Hanford's B Reactor: The Plutonium Factory That Won the War
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Hanford's B Reactor: The Plutonium Factory That Won the War
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Letto da:
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Di:
(00:00:53) The Problem That Needed Solving
(00:02:28) Building the Impossible Town
(00:04:25) The B Reactor Goes Critical
(00:06:04) The Implosion Problem
(00:07:57) The Secret City Behind the Fence
(00:09:17) The Spies in the Perimeter
(00:11:02) Trinity and the Reckoning
(00:12:47) What They Built and What They Knew
Before it was one of the most consequential industrial sites in human history, Hanford was just a quiet bend in the Columbia River — sagebrush, dust, and a few hundred farming families. Then the Army arrived, condemned the land, and gave those families sixty days to leave. What rose in their place would change the world.
This episode follows the construction of the B Reactor, the world's first full-scale nuclear reactor, built in under a year by 51,000 workers who were told almost nothing about what they were building. It traces the scientific problem that made Hanford necessary: how do you produce enough plutonium — a synthetic element that didn't exist in nature — to fuel an atomic bomb? The answer required a remote river, massive industrial secrecy, and an engineering gamble that almost failed on the first day.
When the B Reactor first went critical in September 1944, it ran for a few hours and then began shutting itself down. The cause was xenon-135, a fission byproduct absorbing neutrons faster than the reactor could sustain its chain reaction. The only reason the program survived was a safety margin that Enrico Fermi himself had considered unnecessary. DuPont's caution saved the Manhattan Project.
This episode explores the human architecture of total secrecy — General Leslie Groves's need-to-know compartmentalization applied across 130,000 people — and what it meant to build something world-altering without being allowed to understand what you'd built. From the displaced farming families of White Bluffs to the engineers racing against a deadline nobody could name, Hanford is the Manhattan Project at its most human.
This episode includes AI-generated content.
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