Interview with Steve Buckingham

Interview with Steve Buckingham

Hanford Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Plutonium
Uranium
Solvent extraction
Chemistry
Radioactive waste disposal

This interview with Steve Buckingham is part of an effort to record the history of the T Plant, a facility that processed irradiated fuel from the B Reactor. Using the bismuth phosphate process, T Plant operations were able to extract plutonium from spent fuel rods.

An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy.

02/21/2018

Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.

video/mp4

The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection.

Robert Franklin

Steve Buckingham

Washington State University - Tri Cities

Robert Franklin: I’m just going to try to remember it—

John Stevens Buckingham: [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: --as best as I can. Okay. Are we ready?

Lori Larsen: Yeah.

Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an interview with Steve Buckingham on February 21, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Steve about his experiences working, specifically at the T Plant, on the Hanford Site. And for the record, Steve, could you state and spell your full legal name for us?

Buckingham: It’s John Stevens Buckingham. B-U-C-K-I-N-G-H-A-M.

Franklin: Okay.

Buckingham: And you don’t need the John Stevens, but—

Franklin: I suppose we could skip it.

Buckingham: [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: Just a quick recap, you did an oral history with us several years ago—

Buckingham: Yes.

Franklin: --where you talked about your life—

Buckingham: At Hanford.

Franklin: Your early life, and then your life at Hanford. So this is specifically will be about T Plant because we’re trying to gather as much information related to T Plant as we can, as there’s a push to include it, perhaps, in the Manhattan Project Historical Park, and bring some protective legislation on it and documents like a Historic American Engineering record and things like that. So, Steve, if I remember correctly, you came to the Hanford Site shortly after World War II.

Buckingham: Right.

Franklin: Correct? And tell me about how you got here.

Buckingham: Well, I started at Washington State in 1941, right out of high school. Went from—I graduated from Raymond, Washington. And of course, the war started; the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor that fall or winter. I was able to finish my freshman year and my first semester my sophomore year. But after the war started, the campus was just overrun with people looking, trying to recruit candidates for different programs. I tried to get into several programs and finally got into one with the Air Corps; they were looking for future meteorologists. So I enlisted in the Air Corps. My mother wouldn’t sign off on me, because I was still only 17, but Dad signed and let me go ahead. Then just shortly after the second semester started, they called me to active duty and sent me down to Reed College in Portland for pre-meteorology.

So I spent a year down there in Reed. Reed was kind of an interesting situation, coming from a rather conservative Washington State College, at that time, to Reed where you could smoke on campus, smoke in classrooms, go up and visit, go up into the girls’ dormitory anytime, very little restrictions. But it was an education, and I must say, Reed has a very fine education. I think the best. We took the standard classes we were taking. We took math, physics, oh, some history classes, and some literature classes.

I was there for a year, and then the Air Corps decided they didn’t need any more meteorologists. So I applied again to communications in the Air Corps. They sent me to, oh, officer candidate school in Seymour Johnson Field, South Carolina and I was there for about four months. And then went up to Yale University where I went through communications and received a commission as a second lieutenant in communications in Air Corps. They were looking for people with a pretty good educational background, particularly in math and physics, because they were developing radar at the time. So I applied and they sent me from Yale up to Harvard where I went through a three-month course in electrical engineering. [LAUGHTER] And then transferred down to MIT, where I then worked developing radar for another six months before they finally sent me down to get ready. By then the war had ended. [LAUGHTER]

They didn’t know what to do with me. So I ended up at Kirkland Field. All we were doing is bombers coming in from the—oh, retired bombers were coming in; we removed the radar equipment from the bombers before they put them into storage down in Arizona. And finally they let me go back to college. So I had a year-and-a-half of college to finish. And I got my degree with all sorts of majors. [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: And where did you finish your schooling?

Buckingham: At Washington State.

Franklin: And what was your degree in when you—

Buckingham: My degree was what they called general. But I had majors in math, I had a major in physics, I had a major in chemistry. And a major in English.

Franklin: Wow.

Buckingham: [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: Quite a renaissance man.

Buckingham: Oh, yeah. But it was fun. I was able to graduate in 1947.

Franklin: Okay, so kind of in the beginning of that GI boom.

Buckingham: Yeah, the GIs were just starting to come back onto campus. And we came—I got a job here in the analytical laboratory. They were developing the REDOX process.

Franklin: And, sorry, what year did you come to Hanford?

Buckingham: 1947.

Franklin: 1947. And your first job was at the analytical lab.

Buckingham: Analytical lab. The REDOX process was really kind of a—it was a new innovation into the technology. Because it was a solvent extraction process, where the old bismuth phosphate process that was the original process developed from Seaborg’s laboratory experiments, was kind of—well, they couldn’t recover the—you know, when they irradiated the uranium in the reactors, they only made two or—I think it was four grams of plutonium for every pound of uranium that went into that reactor.

Franklin: Yeah, that sounds about right.

