Of the National Scientific organizations. Kathleen flenniken is a poet and educated in seattle and the author of three poetry collections including 2012 plume, in addition to nuclear age songs of innocence and experience inspired by him for pictures the Washington State poet laureate from 20122014 and shes cohesively on the board of jack straw local audio art studio and cultural incubator. They are here tonight to talk about steves book the apocalypse factory plutonium and the making of the atomic age. Age. Please join in welcoming Kathleen Flenniken and steve olson. Thanks, weir. Kathleen published a book of poems in 2012 and all of those poems are about hanford. I host so those homes in my book that cannot last week including one of the very beginning of my book thats called a great physicist recalls the Manhattan Project. But for the beginning of this conversation kathleen is going to read a poem from her new book of poems which is entitled postromantic and disconnect in october from university of washington press. And party sica make sure my slides are going to work im going to project the words of her poem on to my screen so we can follow along. So there we go. Thanks, steve. I just want to say before i read the poem how please seem to be part of this eating. 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 this is a story, e story of hanford which is not told as much as i think it should be and it actually gives me a lot of hope you think this nationally published book, it was a big new york publishing house, what help get the story out. Thats one of the biggest problems we had is theres all of this that doesnt go away and not enough to doubt about it. Thank you very book. And all kinds of things from it. Im very excited its out there for people to read and its a really interesting and exciting read, too. Okay. So this is a poem come without would be good places to because it kind of sets the tone for our talk tonight. It kind of tells the story one big and its called story that wont end well. It begins in the laboratory under a football field. While the axis rolls over distant continents, 50,000 nomads journey to the American West to construct cathedrals in the desert for nobel physicist performing feats they are not privileged to understand, through microscopic tolerances in dust storms, legends. Periscopes and codewords, train cars loaded with uranium, the heroism of a just war, all prologue to the story we cant see, smell, or taste. That seeks underground entries undetected downstream and downwind, while the soviets match as bomb for bomb. While we build allies and more reactors, pledge allegiance, defend the key, plant birches in the yard and im not a high couch in the family room. Our story develops invisibly come incrementally until one afternoon in daylight in town square and reform ourselves to read it bubbling there. The ugly, stinking bitter truth. And some fall down. And some go home i moved. So, steve, its wonderful to have you here tonight to begin to tell the story. I will hand it over to. Thanks, kathleen. That is an incredible home that really does tell the whole story of hanford. I wish it had been available to publish in this book. Thats the short version of hanford story and going to back up and fill in some of the details. First of all, where he 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 ultimately comes around again to the south and below the tricities. Kurds west and then flows through the river gorge to the pacific ocean. So why is hanford there . The location was chosen on the first day of winter in the year 1942. A kernel from the u. S. Army corps of engineers named mathias have been sent from washington, d. C. To look for place to build a facility that could create the material that was needed to build atomic bombs. So he was flying around various sites in the states of washington, oregon looking at places and it just looked at a site in oregon and was now flying north. As soon as the small plane he was in came over the top of the Horse Heaven Hills he knew he found what he was looking for. In this broad area plain that stretches from richland to the bend of the Columbia River near white bluffs. He had a list of requirements cited me. It needed coldwater to cool the huge Nuclear Reactors that would be built at the site. The Columbia River could provide plenty of that. Needed electricity to Power Equipment at the site and coincidentally the dan had come online just the year before and a new set of highvoltage lines ran right to the site on the way down on the Columbia River. Mathias needed a rail line to all equipment chemicals to the site and amazingly the main branch of the Old Milwaukee Railroad ran right to the north of the mountains. You can see it here, and to spur line made its way along the Columbia River to the town of white bluffs at the center of the site. The rail line was already there. He needed the a a to be sparsey populated because everyone would have to leave. In 1942 each of these small farming towns of richland, and for and white lets had about 200 or 250 People Living in them. Altogether in solitary the were about 1500 people who would have to move. Mathias figured that was a relatively small number that would have to leave their homes. And finally ended the site to be far away from any aged Population Center which is one reason is look at the western United States because if anything went wrong with the Nuclear Reactors or with any of the other facilities on the site he didnt want to make people to be killed. As i in my book if mathias had just to his northeast of the sites are chosen for hanford he wouldve seen the small town of a fellow othella. Thats why i grew up in the 1960s and early 1970s. You can almost see my house in this photograph come through in this area right here. At 950 elms triggered to give your you a sense of how things are laid out, wife and i will hiking if you want on the top of the mountain and i took this photograph looking back toward hanford toward the south. At splash of blue in the middle is the Columbia River and you can see tiny specks of white on the other side of the river to those of Nuclear Reactors. When i was taking this photograph of a top of the mountain othello was directly behind me. Thats a closer. Heres another way of looking at it. On the cover of my book othello was about 15 miles behind these twin smokestacks that are right here that are rising from the power plant. On the other side of the congo river on the white bluffs from which the tanf white bluffs got its name and the rich in the distance is a ridge that separated hanford from othello were i took that previous photograph. Othello when i was growing up at about 4000 people in it and it was a wonderful town to grew up in. As a vote in the book i will quote once that spirit in rosy hindsight i remember othello as an isolated selfcontained paradise where we are 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 fit in high school i was just desperate to get out of that town come to go to some place more exciting. We would come to seattle on vacation to watch the seattle supersonics and seemed to me i want to be closer to the center of the action. I might say this was a sentiment my parents encouraged every way they could. Heres an example of their encouragement. The only problem with this plan is that your children then moved far away from you and dont come home for a long time. But ten years ago my wife got a job in seattle and we move back to seattle from east coast where we had lived i started traveling in Eastern