May 21st - CREHST

Today I went to the Columbia River Exhibition of History, Science & Technology (CREHST). Visiting it was the reason we came to Richland.

I pulled into the parking lot and I thought, "This is going to be a joke.", when I saw the little building. After spending over two hours inside I found out that it was anything but a joke. The "docents" (the people who lead tours) who were manning the place were a couple of older gentlemen who could hardly restrain themselves from telling stories about the area. They had both worked at the Hanford Site.

I had never heard of the Hanford Site before coming to Washington. It was kind of the western version of Oak Ridge in Tennessee. Oak Ridge worked on enriching uranium while Hanford worked on converting uranium into weapons grade plutonium.

It made the plutonium for the first nuclear bomb the US ever exploded, at the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico. It also made the plutonium used in "Fat Man", the nuclear bomb that was exploded over Nagasaki, Japan in 1945. Oak Ridge provided the enriched uranium that was used in "Little Boy", the bomb that had been dropped on Hiroshima a few days earlier.

The story here is that in early 1943 the federal government told local residents that it was buying their land and that they had 30 days to be gone, whether they wanted to sell or not. The government took control of over 600 square miles. Construction of the first nuclear reactor started in August 1943 and was completed in September 1944. The first batch of plutonium was delivered to the labs in Los Alamos in February 1945. Two more reactors came online in Dec 1944 and Feb 1945.

This area had been a sparsely populated farming area. The federal government brought in 50,000 workers to build these facilities in this short time. No one knew the goal of the project, and they were told not to ask about what someone else was doing. I watched a video of interviews of some of the men who came out here to work. One of the men came, with his family, from Denver. His reason for coming was because the government was offering great wages. He had never even seen a lathe but that was his first job here. He was trained taught to use it and did so for several months before he was transferred to another location and trained for another job.

I had not planned on going out to the Hanford Site. Almost everything there has now been decommissioned and is being demolished. The guys at the museum talked me into driving around the site. It turned out to be a loop that was a little over 100 miles long. I got to see more pretty scenery, but nothing worth the 100 mile drive.

Not everything at the museum was about Hanford. It was quite interesting to read about some of the people who homesteaded in this area.

Kathy stayed home today. As difficult as it might be to believe, she didn't think she would find the museum interesting <grin>.

Tomorrow we head for Montana. Good night to all and may God bless you and yours.