Buckingham: So it was—just wasn’t very—and that uranium went back to the waste storage tanks. So it was—they were beginning to try to look for a new way to also recover the uranium at the same time they were getting the plutonium out. We were—the engineers were working very hard on developing this REDOX process. And it was—unfortunately, they were using ammonium nitrate as a salting agent in the solvent extraction process when Texas City blew up. So—[LAUGHTER]

Franklin: I’m sorry, could you—I’m not familiar with that. Could you talk a little more about—they were using ammonium nitrate in the bismuth phosphate process?

Buckingham: Yeah. That is what is called a salting agent, to help extract the uranium and the plutonium into this organic phase. The organic is methyl isobutyl ketone, was the extractant. The whole theory of it was we could extract the plutonium and uranium into this organic phase, and then in the next step, we could use—change the valence of plutonium and separate the plutonium from the uranium. It was a very good, clean process that was really—one of the very early solvent extraction processes ever developed. Well, this—they began constructing the REDOX plant out there and so the development work was kind of winding down, but they didn’t want to get rid of us, because they knew that we were going to be working on that REDOX process.

Franklin: And the REDOX process, that was—was that specifically to recover the uranium and—

Buckingham: And the plutonium.

Franklin: And the plutonium. Was it to recover the uranium from the tanks, or was it to process new fuels?

Buckingham: New fuel.

Franklin: Okay.

Buckingham: All new fuel.

Franklin: So it replaced bismuth phosphate.

Buckingham: Yeah, we replaced the old bismuth phosphate process.

Franklin: And what—that took place in the REDOX facility, right?

Buckingham: Yeah.

Franklin: Not in the T Plant.

Buckingham: Not in the old T Plant. But they needed to put us someplace, so they sent several of us out to being shift supervisors out at both the T Plant and the B Plant, which were identical plants.

Franklin: Right. As well as—was the U Plant also identical to—

Buckingham: U Plant was identical, but it was never used as a solvent extraction—as a facility for that. That came later. [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: Right. I’d like to back up. So you mentioned this ammonium nitrate that was used in bismuth phosphate. Was that also used in the REDOX process?

Buckingham: That was the one that was used in the REDOX process.

Franklin: Oh, in the REDOX process.

Buckingham: The REDOX process.

Franklin: Not in bismuth phosphate.

Buckingham: No.

Franklin: You’d mentioned Texas City explosion?

Buckingham: Originally, the salting agent to help in the REDOX process to help extract the uranium and plutonium, they used what was called a salting agent. This is just to help push it into the organic phase. Well, the original salting agent we were using was ammonium nitrate. Ammonium nitrate—[LAUGHTER]—used in gunpowder. And there was this rather horrible accident down in Texas City that—so they had to begin looking for a new salting agent at that time. And that’s when they went from the ammonium nitrate to aluminum nitrate.

Franklin: Hmm. Was aluminum nitrate more efficient, more stable, or both?

Buckingham: Well, it was not explosive like ammonium nitrate. It was more stable. It worked very well. So they—but there was quite a little bit of work redeveloping the necessity of using the aluminum nitrate. So there was about a year delay in the startup of the REDOX process. And that’s when I was at T Plant. Now, the T Plant, it was kind of fun. We weren’t real hard-pressed because the Cold War hadn’t started yet. So it was kind of laidback then. The people who worked out there—we were working—it was three shifts a day, seven days a week. So it was a—I was on C shift. But it gave us experience working with real material out there, because we were still separating plutonium using the old bismuth phosphate process.

Franklin: Oh, okay, good, that’s what I was going to ask you about that. So when you got there in ’47 and you were stationed at T Plant—while the REDOX process was in development, you were still processing with bismuth phosphate.

Buckingham: Bismuth phosphate, yes.

Franklin: I’m wondering if you can, as easy as you could for a layman, kind of walk me through the bismuth phosphate—what makes the bismuth phosphate process and what makes it unique?

Buckingham: Well, the bismuth phosphate process is what—in chemical engineering, if you have just a trace of an element that you’re trying to separate out, you often have to use an additional new inert material that will help increase the volume of the precipitate. And the bismuth phosphate process, essentially what we were doing was precipitating plutonium phosphate, but we didn’t—there wasn’t enough volume, so we added another element called bismuth that would increase the volume of the plutonium that precipitated. Then we’d have to do another precipitation to separate the plutonium out of the—with another precipitation process, to precipitate only the plutonium.

Franklin: So first you would kind of bind the bismuth to the plutonium and then pull that out.

Buckingham: Yeah.

Franklin: And then you’d take that much more refined—you know, refined—because you’ve stripped out the uranium, the transuranics, and then—

Buckingham: Because if you could change the valence state of the plutonium, which wouldn’t then precipitate.

Franklin: And how would you separate the bismuth from the plutonium?

