That awe fore mentioned state multinational conglomerate. And 2003s mapping Human History, it was not nateed for the National Book award. His work has been featured in atlantic monthly, science, smithsonian and other magazines. Hes a consultant writer for the National Academy of sciences and other National Scientific organizations. Kathleen friend ken is the author friend ken is the author of plume. She was also the Washington State the poet laureate from 20122014, and shes currently serving on the board of jack straw, a local cultural incubator. Theyre here tonight to talk about steves book, the awe pock lips factory plutonium and the making of the atomic age. Please join me in welcoming them. Thanks, wis er. As you noted, kathleen knolledded a book authored a book in 2012, and all of those poems are about hanford. For the beginning of this conversation, kathleen is going to read a poem from her new book of poems which is entitled postrow plant you can and is coming out in october from the university of washington press. And partly so i can make sure that my slides are going to work, im going to project the words of her poem onto my screen so that we can, we can follow along. So there we go. Thanks, steve. I just want to say before i read the poem how pleased i am to be part of this evening. I think its wonderful to celebrate the publication of this book, and it means a lot to me personally because, not just because i have poems in it, but because this is a story, the story of hanford, which is not told as much as i think it should be. And it actually gives me a lot of hope to think that this nationally published book with a big new york Publishing House help get the story out. And i think thats one of the biggest problems we have, is that theres all of these ways it doesnt go away and not enough people that know about it. So thank you for your book. I learned all kinds of things from it. And im, im very excited that its out there for people to read. And its a really interesting and exciting read too. Okay. So this is a poem, with we thought it would be a good place to start because it kind of sets, sets the tone for our talk tonight. It kind of tells the story, and its called story that wont end well. It begins in a laboratory under a football field. While the axis rolls over distant continents, 50,000 nomads journey to the more than west to construct cathedrals in the desert for nobel physicists, performing feats theyre not privileged to understand to microscopic tolerances [inaudible] storms. Periscope and code words, chain cars loaded with uranium. The heroism of a just war, all prologues to the story we cant see, smell or taste that peaks underground and drifts undetected downstream and downwind. While the soviets match us bomb for bomb, while we build lives and more reactors, pledge allegiance to [inaudible] plant virtues in the yard and the nag hide couch in the family room. Our story develops incrementally until one afternoon it daylights in town square, and we force ourselves to read it bubbling there. The ugly, stinking, bitter truth. And some fall down. And some go home unmoved. So, steve, its wonderful to have you here tonight to begin to tell the story. So ill hand it over to you. Thanks, kathleen. That is an incredible poem really that does tell the whole story of hanford. I just love it. I wish it had been available to publish in this book. And so thats the short version of the hanford story right there, and im going to back up and full in some the details. First of all, where is hanford . As you can see in this map on the lefthand corner, its in southcentral Washington State where the Columbia River briefly flows in the wrong direction, to the east, and then to the north before it ultimately curves around again to the south and the tricities, it curves west and flows to the Columbia River are gorge to the pacific ocean. Okay. So why is is hanford there . The location was chosen on the first day of winter in the year 1942. A colonel from the u. S. Army corps of engineers named Franklin Mathias had been sent from washington, d. C. To look for a place to build a facility that could create the material that was needed to build atomic bombs. Soflying around so he was flying around various sites in the states of washington and oregon looking at places, and he had just looked at a site in oregon and was now flying north. And as soon as the small plane that he was in came over the top of the horse heaven hills, he knew he found what he was looking for n. This broad errant plain that stretches from richland to the bend of the Columbia River up there near white bluffs. You can see my cursor up here where white bluffs is. Colonel mathias had a list of requirements. First of all, it needed cold war to they had huge Nuclear Reactors that were going to be bullet at the site, and the Columbia River could provide plenty of that. It needed electricity to Power Equipment at the site, and quince dent aally the grand cooley dam had come online just the year before and a new set of high voltage lines ran right through the site. Mathias needed a rail line to haul calls and equipment to the site, and amazingly, the main branch of the old milwaukee railroad, and a line made us way along the west flank of the Columbia River to the town of white bluffs in the center of the site. So the rail line was already there. He needed the area to be sparsely populated because everyone in this lawyer was going to have to leave, and in 1942 each of these small towns of richmond, hanford and white bluffs had about 200, 250 people loving in them. Altogether in this whole lawyer there were about 1500 area there were about 1500 people that would have to move. So