The Apocalypse Factory Read online

  THE APOCALYPSE FACTORY

  PLUTONIUM AND THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC AGE

  STEVE OLSON

  For Lynn, again,

  and in memory of John Hersey

  The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation provided support for the

  writing of this book through its Public Understanding of

  Science, Technology, and Economics program.

  Apocalypse: A prophetic revelation of future events.

  . . . Have you ever held plutonium

  in your hand? Someone once gave me a piece shaped and nickel-plated

  so alpha particles couldn’t reach the skin. It was the temperature, you see,

  the element producing heat to keep itself warm—not for ten

  or a hundred years, but thousands of years. This is the energy contained

  in Hanford’s fuel. I think of that place as a song not properly sung.

  A romantic song. And not one person in a hundred knows the tune.

  —Kathleen Flenniken,

  “A Great Physicist Recalls the Manhattan Project”

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART 1THE ROAD TO HANFORD

  Chapter 1BEGINNINGS

  Chapter 2THE CHAIN REACTION

  Chapter 3ELEMENT 94

  Chapter 4THE DECISION

  Chapter 5THE MET LAB

  Chapter 6PLUTONIUM AT LAST

  Chapter 7THE DEMONSTRATION

  PART 2A FACTORY IN THE DESERT

  Chapter 8THE EVICTED

  Chapter 9THE BUILDERS

  Chapter 10THE B REACTOR

  Chapter 11THE T PLANT

  Chapter 12IMPLOSION

  Chapter 13WASHINGTON, DC

  Chapter 14TRINITY

  Chapter 15TINIAN ISLAND

  PART 3UNDER THE MUSHROOM CLOUD

  Chapter 16NAGASAKI MEDICAL COLLEGE HOSPITAL

  Chapter 17THE URAKAMI VALLEY

  Chapter 18NAGASAKI

  PART 4CONFRONTING ARMAGEDDON

  Chapter 19THE COLD WAR

  Chapter 20BUILDING THE NUCLEAR ARSENAL

  Chapter 21PEAK PRODUCTION

  Chapter 22THE RECKONING

  Chapter 23REMEMBERING

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  THE APOCALYPSE FACTORY

  PROLOGUE

  AS SOON AS FRANKLIN MATTHIAS FLEW OVER THE HORSE HEAVEN Hills, he knew he’d found what he was looking for. Spread out below him was a barren, wind-swept plain. The Columbia River, running cold and deep, separated the plain from higher ground to the north and east. To the west the top of Rattlesnake Mountain was covered by snow, but the rest of the land, tinted gray-green by sagebrush, was snow-free, even on this first day of winter.

  Matthias, a 34-year-old colonel in the US Army Corps of Engineers, went through the checklist he’d gotten from the engineers at DuPont. The Columbia could provide plenty of clear, cold water for the reactors. A row of spindly metal towers carried high-voltage lines from Grand Coulee Dam, which had come online just the year before. Not far from the towers, a spur line from the Milwaukee Road emerged from the gap where the Columbia cut through the Saddle Mountains. DuPont could haul equipment, construction materials, and chemicals down the rail line to the site.

  The plain was at least twice as large as the 12-mile by 16-mile expanse that the engineers had demanded, and no large towns were nearby. If one of the reactors blew up, relatively few people would be killed. And on that December 22, 1942, with the sun low on the horizon and silvered by clouds, the land looked sere and forlorn. A few scraggly towns—Richland, Hanford, and White Bluffs, according to the map—interrupted the treeless expanse, along with some bedraggled farms. But the number of people who would have to move couldn’t be more than a thousand or two. “This is it,” Matthias thought. “There’s nothing like it in the country.”