Buckingham: We would oxidize the plutonium to—let’s see if I can remember—it was in the four state in the first separation where we were first separation. Then we would oxidize it, we’d reduce it to the three state, which wouldn’t precipitate, then, in the next step.

Franklin: What are the states that you’re talking about? You said from the four state to the three state.

Buckingham: Oh, that’s the valence state. The oxidization state of the plutonium. Essentially—that’s essentially the way that plutonium is separated from the uranium in all the separation processes. We change the valence of the plutonium from four to three.

Franklin: And that refers to the position of the electrons, right?

Buckingham: Yeah.

Franklin: Okay. It’s been a long time since I’ve had chemistry class. You’ll have to excuse me. You can imagine as a historian it’s been quite a while. Okay. These terms are familiar to me. Okay, so, what kind of equipment would you use to do this work?

Buckingham: Well, in the—similar in both the original bismuth phosphate process, of course the fuel came up from the 100 Area in cask carts and they were put into a dissolver. And in the dissolver, we would first have to remove the aluminum cans that the uranium was canned in, in the reactors. Then dissolve the mixture of uranium and plutonium with nitric acid. And this was usually done as several steps. That’s when the brown fumes used to come pouring out of our stacks. [LAUGHTER] Then after it’s dissolved, we would then add this bismuth, dissolve bismuth nitrate to the mixture—to the dissolver fluid and precipitate a mixture of bismuth phosphate and plutonium phosphate. The plutonium was then jetted out to the Tank Farms and then we would redissolve—or we would redissolve that precipitate and precipitate the—change the—oxidize or reduce the plutonium to the three state, which then wouldn’t precipitate in the bismuth phosphate. We’d have to—I think there were—in the T Plant, there were 40 cells. That meant 20 steps of going between the precipitating the plutonium down and precipitating the—just cleaning the plutonium up. And each step, of course—in the original dissolution, the uranium and a lot of the fission products were removed in that first precipitation step.

Franklin: The stuff like the transuranics and things—?

Buckingham: Yeah.

Franklin: So like the cesium and strontium—what other kinds of fission products—

Buckingham: Oh, there’s just a whole pile of fission products that were developed—formed in that, during the irradiation process.

Franklin: Like iodine—

Buckingham: Iodine, and oh, good grief, a lot of them that—the bad ones was strontium-90 and cesium-137, of course, because they’re highly radioactive. But there was a whole stack of them in there.

Franklin: So the plutonium’s kind of buried in all of this, right, and it’s the goal, but it’s one of the smaller products.

Buckingham: Smaller products.

Franklin: What kind of—you said about 40 cells, 20 steps. What kind of equipment were in the cells? How—

Buckingham: Well, in each—let’s see, in the first two cells, there was a feed tank, of course. There was a centrifuge, a continuous centrifuge. And a receiving tank. And I’m trying to think what all went into that second cell. They would work together, and I think the feed tank might have been in the adjacent cell. The walls of those cells were about 15 feet thick of reinforced concrete, because of the radiation.

Franklin: Between you and the cell, right?

Buckingham: Yes.

Franklin: Because you were doing all of this work remotely.

Buckingham: It’s all done remotely.

Franklin: Right. And did you ever have direct viewing of—

Buckingham: No.

Franklin: --what was going on in the cell? So how did you—I guess one of the questions people would ask, is how did you know—

Buckingham: [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: --what was going on, and how did you know if things were working correctly or if there was a problem?

Buckingham: They had a microphone in the cell and you could hear those centrifuges turning.

Franklin: Oh, wow, okay.

Buckingham: And they made very distinct noise when they finally ran out of fluid. [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: Oh, okay, so that’s how you would—

Buckingham: That’s how you would tell. And those operators got to be very clever on detecting when it was time to go onto the next step.

Franklin: How would you transfer material from one cell to another?

Buckingham: Everything was transferred with air jets.

Franklin: Air jets. I’m having trouble visualizing that. What other applications do you know that air jets were used in—like, how does an air jet work? How would that—

Buckingham: Well, it would just—well, it’s like an aspirator.

Franklin: Okay.

Buckingham: I guess that’s the closest you could come to, is like an aspirator.

Franklin: Okay. So that would kind of—would it push or pull the material through each cell?

Buckingham: Yeah.

Franklin: Did it push and pull or did it--?

Buckingham: Essentially pushed it from one tank to the next.

Franklin: Okay. I imagine that through this process, I know that the highly accountable material was the plutonium, but you would want to sample to make sure that things were going right, and that your—that the amount of plutonium you were producing was matching the calculations of what should be—

Buckingham: Yeah.

Franklin: --what should be produced when the fuel was irradiated. So how would you take the samples?

Buckingham: Well, there were samplers between—from every one of these tanks. And it was circulated around through a little cup, up near the surface of the tank.

[PHONE RINGING]

Buckingham: And between the tanks, essentially, is what they were. And it would—they’d go in and sample it—they’d recirculate through until they thought they had a fair sample. It was for a certain number of minutes and all that kind of stuff.

