waste cleanup. His group also designed and tested a marked, maintenance-free disposal barrier, expanded a network of groundwater monitoring wells, and developed a pilot scale pump and treatment plant. Adams shares his perspective on leaking high-level waste storage tanks, dosimeters, and Hanford¿s obsession with safety. He even answers his least favorite question, insisting he does not glow in the dark. He leaves that unique ability to spent fuel rods in water storage basins--a phenomenon known as Cherenkov radiation.
Download or read book Nowhere to Remember written by Laura Arata and published by Washington State University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “There wasn’t that many people, but they were good people.”--Madeline Gilles “First time I ever tasted cherries or even seen a cherry tree was [in White Bluffs]. Or ever ate an apricot or seen an apricot...It was covered with orchards and alfalfa fields.”--Leatris Boehmer Reid Euro-American Priest River Valley settlers turned acres of sagebrush into fruit orchards. Although farm life required hard work and modern conveniences were often spare, many former residents remember idyllic, close-knit communities where neighbors helped neighbors. Then, in 1943, families received forced evacuation notices. “Fruit farmers had to leave their crops on their trees. And that was very hard on them, no future, no money...they moved wherever they could get a place to live,” Catherine Finley recalled. Some were given just thirty days, and Manhattan Project restrictions meant they could not return. Drawn from Hanford History Project personal narratives, Nowhere to Remember highlights life in Hanford, White Bluffs, and Richland--three small agricultural communities in eastern Washington’s mid-Columbia region. It covers their late 1800s to early 1900s origins, settlement and development, the arrival of irrigation, dependence on railroads, Great Depression struggles, and finally, their unique experiences in the early years of World War II. David W. Harvey examines the impact of wagon trade, steamships, and railroads, grounding local history within the context of American West history. Robert Franklin details the tight bonds between early residents as they labored to transform scrubland into an agricultural Eden. Laura Arata considers the early twentieth century experiences of women who lived and worked in the region. Robert Bauman utilizes oral histories to tell forced removal stories. Finally, Bauman and Franklin convey displaced occupants’ reactions to their lost spaces and places of meaning--and explore ways they sought to honor their heritage.
Download or read book The Apocalypse Factory Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age written by Steve Olson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thrilling narrative of scientific triumph, decades of secrecy, and the unimaginable destruction wrought by the creation of the atomic bomb. It began with plutonium, the first element ever manufactured in quantity by humans. Fearing that the Germans would be the first to weaponize the atom, the United States marshaled brilliant minds and seemingly inexhaustible bodies to find a way to create a nuclear chain reaction of inconceivable explosive power. In a matter of months, the Hanford nuclear facility was built to produce and weaponize the enigmatic and deadly new material that would fuel atomic bombs. In the desert of eastern Washington State, far from prying eyes, scientists Glenn Seaborg, Enrico Fermi, and many thousands of others—the physicists, engineers, laborers, and support staff at the facility—manufactured plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and for the bombs in the current American nuclear arsenal, enabling the construction of weapons with the potential to end human civilization. With his characteristic blend of scientific clarity and storytelling, Steve Olson asks why Hanford has been largely overlooked in histories of the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Olson, who grew up just twenty miles from Hanford’s B Reactor, recounts how a small Washington town played host to some of the most influential scientists and engineers in American history as they sought to create the substance at the core of the most destructive weapons ever created. The Apocalypse Factory offers a new generation this dramatic story of human achievement and, ultimately, of lethal hubris.
Download or read book Echoes of Exclusion and Resistance written by Robert Bauman and published by . This book was released on 2020-12 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mid-Columbia region history mirrors common American West multiracial narratives, but with important nuances. In "Echoes of Exclusion and Resistance," the third Hanford Histories volume, four scholars draw from oral histories to focus on the experiences of non-white groups such as the Wanapum, Chinese immigrants, World War II Japanese incarcerees, and African American migrant workers from the South, whose lives were deeply impacted by the Hanford Site. Linked in ways they likely could not know, each group resisted the segregation and discrimination they encountered, and in the process, challenged the region's dominant racial norms.