Washington and realize in retrospect that othello was really as isolated as it seemed back in the 1960s and 1970s. Right on the top between othello in hanford was an air force station that we called radar hill because of this large dome that sat on top of the suit. That air force station was there to protect the town of hanford, just 15 miles away from othello on the side of the ridge line. This was back in the 1960s and 1970s and we didnt know much about hanford at that point. We knew it was involved in Nuclear Weapons program. I was a big science geek in the sputnik age in the 1960s come interest in sight and so i probably knew at that time that they manufacture plutonium but hanford was in the 1960s and 1970s actual threat of its History History in the 1940s behind tall barb wire heavily armed fences, my grandfather something worked as a steam fitter at hanford but when you were an employee at hanford you had to sign an agreement that you would not tell even your families about what you did there. This model silence means security, was a common feature. You would see this plastered on billboards and on water towers. Theres the worker sam in the background presumably complete ignorant about what is the person might be doing at hanford. To some extent the secrecy that surrounds hanford, back then, t still surrounds the place today. Hanford is still a close site because of whats going on today, the cleanup effort that is going on, but you are free to learn everything you want about hanford. Its just that this air of secrecy stuck to it and i think thats one of the reasons as kathleen said, so few people know about its history of whats going on there today. So what is it that happen at hanford . As i said colonel mathias was looking for a place to build a facility that would manufacture a something to be used to make atomic bombs and the substance was discovered in 1941 about ten months before pearl harbor by these two scientists, actually it was discovered in this laboratory. The one on the right in a dark suit is the who at the time in 1941 was a 29yearold chemist at the university of california at berkeley. Thats what this is located and he was working with a 23yearold graduate student named art wall was in the light suit. In this laboratory where there standing isolated and new element that they named plutonium. In fact, they are holding in the laboratory here the very first sample of plutonium which they stored in this cigar box and the use the sample to make critical measurements of whether not plutonium was going to be able to work in atomic bombs. This photograph was taken when the laboratory was being designated a National Historic landmark, even though they tried as hard as they could to be careful during their experiment. This laboratory had to be thoroughly scrubbed before this event to reduce the amount of radioactivity that was to present in the countertops and on the floors. This is how you make plutonium. They were doing fundamental research into the properties of heavy elements like uranium and they discovered that if you add a neutron to the most common isotope of uranium known as uranium 238 you create and and stabilize that decays through this process into two new elements. First it decays over the corps of a couple of days into this element neptunian 239. But this isotope is also unstable and it decays over the corps of another couple of days into what is called in this diagram element 94 which they named plutonium because its the next planet out from uranus and neptune as pluto. Plutonium 239 or element 94 is extremely stable. Innocence remains unchanged for thousands of years. Thats what way can be used tod atomic bombs. They discovered plutonium at a critical juncture. Before their discoveries scientist about one way to make atomic bomb using ever isotope of uranium called radium at 235. But attracting enough about isotope from the uranium or they knew at the very beginning of world war ii it would be a a difficult process during the Manhattan Project a huge factory was built and oak ridge, tennessee, and it worked throughout the war to produce exactly the uranium 235 for one von which was the bomb dropped on hiroshima. They couldnt have tested that font even if they wanted to because he didnt have enough uranium to do so. But the discovery of plutonium in 1941 kate scientist two ways to make an atomic bomb. They had shown plutonium was even better substance to make atomic bombs and was uranium 235. As u. S. Scientist had two is to make an atomic bomb, then german scientists had to ways to make a bomb effort. I argue in this book the Manhattan Project how he would not have occurred if plutonium had not been discovered at exactly the right time. Because it would be so difficult in both United States and in germany to produce a bomb using uranium. But when the u. S. Scientists realized the germans could possibly build upon using plutonium, thats when the Manhattan Project started, the whole objective was to reduce a bomb that could counter the development of an atomic bomb i germany. But to build an atomic bomb using plutonium as seen in this diagram you need lots of neutrons and to the state is only one way to generate lots of neutrons and thus in in a nuclr fission. In 1941 Nuclear Reactors didnt exist but through another amazing coincidence this man the italian physicist in rico for me which led italy in 1938 because his wife was jewish was working at Columbia University on a prototype of a Nuclear Reactor. And when scientist and cuban officials realize that Nuclear Reactors could be used to produce plutonium they gave enrico fermi much more money to do is research. At the end of 1942, so right before the flight to pick a site for hanford, enrico fermi and a group of scientists all men except for one women who can see in the middle of this painting built this, the first World First Nuclear reactor under the span of a football field at the university of chicago. This what of the most famous expense in 20th century. Its been written about countless times. But most accounts of this experiment emphasized it was designed to prove that a selfsustaining Nuclear Chain reaction was possible, that fermi could do. Its true. Fermi was trying to do that but at the time the it at 9042 he was trying to demonstrate something that was equally important, which is that the Nuclear Reactors that within being designed at the university of chicago to produce plutonium for atomic bombs worked. So less than two years after his experiment, this extreme mental Nuclear Reactor was built of universal chicago, this Nuclear Reactor on the banks of the congo river had to deal. This was built in just 11 months from the time they broke foundation to when they began producing plutonium in this reactor. This is called at the reactor, this is a photograph from world war ii. The b reactor is the lucky building between the two water towers, those water towers contain emergency clean water into something wrong with reactor. This reactor was the very first largescale Nuclear Reactor built anywhere in the world. All subsequent reactors have been based on the technologies that we 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 associate with hanford and it is not part of a new National Park created about five years ago, the matin project national and historic park. Ive been to all three sites in the park both that hanford, another site at los alamos and another in oak ridge, tennessee, and the b reactor is by far the most impressive thing to see in all of the matin projects National Historical park he