  Matthias was looking for a place to build a facility that he had been told could end World War II. Four years earlier, two chemists working in a laboratory a few miles away from Hitler’s Berlin headquarters, with the invaluable help of an Austrian physicist living in exile in Sweden, had announced that atoms of uranium could split and release immense quantities of energy. Alarmed that Nazi Germany would use the discovery to build atomic bombs, the United States had launched a crash program, dubbed the Manhattan Project, to build them first. Even as Matthias was flying over the towns of Richland, Hanford, and White Bluffs, workers were clearing a vast tract of land in eastern Tennessee, near a sharp rise of land known as Black Oak Ridge, where a massive factory to create bomb-making materials would rise over the next two years. On the flanks of an extinct volcano in New Mexico, other workers were converting a boys’ school in the tiny hamlet of Los Alamos into a top-secret laboratory, where many of America’s leading scientists would soon congregate to assemble the raw materials of the atomic age into weapons of unprecedented power.

  Los Alamos and, to a lesser extent, Oak Ridge have gotten most of the attention in histories of the Manhattan Project. That’s understandable. The Oak Ridge facility produced the material in the first atomic bomb used in warfare, the one dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. The scientists at Los Alamos accomplished in a few short years work that would normally have taken much longer.

  But in this book I argue that the Hanford nuclear reservation in south-central Washington State is the single most important site of the nuclear age. Hanford produced the material in the first atomic bomb ever exploded, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. The first full-scale nuclear reactor was built at Hanford, and all subsequent reactors have used ideas and technologies developed there. The last atomic bomb used in warfare—the one dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945—contained nuclear material manufactured at Hanford.

  The Hiroshima bomb was a technological one-off. No subsequent bombs used that design, except for a few artillery weapons that were soon discarded. At the core of every nuclear weapon in the world today is a small pit of radioactive material made either at Hanford or at a comparable facility elsewhere in the world.

  Hanford and its successor facilities have given us, for the first time in history, the ability to destroy ourselves and everything we have ever created. Understanding what happened at the site that Colonel Matthias chose on that solstice day in December 1942 may give us a way to avoid that fate.

  IF MATTHIAS HAD LOOKED through the window of his reconnaissance plane toward the northeast, he would have seen a distant gray smudge on the horizon. That’s the town of Othello, Washington, where I grew up in the 1960s and early 1970s. I had an idyllic, all-American childhood in Othello. In those days of laissez-faire parenting, my friends and I, on weekends and in the summer, were free to do pretty much anything we wanted once we’d finished a few chores. We could ride our bikes to the swimming holes outside town, to the strange rock formations carved into the desert by prehistoric floods, sometimes all the way to the Tri-Cities, 60 miles to the south, on the banks of the Columbia River. We congregated at Othello’s many parks to play baseball, at the drugstore to read comics, and at the one-room library adjacent to city hall. In rosy hindsight, I remember Othello as an isolated, self-contained paradise where we were free to make our own mistakes and enjoy our own triumphs.

  If I hadn’t lived in Othello, I could have written almost exactly the same book as you hold in your hands. Then again, if I hadn’t lived in Othello, this book might never have been written. Hanford and Nagasaki have always been the neglected stepchildren of World War II. Some people might have heard of Hanford as the “most contaminated nuclear site in the Western Hemisphere,” or as the location of a multi-billion-dollar Department of Energy cleanup, but they prob
ably haven’t heard much else. In Japan, residents of Nagasaki often wonder why Hiroshima gets so much more attention than the city on which the second bomb was dropped. Throughout the world, people tend to speak of “the bomb,” rather than “the bombs,” as if the two quite different bombs dropped on Japan can all be captured in a single abstract image.

  The first time Colonel Franklin Matthias saw the barren stretch of land extending from Richland to White Bluffs in south-central Washington State, he knew it would be perfect for the plutonium production facilities that came to be known as Hanford. The distance from Richland to White Bluffs is about 30 miles. Map courtesy of Matt Stevenson; drawing courtesy of Sarah Olson.

