MlfLEn By Paul Loeb V .nder the Manhattan Project's auspices, the world's first controlled chain reaction took, place on December 2, 1942, in the Stagg Pield test facility o f Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory. The laboratory's scientists had already begun developing methods to separate out the plutonium that would be created in this reaction. And because it appeared as if an atomic weapon could be created either from plutonium or from the scarce uranium isotope U-235, the project’s directors decided to pursue both approaches simultaneously. They found an assembly site for the actual weapons at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Special facilities were to be built at the already existing research site of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to separate out the U-235 from the far more common isotope U-238. Now the project needed a secure and geographically distanced location for the reactors that would produce the weapons-grade plutonium. They found this isolation at Hanford, along with access to ample cooling water from the Columbia, to transcontinental rail transport from the Northern Pacific line that ran through the nearby town of Pasco and to nearly unlimited electrical power from the recently completed Grand Coulee Dam. When Army surveyors arrived in January 1943 to dig holes and test the bedrock for geological stability, local residents joked about forthcoming bonanzas from oil leases. But on February 23, a federal judge issued an expropriation order under the War Powers Act. A few days later curt notices arrived, giving the 1500 farmers — who had been cultivating irrigated orchards and vineyards in the valley surrounding the old towns of Hanford and White Bluffs — from fifteen to thirty days to leave their homes. Like the Japanese forced to relocate to Manzanar, they had no time to argue or resist. A few were permitted to return and complete their harvests, or, if they took Hanford jobs, to remain temporarily in houses on the edge of what was now officially the Hanford Engineering Works. A few defended their land briefly with shotguns. But the bulldozers, which the farmers referred to later as “them giant scoopmobiles,” knocked down the houses and barns. Workers began immediate construction. Follow-up letters explained that even shrubs and trees were now government property and could not be removed. Because the Manhattan Project did not have massive numbers of personnel directly under its command, it worked through the Army Corps of Engineers, and the engineers brought in the Du Pont corporation as the prime contractor to build and operate three plutonium production reactors and the accompanying facilities for separations, processing and fuel manufacture. Du Pont recruited the necessary workers from their existing, non-nuclear facilities in other states and from War Manpower Commission ads printed in newspapers and posted at government institutions throughout the country. Since the Hanford project was top secret, the incoming men and women were told only that they were going to a nameless eastern Washington location where they would earn high wages, have living facilities provided and make an important contribution to the war effort. They came by train or car — one man had 37 flat tires on the way up from Borger, Texas — and settled down in a newly built construction camp along with 45,000 other workers. Richland had no poor, no old and no unemployed. Crime was almost nonexistent — from 1945 to 1947 the localjail did not hold a single prisoner. “Nuclear Culture” is an excerpt from the book Nuclear Culture by Seattle writer Paul Loeb. These early impressions open the door for an examination of the present-day Hanford Project and Richland. It is published by Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc., New York, 1982. Like any construction boomtown anywhere, the Hanford camp had its brawling, gambling and drinking, so much so that Walter Winchell aroused the ire of the security people by suggesting in a column that mothers prohibit their daughters from coming here. Workers ate in huge mess halls, loading their plates from giant platters of pork chops and steaks and holding the platters up to be refilled each time they emptied. They took ten days to build a 4,000-person recreation hall, then attended movies in it and danced to top visiting performers like Kay Kyser, Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. Except for families living in a 4,000-unit trailer camp, men and women slept in separate, racially segregated barracks, with fences surrounding those for the women. Because of this, local fire8 Clinton St. Quarterly
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