Download or read book The Hanford Plaintiffs written by Trisha T. Pritikin and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than four decades beginning in 1944, the Hanford nuclear weapons facility in southeastern Washington State secretly blanketed much of the Pacific Northwest with low-dose ionizing radiation, the byproduct of plutonium production. For those who lived in the vicinity, many of them families of Hanford workers, the consequences soon became apparent as rates of illness and death steadily climbed—despite repeated assurances from the Atomic Energy Commission that the facility posed no threat. Trisha T. Pritikin, who has battled a lifetime of debilitating illness to become a lawyer and advocate for her fellow “downwinders,” tells the devastating story of those who were harmed in Hanford’s wake and, seeking answers and justice, were subjected to yet more suffering. At the center of The Hanford Plaintiffs are the oral histories of twenty-four people who joined In re Hanford Nuclear Reservation Litigation, the class-action suit that sought recognition of, and recompense for, the grievous injury knowingly caused by Hanford. Radioactive contamination of American communities was not uncommon during the wartime Manhattan Project, nor during the Cold War nuclear buildup that followed. Pritikin interweaves the stories of people poisoned by Hanford with a parallel account of civilians downwind of the Nevada atomic test site, who suffer from identical radiogenic diseases. Against the heartrending details of personal illness and loss and, ultimately, persistence in the face of a legal system that protects the government on all fronts and at all costs, The Hanford Plaintiffs draws a damning picture of the failure of the US Congress and the Judiciary to defend the American public and to adequately redress a catastrophic wrong. Documenting the legal, medical, and human cost of one community’s struggle for justice, this book conveys in clear and urgent terms the damage done to ordinary Americans in the name of business, progress, and patriotism.
Download or read book Hanford written by R. E. Gephart and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Hanford: A Conversation About Nuclear Waste and Cleanup, Roy Gephart takes us on a journey through a world of facts, values, conflicts, and choices facing the most complex environmental cleanup project in the United States: the U.S. Department of Energy's Hanford Site. Starting with the top-secret Manhattan Project, Hanford was used to create tons of plutonium for nuclear weapons. Hundreds of tons of waste and millions of curies remain. In an easy-to-read, illustrated text, Gephart crafts the story of Hanford becoming the world's first nuclear weapons site to release large amounts of contaminants into the environment. This was at a time when radiation biology was in its infancy, industry practiced unbridled waste dumping, and the public trusted what it was told. Hanford history reveals how little we sometimes understand events when caught inside of them. The plutonium market stalled with the end of the Cold War. Public accountability and environmental compliance ushered in a new cleanup mission. Today, Hanford is driven by remediation choices whose outcomes remain uncertain. It's a story whose epilogue will be written by future generations. This book is an information resource, written for the general reader as well as the technically trained person. It provides an overview of Hanford and cleanup issues facing the nuclear weapons complex. Each chapter is a topical mini-series. It's an idea guide that encourages readers to be informed consumers of Hanford news, and to recognize that knowledge, high ethical standards, and social values are at the heart of coping with nuclear waste. Hanford history is a window into many environmental conflicts facing our nation; it's about building uponsuccess and learning from failure. And therein lies a key lesson: when powerful interests are involved, no generation is above pretense.
Download or read book Legacies of the Manhattan Project written by Mick Broderick and published by Washington State University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-24 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hanford History Project held the “Legacies of the Manhattan Project at 75 Years” conference in March 2017. Its Richland, Washington, meeting venue was a stone’s throw from the southern-most edge of the Hanford Nuclear Site--the place where workers produced the plutonium that fueled the “Fat Man” nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The symposium’s appeal extended well beyond local interest. Professionals from a broad array of backgrounds--working scientists, government employees, retired health physicists, downwinders, representatives from community groups, impassioned lay people, as well as scholars working in a host of different academic fields--attended and gave presentations. The diverse gathering, with its wide range of expertise, stimulated a genuinely remarkable exchange of ideas. In Legacies of the Manhattan Project, Hanford Histories series editor Michael Mays combines extensively revised essays first presented at the conference with newly commissioned research. Together, they provide a timely reevaluation of the Manhattan Project and its many complex repercussions, as well as some beneficial innovations. Covering topics from print journalism, activism, nuclear testing, and science and education to health physics, environmental cleanup, and kitsch, the compositions delve deep into familiar matters, but also illuminate historical crevices left unexplored by earlier generations of scholars. In the process, they demonstrate how the Manhattan Project lives on.
Download or read book Atomic Frontier Days written by John M. Findlay and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Outstanding Title by Choice Magazine On the banks of the Pacific Northwest’s greatest river lies the Hanford nuclear reservation, an industrial site that appears to be at odds with the surrounding vineyards and desert. The 586-square-mile compound on the Columbia River is known both for its origins as part of the Manhattan Project, which made the first atomic bombs, and for the monumental effort now under way to clean up forty-five years of waste from manufacturing plutonium for nuclear weapons. Hanford routinely makes the news, as scientists, litigants, administrators, and politicians argue over its past and its future. It is easy to think about Hanford as an expression of federal power, a place apart from humanity and nature, but that view distorts its history. Atomic Frontier Days looks through a wider lens, telling a complex story of production, community building, politics, and environmental sensibilities. In brilliantly structured parallel stories, the authors bridge the divisions that accompany Hanford’s headlines and offer perspective on today’s controversies. Influenced as much by regional culture, economics, and politics as by war, diplomacy, and environmentalism, Hanford and the Tri-Cities of Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick illuminate the history of the modern American West.