  Hanford was born in secrecy, operated in secrecy, and remains obscure today. Most histories of the Manhattan Project have focused on the exotic physicists who worked largely in New Mexico, not on the chemists, metallurgists, and engineers elsewhere who were just as vital to the project’s success. As Richard Rhodes said of his magisterial four-volume history of the atomic age, “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.” Yet the successful operation of the facilities built at Hanford changed the course of history. World War II would not have ended the way it did without the bomb-making material from Hanford’s reactors. The Cold War would not have been fought the way it was if Hanford and the corresponding facility in the Soviet Union had not been churning out their deadly product—enough to end human civilization many times over. The ongoing cleanup of the site has provided the world with a precautionary tale of nuclear overreach.

  The history of the atomic age looks radically different from the perspective of Hanford. The United States probably would not have undertaken an atomic bomb project during World War II if Hanford could not have been built. Without Hanford, the US military certainly would not have had multiple atomic weapons with which to bomb Japan and threaten the Soviet Union after the war. The history of Hanford explains why the world’s first nuclear reactor was built when and where it was. It accounts for the decision to bomb Nagasaki just three days after Hiroshima, before the Japanese government had time to react to the new era of warfare that had begun. It recalibrates the moral calculus of the Manhattan Project. When asked after the war about the famous statement made by Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Los Alamos laboratory, that physicists had “known sin,” the lead engineer at DuPont, the company that built Hanford, said, “My God, if everybody that has made an important contribution to the Hanford project was a sinner, then it would take several Rose bowls to hold them all.”

  Of the three sites in the Manhattan Project National Historical Park established in 2015—Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Hanford—the latter is where the physical, the personal, and the political meet most starkly. Hanford represents one of humanity’s greatest intellectual achievements; it also embodies a moral blindness that could destroy us all. People have begun to realize, after decades of warnings, that climate change poses a severe threat to our species. Yet they blithely overlook the fact that human civilization could end in a few hours if the leaders of the nuclear states were to unleash the force that Hanford has placed in their hands.

  Seen from the top of Rattlesnake Mountain, the land selected for the Hanford nuclear reservation lies within a broad bend of the Columbia River. Courtesy of the US Department of Energy.

  Hanford is where people confronted for the first time all the dilemmas of power, pollution, destruction, and sustainability associated with nuclear energy. The laws of physics enable us to create substances that can release immense quantities of energy. This energy can power electrical grids, cure cancer or cause it, and destroy cities. The substances produced in nuclear reactors will remain dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years, longer than we have existed as a species on this planet. Are we mature, reasonable, and wise enough to be entrusted with such knowledge?

  What Matthias had been told about his 1942 mission to Washington State was right. The facilities built at Hanford did end World War II. They also opened the door to a new world, one with which we still have not come to terms.

  PART 1

  THE ROAD TO HANFORD

  “I didn’t think, ‘My God, we’ve changed the history of the world.’”

  —Glenn Seaborg

  Chapter 1

  BEGINNINGS

  THE ROAD TO HANFORD BEGAN IN A COLLEGE CLASSROOM IN SOUTHERN California. There, in early 1932, on the recently opened campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, a chemistry student named Glenn Seaborg heard about a momentous scientific development—the discovery of the neutron. Over the next 13 years, the combination of that student and that discovery would lead to entirely new radioactive substances, to entirely new elements, and to atomic bombs.

  Toward the end of his long and productive career, The Guinness Book of World Records recognized Seaborg as having the longest biography of anyone in Who’s Who in America. Yet he came from a small and isolated town, was not much interested in science until his last two years in high school, and for a long time questioned his ability to do great things. Compared with European scientists, who often came from privileged families, Seaborg was typical of mid-20th-century US scientists, who tended to be from rural and middle-class families—perhaps, according to one commentator, because “pathways to success in big business or the established professions are relatively unavailable, but social mobility via a scientific education is possible.” As his future colleague Emilio Segrè, whose father had owned a factory near Rome, once exclaimed: “Seaborg’s brother is a truck driver!”

