Before Trinity, there was the B Reactor

A few days ago, the Hanford B Reactor, near Richland, Washington, was designated a National Historic Landmark. The eventual goal is to turn the building into a museum; the reactor has been shut down and defueled for 40 years, and many areas, including the control room and the reactor front face, are decontaminated and safe for the public to view.

This was the world's first industrial-scale nuclear reactor. Built quickly and under heavy secrecy during World War II, the B Reactor and its associated processing plants produced the plutonium for the first atomic bomb test at the Trinity Site, and later for the "Fat Man" bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Enrico Fermi himself oversaw its initial startup.

Understandably, the site's new status has provoked some dismay from letter writers, including one who felt "that designation honors the birthplace of the most devastating weapon of war ever created," and another who asked, "Is having unleashed the nuclear demon ... something about which we should boast?" This prompted me to write the following letter to the editor, which I thought I would also share here.

I read the two letters to the editor on Wednesday that expressed dismay about the Hanford B Reactor's new status as a national historic landmark. I thought I'd give a slightly different perspective.

Two years ago I had the privilege of seeing the B Reactor in person, thanks to getting a slot on one of the rare public tours of the Hanford Site. It was impressive, sobering, and thought-provoking. Standing there, I found it impossible to forget that what went on inside that hastily-constructed cinderblock building changed history. A new era dawned when the world's first atomic bomb, built with material produced by that reactor, was detonated. As a nation we may still be debating whether this was a step we should have taken, but we owe it to future generations to preserve the B Reactor Building as part of the context for that debate. It's an incredibly important part of history and it deserves its landmark status.

The dawn of the atomic age, and the Cold War that followed, have left very few public landmarks for people to look at and contemplate. I feel strongly that it's important to preserve what we can from that era -- not necessarily because we're proud of what transpired, but because those events changed the world.