Download or read book Working on the Bomb written by S. L. Sanger and published by Continuing Education Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of the Hanford Engineering Works, a site in eastern Washington that produced and separated plutonium for the Manhattan Project.
Download or read book Made in Hanford written by Hill Williams and published by Washington State University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the eve of World War II, news of an astonishing breakthrough filtered out of Germany. Scientists there had split uranium atoms. Researchers in the United States scrambled to verify results and further investigate this new science. Ominously, they soon recognized its potential to fuel the ultimate weapon--one able to release the energy of an uncontrolled chain reaction. By 1941, experiments led to the identification of plutonium, but laboratory work generated the new element in amounts far too small to be useful. Fearing the Nazis were on the verge of harnessing nuclear power, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gambled on an ambitious project to research and manufacture uranium and plutonium for military use. As research continued, engineers began to construct massive buildings in an isolated eastern Washington farming community. Within two years, Hanford became the world’s first plutonium factory. The incredibly complex operation was accomplished with a speed and secrecy unheard of today; few involved knew what they were building. But on August 9, 1945, when the “Fat Man” fell on Nagasaki, the workers understood their part in changing the world. Hanford’s role did not end there. The facility produced plutonium throughout the Cold War. Some was used in tests conducted halfway around the world. Nuclear bombs were dropped on the Bikini and Enewetak Atolls, profoundly impacting the Marshall Islands people and forever altering their way of life. Through clear scientific explanations and personal reminiscences, Hill Williams traces Hanford’s role in the amazing and tragic story of the plutonium bomb.
Download or read book Plume written by Kathleen Flenniken and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poems in Plume are nuclear-age songs of innocence and experience set in the "empty" desert West. Award-winning poet Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland, Washington, at the height of the Cold War, next door to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where "every father I knew disappeared to fuel the bomb," and worked at Hanford herself as a civil engineer and hydrologist. By the late 1980s, declassified documents revealed decades of environmental contamination and deception at the plutonium production facility, contradicting a lifetime of official assurances to workers and their families that their community was and always had been safe. At the same time, her childhood friend Carolyn's own father was dying of radiation-induced illness: "blood cells began to err one moment efficient the next / a few gone wrong stunned by exposure to radiation / as [he] milled uranium into slugs or swabbed down / train cars or reported to B Reactor for a quick run-in / run-out." Plume, written twenty years later, traces this American betrayal and explores the human capacity to hold truth at bay when it threatens one's fundamental identity. Flenniken observes her own resistance to facts: "one box contains my childhood / the other contains his death / if one is true / how can the other be true?" The book's personal story and its historical one converge with enriching interplay and wide technical variety, introducing characters that range from Carolyn and her father to Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and Manhattan Project health physicist Herbert Parker. As a child of "Atomic City," Kathleen Flenniken brings to this tragedy the knowing perspective of an insider coupled with the art of a precise, unflinching, gifted poet. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iSaR9mfeeM
Download or read book The Atomic West written by Bruce W. Hevly and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Manhattan Project—the World War II race to produce an atomic bomb—transformed the entire country in myriad ways, but it did not affect each region equally. Acting on an enduring perception of the American West as an “empty” place, the U.S. government located a disproportionate number of nuclear facilities—particularly the ones most likely to spread pollution—in western states. The Manhattan Project manufactured plutonium at Hanford, Washington; designed and assembled bombs at Los Alamos, New Mexico; and detonated the world’s first atomic bomb at Alamagordo, New Mexico, on June 16, 1945. In the years that followed the war, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission selected additional western sites for its work. Many westerners initially welcomed the atom. Like federal officials, they, too, regarded their region as “empty,” or underdeveloped. Facilities to make, test, and base atomic weapons, sites to store nuclear waste, and even nuclear power plants were regarded as assets. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, regional attitudes began to change. At a variety of locales, ranging from Eskimo Alaska to Mormon Utah, westerners devoted themselves to resisting the atom and its effects on their environments and communities. Just as the atomic age had dawned in the American West, so its artificial sun began to set there. The Atomic West brings together contributions from several disciplines to explore the impact on the West of the development of atomic power from wartime secrecy and initial postwar enthusiasm to public doubts and protest in the 1970s and 1980s. An impressive example of the benefits of interdisciplinary studies on complex topics, The Atomic West advances our understanding of both regional history and the history of science, and does so with human communities as a significant focal point. The book will be of special interest to students and experts on the American West, environmental history, and the history of science and technology.