Franklin: I would imagine those samples would be very radioactive.

Buckingham: They were sampled in what was called a doorstop. It’s a little tiny pipette. [LAUGHTER] In quite a bit of stainless steel, about four inches in diameter. And there was a little insert inside that that the pipette would go down into. People would have to go in—actually go into the canyon to sample these different tanks at different times. We’d have to sample the receiving tank to make sure we weren’t dumping a lot of plutonium back into—out into the waste tank, and to also get a feel for how much plutonium was being moved and so forth. So, those first samples were pretty hot. They had to be handled behind—we had what was a special device in the laboratory that we would sample those tanks with those pipettes out of.

Franklin: Wow. Did you ever have to go collect a sample?

Buckingham: Only once.

Franklin: I wonder—could you describe that for me?

Buckingham: Well, you had to put on coveralls, wear a face mask, we weren’t on oxygen—we weren’t on air at that time. Now they even have to put on air supply. But it was really kind of interesting, because at the back of the T Plant there were these entries into the different levels. You’d have to call the dispatcher to tell her—tell them that we were entering, and they would then start timing you, let you know how much time you had to go in and get that sample, and get in to the doorstop and then get it back out so it can be delivered to the lab next-door.

Franklin: And that’s because you would be receiving a dose--

Buckingham: Yes.

Franklin: --when you were in there. How much time could you be in the canyon?

Buckingham: Oh, you could be in there maybe 20 minutes. 20, 30 minutes.

Franklin: Oh, wow.

Buckingham: The cells were so thick, the walls of the cells were so thick, even the lids were offset on steps so that you weren’t getting an awful lot of radiation in there, but you were getting quite a bit. And then of course, when you get the sample up into the pipette, moving it into the doorstop, you were getting a bit of a dose. It wasn’t fun.

Franklin: You said you had to put on a face mask and coveralls—how thick was all of that?

Buckingham: Well, you had to put on two pairs of coveralls.

Franklin: Two pairs of coveralls.

Buckingham: Two pairs.

Franklin: Okay.

Buckingham: And boots, gloves. Let’s see what other—a hood. You were thoroughly dressed. And then you had to be checked out, of course. There was always an RM person there, making sure you didn’t have anything on you when you came out.

Franklin: And RM stands for--?

Buckingham: Radiation monitor.

Franklin: Okay. Similar to—is that what today would be called an HBT?

Buckingham: Yeah.

Franklin: Okay. Was RM the standard terminology at the time?

Buckingham: That was the terminology at the time.

Franklin: But same basic—

Buckingham: Yeah.

Franklin: Same basic job, okay. I’m wondering, I’d like to step back for a minute and I’d like to ask you about the first time you saw the canyon, the T Plant. I’m wondering if you could describe the building, but also how you felt about it, you know. Your impressions of the building.

Buckingham: Scared.

[LAUGHTER]

Buckingham: That really was. I was just absolutely confounded about the whole thing.

Franklin: Why?

Buckingham: Well, the building was 800 feet long.

Franklin: Okay.

Buckingham: About 30 feet wide. And a third of it was, or a good portion of it was below ground level. And then a long—one side of it was what they called the operating galleries. And this was where the people, the operators, sat. And they were the ones who—there was also as long as that gallery was where they had the tanks that they fed the new chemicals in for the separation process. It was—there’s then a crane ran the whole length of the building. And the crane was operated behind a concrete wall and it was a lead-shielded crane. [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: How did the person operating the crane see what they were doing?

Buckingham: Through optics.

Franklin: Such as?

Buckingham: Just like a telescope. [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: Oh, wow.

Buckingham: And they were canny. Those crane operators were canny. I think they had a second sense of feeling where that crane hook was. But they could see it.

Franklin: Did they also use television as well?

Buckingham: No, that—television was hardly invented at that stage in the game.

Franklin: Okay.

Buckingham: It was strictly optics.

Franklin: Was television, CCTV added to the processing later?

Buckingham: Later on, yeah.

Franklin: Do you know approximately when that was?

Buckingham: Oh, gosh, it wasn’t until—well, they were no longer using the bismuth phosphate process when they finally got television. It wasn’t until, oh, gosh, I would say well into the ‘70s before we even had the idea of using much television.

Franklin: Okay. Had you ever seen a building like the T Plant before?

Buckingham: Never.

Franklin: I’m wondering—you mentioned the brown fumes that came out. Could you describe the stack? How tall was it, and--?

Buckingham: Well, the stack was about 50 feet tall, and of course it was part of the ventilation system. Now, the dissolver would—any time you dissolve a metal in nitric acid, you’re going to get NO₂ off. The original processes, we did not try to do anything about that NO₂. We just booted it out into the atmosphere. You could always tell when they were—we were very closely regulated when we couldn’t dissolve—that was why there was a weather station out at Hanford. If the weather was not good for dissolving, we couldn’t dissolve, or they’d have to drown the dissolver to stop the reaction.