mathias figured that was a relatively small number. And finally, he needed the site to be far away from any Major Population Centers because if anything went wrong with the Nuclear Reactors or with any of the other facilities on this site, he didnt want too many people to be killed. As i write in my book, if mathias had looked just to the northeast of the sites he had chosen for hanford, he would have seen the small town of othello. Thats the town where i grew up in the 1960s and early 1970s. You can almost see my house from this, in this photograph sort of in this area right here. At 915 elm street. Just to give you a sense of how things are laid out, my wife and i were hiking a few months ago, and i took this photograph looking back toward hanford toward the south. So that little splash of blue in the middle right there is the Columbia River, and you can see tiny specks of white on the other side of the live. Those are the Nuclear Reactors. So when i was taking this photograph from the top of saddle mountain, othello was direct lu behind me. Or heres another way of looking at it. On the cover of my book, othello is about 15 miles behind these twin smokestacks that are right here that are rising from the power plants of the reactor. And on the other side of the Columbia River are the white bluffs from which the town of white bluffs got its name, and that ridge in the distance is the Saddle Mountains, the ridge that separated hanford from othello where i took that peeves photograph. Othello, when i was i growing up, had about 4,000 people grow in it people in it. As i wrote in the book, ill just quote one sentence from the book in rosy hindsight, i remember othello has an isolated, selfcontained paradise where we were free to make our own mistakes and enjoy our own triumphs. But there was another feeling i had while i was growing up in othello. I had the sense that this little, small town was really in the middle of nowhere. And by the time i was in middle school and then in high school, i was just desperate to get out of that town to go to someplace more exciting and move to seattle to watch the son you cans play. Sonics play. I wanted to be closer to the center of the action. And i might say, but the way, this was a isntment that my parents encouraged every day they could. Heres an example of their encouragement. The only problem with this plan is that your children then move far away from you and dont come home for a long time. But ten years ago when my wife got a job here in seattle and we moved back from the east coast where we hadlied previously, i had lived previously, i started traveling in washington and realized in represent prospect that othello really wasnt as isolated as it seemed back in the 1960s and 1970s. Right on the top of Saddle Mountains was an air force station that we called radar hill because of this large ray dome that sat on top of this hill. And that air force station was there to protect the town of hanford just 15 miles away from othello e on the orr side of the ridge line. This was in the 1960s and 1970s, and we didnt know much about hanford at that point. I mean, we knew it was involved in the Nuclear Weapons program. I was a big science geek in the sputnik age in the 1990s interested 1960s interested in science, so i probably knew at that time that it manufactured plutonium. But hanford was, in the 1960s and 1970s actually, the 40s behind tall barbed wire, heavily armed fences. My grandfather sometimes worked as a steam fitter at hanford. But when you were an employee at hanford, you had to sign an agreement that all not tell even your families about what you did there. This motto, silence means security, was a common feature. You would see this plastered on billboards and on water towers. Theres workers in the background presumably completely ignorant about what that person might be doing at hanford. And, you know, i think to some extent the secrecy that surrounds hanford, that surrounded hanford back then, it still surrounds the place today. I mean, hanford is still a closed site because of whats going on there today, the cleanup effort thats going on. But youre free to learn everything you want about hanford, its just that this our of secrecy has stuck to it, and i think thats one of the reasons, as kathleen said, so few people know about its history and whats going on there today. So what is it that happened at hanford . As i said, colonel ma knew whereas was looking for a place to build a facility that would manufacture a substance that could be used to make atomic bombs, and this substance was discovered in 1941 about ten months before pearl harbor by these two scientists right here. Actually, it was discovered in this laboratory. The one on the right in the dark suit is glenn sieborg who was a 29yearold chemist at the university of californiaberkeley. Thats where this lab tour is located. And he was working with a 23yearold graduate student named art wall. In this laboratory where theyre standing, they ooh isolated a new element that they named plutonium. In fact, theyre holding in this, in the laboratory here the very first sample of plutonium which they stored in this su garre box, and thaw used the sample to make some critical measurements of whether or not plutonium was going to be able to work in atomic bombs. By the way, this photograph was taken when the laboratory was being designated a National Historic land mark even though they tried as hard as they could to be careful during their experiments, this laboratory had to be thoroughly scrubbed before this event to reduce the amount of radioactivity that was still present in the countertops and on the floors. Heres how your make plutonium. They