Download or read book Science and Technology for Environmental Cleanup at Hanford written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2001-11-23 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hanford Site was established by the federal government in 1943 as part of the secret wartime effort to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. The site operated for about four decades and produced roughly two thirds of the 100 metric tons of plutonium in the U.S. inventory. Millions of cubic meters of radioactive and chemically hazardous wastes, the by-product of plutonium production, were stored in tanks and ancillary facilities at the site or disposed or discharged to the subsurface, the atmosphere, or the Columbia River. In the late 1980s, the primary mission of the Hanford Site changed from plutonium production to environmental restoration. The federal government, through the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), began to invest human and financial resources to stabilize and, where possible, remediate the legacy of environmental contamination created by the defense mission. During the past few years, this financial investment has exceeded $1 billion annually. DOE, which is responsible for cleanup of the entire weapons complex, estimates that the cleanup program at Hanford will last until at least 2046 and will cost U.S. taxpayers on the order of $85 billion. Science and Technology for Environmental Cleanup at Hanford provides background information on the Hanford Site and its Integration Project,discusses the System Assessment Capability, an Integration Project-developed risk assessment tool to estimate quantitative effects of contaminant releases, and reviews the technical elements of the scierovides programmatic-level recommendations.
Download or read book Something Extraordinary written by Robert L. Ferguson and published by Cms-Author.com. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finally, a concise but comprehensive narrative of the geopolitics and atomic research that led to the creation of the Manhattan Project--the American effort to develop and deploy the atomic bomb during World War II. Written by two award-winning authors who together have more than a century of direct experience with the subject, this book is unlike any other. A key component of the Manhattan Project was the development of the massive Hanford Site where the plutonium used in America's atomic bombs was produced. The book celebrates the 75th anniversary of the date in 1944 when the first production reactor, the B Reactor, went critical and the plutonium it produced helped win the war. The year 2019 is also the 35th anniversary of the startup of WNP-2, now the Columbia Generating Station, the only nuclear power reactor to be built by the Washington Public Power Supply System. Also, this year is the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Tri- Party Agreement, which governs the cleanup of the Hanford Site. Hanford and the B Reactor played an important role in the Cold War and in the growth and subsequent economic fortunes of the nearby Tri-Cities communities whose economies were directly affected by events at Hanford. When the plutonium production reactors and chemical separation facilities were deactivated, the community sought to find new missions and uses for the Hanford Site. By the 1980s, it was clear that Hanford's mission had finally changed from production to cleanup, ushering in a whole new set of challenges and opportunities that continue to this day. It's all here, from the history of atomic research to the continuing efforts to clean up the Hanford Site. Written for non-technical readers who may be first-time visitors to the Tri-Cities or the B Reactor--now part of the Manhattan Project National Historic Park-- or for those who have lived and worked around the Hanford Site and may want a brief and easy-to-read history of their community.
Download or read book Manhattan Project at Hanford Site The written by Elizabeth Toomey and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2015 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Manhattan Project at Hanford Site describes the top-secret effort undertaken during World War II to develop a weapon never imagined at "Site W" or "Hanford Engineer Works," one of three sites selected in the United States (plus Los Alamos and Oak Ridge) to research and produce weapons that were ultimately used to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki and end World War II. It was a research and engineering feat of unimaginable proportion, and the total project cost for all three sites was $2.1 billion--an unthinkable amount for a country that was coming out of the Great Depression. It is a story of gumption, resolve, tenacity, patriotism, pride, and selflessness for the thousands of people who worked multiple shifts, seven days a week, in a hot, dry, and desolate desert, never knowing what they were working on. It is a tribute to American resolve in the face of overwhelming adversity.
Download or read book Plutopia written by Kate Brown and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While many transnational histories of the nuclear arms race have been written, Kate Brown provides the first definitive account of the great plutonium disasters of the United States and the Soviet Union. She draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the extraordinary stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia--the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias--communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Plutopia was successful because in its zoned-off isolation it appeared to deliver the promises of the American dream and Soviet communism; in reality, it concealed disasters that remain highly unstable and threatening today.
Download or read book Atomic Harvest written by Michael D'Antonio and published by Crown. This book was released on 1993 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspector Casey Ruud raised questions about the concerns of people like nearby farmer Tom Bailie, and eventually went public with facts and figures on faulty plant designs, poor maintenance, sloppy engineering practices, and mismanagement.