Franklin: What would be bad weather for dissolving?

Buckingham: High winds.

Franklin: Because it would be variable where it would go, or--?

Buckingham: Yeah. They didn’t want too much of that stuff to leave the Hanford Project. You know, even after running out there for quite a number of years, there was a big ruckus about all the radiation that came from Hanford causing downwind cancers and all that good stuff. And that’s when they did that very extensive study of how the radiation went from Hanford. There was a row of samplers built for about 30 miles around Hanford to detect—if they could detect anything coming from radiation.

And then also that’s when we got into the REDOX process. They decided they would try to recover a lot of that nitric acid. So we put in absorbers so that the fumes weren’t as brown coming out of the process after a few years. [LAUGHTER]

And they did a very extensive study of the atmospheric dispersion of stuff around. Gosh, there’s so many studies on all that. And also, down on the river, we had—University of Washington had a fish hatchery where we were studying the effect of any—well, it was started out the effect of the water through the reactors, how it was affecting the fish. And also they were beginning to study what’s happening to the cooling waters and so forth were just put into cooling ponds. [LAUGHTER] We had some pretty hot ducks out there at one time. [LAUGHTER] But—

Franklin: Hot how?

Buckingham: Radioactive.

Franklin: And how did they become radioactive?

Buckingham: Well, you know, there’s—we were trying very hard to not discharge anything to these surface ponds. But there were always leaks. And somehow or other, radiation always managed to get into some of these ponds. And some of them became fairly grossly contaminated over the years. And also, that’s when they began looking at the amount of—the effect of groundwater under the separation plants. We knew more about what was going on underground than most people know about what’s going on on the surface.

Franklin: Right, because of the worry of contaminating the groundwater, right?

Buckingham: Yeah, they didn’t want to contaminate the groundwater. And that was pretty important. Also, where’s the groundwater going? They know it’s going towards the river. And how long is going to take? And certain radioisotopes were moving faster than others. Which was a big concern. So we were doing a lot of studies on that. Oh, I don’t know. It’s just amazing the studies that were going on. You know, there was also a pretty good-sized animal farm down there by F—

Franklin: F Reactor, right?

Buckingham: F factory, yeah. [LAUGHTER] And also the hot desert, the hot poop out in the desert from the animals that had gotten some—the Cold War got started through all this period of time. It was to get that plutonium out of here come hell or high water. And we were running out of waste storage tanks, and we didn’t have any—this is when we went through a procedure of trying to precipitate enough of the bad active radioisotopes in the waste storage tanks to be able to keep running, keep our space going. Some of these things didn’t really work out too well. But we were making plutonium. [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: Right. Some of what things didn’t work out too well?

Buckingham: Well, some of what—we were precipitating some of the higher radioactive isotopes in the tanks by adding—oh, let’s see, what was it that we were adding? Gosh, I can’t remember now. Oh, dear. We went through so many different processes that it’s kind of funny. Then we also went through the process of wanting to recover all that uranium that we had put out into those waste tanks.

Franklin: Right, I was going to ask you about that.

Buckingham: That was when we revamped U Plant.

Franklin: And that was specifically for recovering—

Buckingham: Uranium.

Franklin: Uranium. And I’m wondering if you could—I’d like to go back a little bit but end up there, but go back a little bit. You, I imagine, when you came in ’47, you worked with a lot of people that had worked at Hanford during the Manhattan Project, right?

Buckingham: Yeah.

Franklin: How many people were still around from the Manhattan Project when you started?

Buckingham: Oh, I would imagine maybe a couple thousand. We didn’t have a big crew here, but there were quite a few people here. Of course, DuPont had just left when we came. They left in January, and I came in June or July.

Franklin: Okay. And you worked for General Electric?

Buckingham: Yeah, it was General Electric was the one who was running the facility at that time.

Franklin: And were any of your fellow engineers—had any of them been around in the Manhattan Project?

Buckingham: Yeah, most of them. Most of the people we were working with had been here during DuPont. Uncle DuPont. They were very proud of Uncle DuPont. [LAUGHTER] And we were actually still operating under DuPont procedures.

Franklin: For the processes?

Buckingham: For the processes.

Franklin: How long did you continue to operate under those procedures?

Buckingham: Oh, I think we must’ve operated under them for over ten years.

Franklin: Oh, wow. Was the uranium that was going into the storage tanks during World War II and a little after, was that a concern at the time, in terms of recovering that as fuel and/or worrying about the space in the tanks?

Buckingham: Well, it was more concerned about—it was a fuel that was usable. Uranium was becoming a very valuable product at that time, because there was a lot of work going on with power reactors, the building of—looking at the possibility of using power reactors. There were several companies getting into building reactors. This was going to be the new power thing of the future.

Franklin: Right.

Buckingham: [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: Because it puts off so much heat, right?

Buckingham: Yeah!

