19441776 Club
Hanford's B Reactor turns out its first plutonium
Six weeks after the chain reaction began, the graphite pile beside the Columbia River starts making what it was built to make.
On September 26, 1944, operators at the Hanford Site in Washington State started the first self-sustaining chain reaction in a full-scale reactor. On November 6, the B Reactor began producing plutonium. The reactor had been designed to convert natural uranium into plutonium-239 for nuclear weapons. B Reactor was one of the Hanford reactors that supplied plutonium for most of the American nuclear arsenal…
