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Richard Rhodes is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. He is regarded as one of the nation ’s authorities on the history of the Manhattan Project. Many of you know the history of the Hanford Engineer Works well; some of you lived it. I know it as a historian. I researched it through mostly secondary sources to write about it, rather briefly, in my book The Making of the Atomic Bomb. (I would have written more, but I simply didn ’t have room, so I treated plutonium production to some extent as a black box, inadvertently contributing to the myth that the atomic bomb was the work of 30 theoretical physicists at Los Alamos.) More recently I ’ve reviewed boxes and boxes of primary sources to refresh my memory of the heroic work carried out here between 1943 and 1945. So I think I can speak with some authority about it. I may even be able to clear up a mystery or two. Scientists at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago determined the parameters of the site where plutonium would be produced for the first atomic bombs. Thirty-three-year-old Army Corps of Engineers Colonel Franklin T. Matthias, known to his friends as "Fritz," wrote them into his diary after a meeting at DuPont ’s home offices in Wilmington, Delaware, on December 14, 1942: The site needed to be spacious enough to accommodate a manufacturing area of approximately 12 by 16 miles, with no public highway or railroad nearer than 10 miles , no town of greater than 1,000 population nearer than 20 miles, an available water supply of at least 25,000 gallons per minute and an electrical supply of at least 100,000 kilowatts. Matthias looked in the Grand Coulee area of Washington and at several sites in Tennessee before flying over Hanford in an Army observation plane. "I came back over Horse Heaven," he remembered many years later — "in the area northeasterly from Plymouth —and over Rattlesnake Mountain to the Hanford site from the west, and I got over that mountain, and I had looked at everything else, and I knew that was it, right then." His boss, Brigadier General Leslie Richard Groves, agreed, and the Corps of Engineers began land appraisals at the Hanford site in January 1943. The first great question was what kind of cooling system to use in the production reactors that would be built and operated at Hanford to make plutonium. Graphite would serve as moderator, uranium metal as fuel. The fission chain reaction would release tens and hundreds of thousands of kilowatts of energy, and since these reactors were being built to breed plutonium, that energy would not be used to make steam to generate electricity but would have to be transferred away. The first chain reaction in the squash court pile at the University of Chicago had operated with a barely positive reactivity of 1.006, so conserving neutrons was an important consideration.

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