Franklin: That was the major attractiveness to producing power, would be to generate steam.

Buckingham: And we actually put so much radioactivity in some of those old tanks that they were boiling. Those old storage tanks.

Franklin: Like, as in the material was actually boiling.

Buckingham: Actually boiling.

Franklin: Wow.

Buckingham: That was from the decay of a lot of the radioactive material. And, you know, we also recovered—went to a recovery of strontium-90 and cesium-137, because these were going to be valuable isotopes that could be used. In fact, there were a lot of the -90 isotopes used to run beacons up north.

Franklin: Beacons?

Buckingham: Yeah, radio-beacons because of the heat generated from those strontium-90.

Franklin: Oh, okay. Those would be used in arctic environments.

Buckingham: Yeah, for arctic environments where you couldn’t depend on sunshine in the middle of winter. [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: Right. Wow.

Buckingham: So, we went—that’s one of the things that was kind of fun in my later work, I went into this organization called Process Chemistry where we were looking at all these different isotopes. And there was a whole array of them that we thought were going to be valuable isotopes to use. That’s why they repurposed the old bismuth phosphate process B Plant into recover strontium and—[LAUGHTER] strontium and cesium.

Franklin: It’s pretty amazing that they used plants which had been made—I guess when they were made, correct me if I’m wrong, but the final process hadn’t been quite decided when DuPont was constructing the T Plant and B Plant, right? They had an idea but they hadn’t settled on the specifics.

Buckingham: No, the only way you could extract something like that—the extraction process was not really new. It’s used in chemistry laboratories. It was an ether extraction. Well, you know, ether is not very friendly material to use.

Franklin: No, it’s very flammable, right?

Buckingham: Yeah, very flammable. But when they discovered this methyl isobutyl ketone from the REDOX process, it was a whole new field of chemistry that was coming in. Not only usable in nuclear material; it was usable in a lot of metallurgical processes.

Franklin: What did you call that? Something ketone?

Buckingham: Methyl isobutyl ketones. Hexone.

Franklin: Hexone, okay.

[LAUGHTER]

Franklin: I’m just going to try to write that down as well as I can spell it. It’s pretty amazing that these, T, and B and U, designed for this one process were able to be kind of retrofitted for all of these different jobs. Was that because the uranium recovery wasn’t all that different, or was it because these buildings were—

Buckingham: Well, the uranium recovery was actually kind of off-step to the future of the PUREX process which used tributyl phosphate as an extractant. We used just a more dilute tributyl phosphate as an extractant in the uranium recovery process.

Franklin: And PUREX was kind of the final process at Hanford that—like, it was kind of the final evolution of that, what had started with bismuth phosphate, right?

Buckingham: Yeah.

Franklin: Yeah. And that PUREX process, correct me if I’m wrong, was used in other facilities?

Buckingham: Now it’s used all over the world, yeah. And it was actually invented here. [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: Yeah. Right. Because we have the building that bears its name, right?

Buckingham: Yeah, right!

Franklin: I wanted to ask you a few more questions, some of the ones that John had written—John Fox had written about T Plant. But I had one question before that. When you’d finished—when the material had gone through the cells—

Buckingham: Yes.

Franklin: --and you’d separated out the plutonium, what was that final—and I’m talking about when you first got here, with the bismuth phosphate process. What was the final product?

Buckingham: Well, it goes through all these stages in the old bismuth phosphate plant. And then we transferred it over to the 224 Building, which was right behind the plant. And instead of using bismuth phosphate to precipitate the material, we used a lanthanum fluoride precipitation. And this was a little bit cleaner and a little bit more straightforward. Then that material from the old lanthanum fluoride precipitation was essentially a—well, we precipitated it as a hydroxide, plutonium hydroxide. Then dissolved that and shipped it down to the old 231 Building, where it was then just plain concentrated down to make a kind of—well, it wasn’t a paste exactly, but it was a very concentrated solution of plutonium nitrate.

Franklin: It was some kind of—like a thick liquid?

Buckingham: Very thick liquid.

Franklin: Like a sludge?

Buckingham: It was essentially a sludge.

Franklin: Interesting.

Buckingham: And that is what was then shipped down to Los Alamos.

Franklin: When was the decision—when did we switch from shipping the semi-liquid to the solid puck or the powder forms?

Buckingham: Well, it was—the plant down at Los Alamos was undersized. And they needed a bigger plant to make a solid form, and that’s when they began building the Dash-5 Plant. And good grief, that started in—seemed to me like that started in the ‘50s.

Franklin: Okay. So I want to go to some of John’s questions and I’ll try to skip them if I feel like we’ve already talked about them.

Buckingham: Sure.

Franklin: So how long did it take to run a batch through the T Plant canyon?

Buckingham: Oh, it took maybe a week.

Franklin: Okay. That’s all? Just one—

Buckingham: About a week, yeah.