  In 1922, when he was 10 years old, Seaborg’s parents sold their house in Ishpeming, Michigan—a small town about a dozen miles west of Marquette—and bought one-way tickets to California. They settled into a new subdivision in what is now the city of South Gate near Los Angeles. They carried water in a bucket to their partly finished home, raised vegetables in a backyard garden, and cooked eggs from their chickens. “We weren’t poor so much as we just didn’t have money—the same as almost everyone in the neighborhood,” Seaborg later recalled.

  He went to high school two miles away, in an already diverse Watts. Seaborg’s mother wanted him to be a bookkeeper. He thought he might be interested in literature. But he knew he wanted to go to college, and a school counselor told him before his junior year that he needed to take at least one laboratory class to qualify. He signed up for chemistry.

  His teacher was a man named Dwight Logan Reid, who “taught chemistry with the charisma and enthusiasm of an old-fashioned preacher,” Seaborg wrote. Science immediately appealed to Seaborg. It had an internal logic. “You could learn certain principles and then make predictions. It all seemed to hang together.” By halfway through the year, he had decided to become a chemist.

  He had the highest grades of his 45-member high school class and was admitted to the University of California, Los Angeles, on a scholarship. But even though he could commute from home, the incidental expenses were going to be hard to cover. The summer after high school he got a job at the Firestone Rubber and Tire Company, cleaning the caked tar off glassware and preparing chemical compounds. No matter what else happened, Seaborg thought, he could always become an industrial chemist.

  His junior year, Seaborg began taking physics classes in addition to the chemistry classes required for his major. It was a remarkable year to be a college science student. In February of 1932, the discovery of the neutron by the British physicist James Chadwick answered a question people had been asking for millennia: What is the world made of?

  Since the turn of the 20th century, scientists had known that matter is made of atoms—minuscule particles so small that 20 million of them lined up in a row would just about span the letter o. But the constituents of atoms had remained mysterious. Physicists knew that they contain positively charged particles called protons that are clustered together in a central object called the nucl
eus. This nucleus is surrounded by a swirling mist of much lighter particles known as electrons. The number of protons determines what kind of element an atom is. Hydrogen, at the top of the list of elements, has a single proton. Uranium, at the bottom of the list (as it then existed), has 92.

  But something else had to be going on in atomic nuclei. For one thing, the positively charged protons should repel each other, like the matching ends of two bar magnets. What was keeping the nucleus together? Also, physicists had determined that atoms of the same element could have different weights, so nuclei had to contain something besides protons, but what?

  The discovery of the neutron solved both problems at once. With their neutral electric charge, neutrons act as a sort of nuclear glue. They stick to protons and to each other to keep the protons in nuclei from blowing atoms apart. Furthermore, atoms with the same number of protons can have different numbers of neutrons, which accounts for the different weights of what are known as isotopes of the same element. It all made sense. Everything fit together.

  Scientists were delighted by the discovery of the neutron. It explained how atoms are constructed and why they have the properties they do. But the neutron’s discovery also sent science—and incipient scientists like Seaborg—careening down entirely new paths.

  AS A UCLA FRESHMAN,Seaborg had no idea what a PhD degree was. In his junior year, he decided he wanted to get one. He applied to the graduate program in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and, despite his “lingering disbelief” that he belonged at such a top-notch university, was accepted. “The whole Berkeley atmosphere was like magic to me,” he later wrote. “Berkeley was Wonderland.”

  When Seaborg began graduate school in the fall of 1934, Berkeley was one of the leading universities for science anywhere in the world. The chemistry department, under the leadership of its dean, Gilbert Lewis, was widely considered the best in the United States. Seaborg soon impressed the gruff, cigar-chomping Lewis with his good sense and industriousness. He later spent many hours at Berkeley preparing solutions and making measurements under Lewis’s watchful instruction—critical preparation for the tasks to come.