were doing fundamental research into the properties of heavy elements like your run yum, and they discovered that if you add a neutron to the most common isotope of uranium, 238, you create an unstable ice stone that decays through this twostep process into two new elements. Over the course of a couple of days, it decays into neptunium239, and it dei cays over the course of another couple of days into what is called in this element 94 which they called plutonium. So plutonium239, or what i i called element 94 here, is extremely stable. It essentially remains unchanged for thousands of years. Thats why it can be used to build awe topic bombs. A atomic. So they discovered this at a critical juncture. Before their discovery, scientists knew about one way to make an atomic bomb using a rare isotope calls uranium235, but extracting enough was going to be they knew at the very beginning of world war ii it was going to be a very difficult process. During the Manhattan Project, a huge factory was built in oak ridge, tennessee, and it worked throughout the war to produce exactly enough uranium235 for one bomb chft dropped on huh roche ma. They couldnt have tested that bomb even if they wanted to because they didnt have enough uranium to do so. But the discovery of plutonium in 1941 by seiborg and wall gave scientists two ways. They had shown that plutonium was an even better withdraw than uranium235, and if you had two withdraws to make an atomic bomb, then a german scientist has two ways as well. I argue in this book that the Manhattan Project probably would not have occurred if plutonium had not been discovered at exact ly the right time because it was going to be so difficult in both the United States and in germany to produce a bomb using uranium. But when the u. S. Scientists read zed that germans could possibly build a bomb using plutonium, thats when the Manhattan Project started. The whole objective was to produce a bomb that could counter the development of an atomic bomb by germany. But to build an atomic bomb using plutonium, as seen in this diagram, you need lots of neutrons. And to this day theres only one way to generate lots of neutrons. So in 1941 Nuclear Reactors didnt exist, but through another amazing countries dense, this man coincidence, this man who had fellowed italy in 1938 because husband wife was jewish was working at Columbia University on a prototube of a Nuclear Reactor. And when scientists and government officials realized that Nuclear Reactors could be used to produce plutonium, they gave him much more money to do his research. And at the end of 1942, so right before mathias flight to pick a site for hanford, a group of scientists all men except for one woman who we can see in the middle of this painting built this, built the worlds First Nuclear reare actor under the stands of a football field at the university of chicago. Now, this is one of the most famous experiments of the 20th century. Its been written about countless times. But most accounts of this experiment have emphasized that it was designed to prove that a selfsustaining Nuclear Chain reaction was possible, that somebody could do it. And, you know, thats true. He was trying to do that. But at the time, the end of 1942, or he was trying to demonstrate something equally as important, which is that the Nuclear Reactors that were then being designed at the university of chicago to produce blew to be yum for atomic bombs would work. So less than two years afterrer fermes experiment, this Nuclear Reactor on the banks of the Columbia River had been built. This reactor was built in just 11 months from the time they broke foundation to when they began producing plutonium in this reactor. This is called the b reactor. This is a photograph from world war ii. The b reactor is that blocky building between the two water towers. Those water towers contained Emergency Water in case something went wrong with the reactor. So this reactor was the very first large Scale Nuclear are actor built anywhere in the world. All subsequent reactors have been based on the technologies that were developed here at the b reactor. By the way, some of the people listening to this event may know that the b reactor has been preserved by a group of engineers and other People Associated with hanford, and its now part of a new National Park that was created about five years ago, the Manhattan ProjectNational Historical park. Ive been to all three sites in the park both at hanford and theres another site at los alamos and another site in of course ridge, tennessee, and the b reactor is by far the most impressive thing to see in all of the Manhattan ProjectNational Historical park. When you walk into the room and the front of the reactor and see these 2004 aluminum tubes which pierce this huge block of graphite which is what this reactor was made out of, this is where the operators would load the uranium fuel cell elements into these tubes where the Chain Reaction would occur to make plutonium and the fuel cells would then fall out of the back, when i walked in and saw this thing, i could not believe it. It just took my breath away that this thing could still exist. And, you know, it looks almost exactly the same. It has changed very little since 1944, since enrico ferme and other world famous scientists of the 20th century started this reactor and began making plutonium in september of 1944. Its an incredible thing. Once this pandemic is over, i would certainly encourage people to book a tour and try to go over and see the b reactor. This was the first of nine reactors, Nuclear Reactors that were eventually built along the left bank of the Columbia River. Three during world war ii and then ano