Franklin: So it was shorter than what it took—the time it took to irradiate the fuel in the reactor.

Buckingham: Right.

Franklin: And is that why they didn’t—why T Plant could handle the material from the three reactors? Because I remember they’d built the three reactors in the Manhattan Project, and then built three identical canyons—

Buckingham: Yeah.

Franklin: --but only T Plant ran the bismuth phosphate process, correct?

Buckingham: No, T and B Plant.

Franklin: T, oh, and B. Okay.

Buckingham: Yeah, the two plants. They didn’t need U Plant.

Franklin: Okay, it was U Plant they didn’t.

Buckingham: Yeah.

Franklin: Because it took about, what was it, like 30 days to run fuel through the reactor? 30 to 90?

Buckingham: Yeah, I think they were in the reactor 30 days.

Franklin: And then cooling time.

Buckingham: A little bit of cooling time. But we were able to—the two, B and T Plant, were able to handle all the output from the three original reactors. But then they began building more reactors. [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: What reactors were under—what reactors were at Hanford when you first got to the Site?

Buckingham: B, D and F.

Franklin: And then the other six were built while you were working?

Buckingham: Yeah, then they began—oh, the began to build a replacement for B—

Franklin: D.

Buckingham: And that was C Reactor.

Franklin: Oh, C, right, okay.

Buckingham: And then they began building the super reactors, K-E and K-W. [LAUGHTER] Then they began building N Reactor for the dual purpose. So. [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: And then somewhere in there is DR.

Buckingham: DR.

Franklin: And H.

Buckingham: Yeah.

Franklin: Okay. How long did the process take—I guess, I’m trying to—so this follows the how long did it take to run a batch through the T Plant question. I think this is a sub-question. How much more time in the 224 and 231 Buildings?

Buckingham: Just a few days, actually, in the 224 Building.

Franklin: And what was the 224 Building?

Buckingham: Well, that was where we then went from the bismuth phosphate to the lanthanum fluoride.

Franklin: So that was kind of like a finishing—

Buckingham: Yeah, it was finishing the bismuth phosphate process.

Franklin: Did that building have another name besides the 224?

Buckingham: No. 224 is all we ever used.

Franklin: Okay, and then 231 was a further finishing?

Buckingham: That was where it was just concentrated to—that was the final step.

Franklin: Okay. And did the 231 have another name, or was it just 231?

Buckingham: Just 231 Building.

Franklin: Okay. Gotcha.

Buckingham: And it went from there into the shipping containers that they shipped it to Los Alamos then.

Franklin: So did it take an additional several days in each building?

Buckingham: Yeah, just several days. Maybe could’ve taken a week or so. But they had to start—I don’t think it took much more than a week to get it through 231 Building.

Franklin: So, a week—conservatively like a week for each?

Buckingham: Yeah, it was—well, there were steps that they would go through and you didn’t have to wait until they finished one step to go—another step could be coming in right away.

Franklin: Okay. I’ll just put a week or so. That’s a pretty—so the entire process, we could say, would probably be somewhere in the realm of two to three weeks—

Buckingham: Yeah.

Franklin: --to take the irradiated fuel and have the shipment ready for Los Alamos?

Buckingham: I would say it would take less than three weeks.

Franklin: Less than three weeks.

Buckingham: Yeah.

Franklin: Okay. Interesting. How many days were there when you couldn’t dissolve the fuel sludge because of weather conditions?

Buckingham: Oh, it wasn’t too bad here. You know, the climate here is not that bad. It’s just—I would guess that there was probably, in a year there might be less than two months.

Franklin: Okay.

Buckingham: Total.

Franklin: Sure.

Buckingham: Because it seemed to me like we were constantly—I don’t know whether we were cheating or—[LAUGHTER]—sitting on the edge of—and I don’t know who ever really decided why we couldn’t dissolve.

Franklin: Oh, that was my next question here, was who—how was this decided?

Buckingham: I don’t know if it was the meteorologist decided. I have no idea who made that final decision.

Franklin: Gotcha. How could you tell when each step of the process was completed? You mentioned earlier about the centrifuge noise.

Buckingham: Well, the—

Franklin: How—sorry, go ahead.

Buckingham: Well, in the—they would have to—it took quite a little while to move clear through the old bismuth phosphate process. I would say that it took—it could take up to—it’d take a good hard week of 24-hour days in there to get clear through. If you took one batch and ran it clear through. But, you know, all they have to do is get out of that first two cells and they could bring another one in. So, they were following on very closely. We did—

Franklin: How did—oh, sorry.

Buckingham: Go ahead.

Franklin: Oh, I was going to say, how would you tell in the later cells when it was time to move that material on? What other types of tools did you use?

Buckingham: By samples.

Franklin: By the sampling?

Buckingham: Yeah, by the sampling. And also the point at which—they could tell pretty well when they finished that lanthanum fluoride, they could tell when to move to the next position where they were then precipitating the hydroxide.

Franklin: Okay. What about in the T Plant, though, in between cells, how would you know when it was time for the air jets to move a particular batch through?

Buckingham: Well, they knew the volumes that they were moving through because they used things that told the volume of what the volume of the tank was. There were bubblers in the tanks. And they could tell pretty well when one step of the process was over with and they were going on to the next step.

Franklin: Because you had mentioned earlier that they would use microphones near the centrifuges to tell when the centrifuge was kind of out of liquid because it would emit this particular tone. And so they would also use other measuring devices to tell each volume and things like that?

Buckingham: Yeah, they knew the volume of the feed tank that they were pumping out of, and the volume of the waste tank that was being received into. They could—there were ways of doing that.

Franklin: How would you read that? Would that be in the operating gallery?

Buckingham: It was in the operating gallery.

Franklin: And how could you read that volume through 15 feet of concrete?

Buckingham: They used what they call bubblers. They’re two pipes going down into the tanks that they could measure by the air pressure going in how much—what the reading was on the—that all showed out on the chart up in the operating gallery.

Franklin: Oh, so would it be the pressure of the air—

Buckingham: The pressure of the air.

Franklin: --hitting, going into the tank would tell you the volume and you could get the volume. Ah, I see. So that was a way, I suppose, to keep an active measurement, but also to—if you have air going in, you don’t have anything coming back.

Buckingham: Right.

Franklin: Right, so you’re not introducing radiation anywhere in the operating gallery or something like that, okay.

Buckingham: No, no.

Franklin: Because everything—correct me if I’m wrong—a big concern was kind of keeping everything contained but also having—was pressure a concern in the cells, for example, having a pressurized environment where if you had a leak, the air would rush in and not rush out?

Buckingham: Well, of course they were under a slight lower pressure than the outside air pressure, because they had fans sucking the air out all the time. And they went through—later on we had a pretty good filtering system. Before, they were just using—they had just pits with fiberglass filters.

Franklin: And later on they went to HAPA filters.

Buckingham: Went through—yeah, we went to better filters.

Franklin: Interesting, okay. How reliable was the instrumentation?

Buckingham: I would say it was very reliable. Because they were using just standard equipment that was used in all sorts of industry around the world.

Franklin: How did the introduction—this is my own question; I don’t know if it’s going to fit in here, but—how did the introduction of transistors and things change the layout of the operating gallery? I imagine that that would’ve changed some of the components used.

Buckingham: I can’t remember that it actually changed it very much. We would get a little bit better instrumentation coming in, and—

Franklin: Was there any special instrumentation designed for this process?

Buckingham: I don’t think so. I think we just used standard equipment that was used in any—like, in the oil industry. You know? Just standard. [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: Sure, sure, sure. You mentioned that you entered the canyon once to take samples.

Buckingham: Yeah.

Franklin: How often, though, did crew enter the canyon? Yeah, how often did people take samples?

Buckingham: Well, I would say they had to go—we were working on 8-hour shifts, and during an 8-hour shift, I think they made at least one entry a shift.

Franklin: Okay, one entry—

Buckingham: But it could’ve been a little, few more than that, depending on our pressure of getting something out or—

Franklin: And you said they would typically stay about 20 to 30 minutes in the canyon? And was there a strong cut-off?

Buckingham: I don’t think so. I can’t ever remember anybody complaining too much about being in there too long or— They kept pretty good track of it, of course.

Franklin: Right, well, I’m sure it wasn’t a place where people would want to go and hang out all day.

Buckingham: No. [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: How often did you need to change or replace jumpers in a cell?

Buckingham: Not very often.

Franklin: And, actually, let’s back up, because I realized we hadn’t really talked about—I’m wondering if you could describe a jumper and what it is, what its—

Buckingham: Okay, now, in each cell, there would be tanks or equipment. And on each of these, there was a nozzle, many nozzles. If, in fact, you looked into a cell—and then, these connect to an identical thing on the walls of the cell. If you look into one of those cells, it almost looked like looking into a bowl of spaghetti. And the crane operator could go in and remove these jumpers as needed. And it wasn’t too terribly often that they would have to go in. If a piece of equipment would fail, they would have to pull it out. To do that, he would have to know which jumpers to take off. [LAUGHTER] They have to be taken off in a certain pattern, because some of them would be down hidden, down underneath. But, I tell you, those guys were clever.

Franklin: Yeah, I bet. Well, especially doing it through optics, too.

Buckingham: And we would—we took a few large samples, too, out of the samplers. And they would—the crane operator bring a big cask in and set it next to the sampler. Then when he needed to get to pick the crane up, he would get the hook swinging, so he could get it and snag the bale on the big sample and pull it out.

Franklin: Wow. Wow.

Buckingham: I rode with the crane operators one night, just for about two hours, just to see what they were doing. And they were good.

Franklin: What kind of equipment did they use in the cab? Was it a typical kind of crane, or was there any special equipment?

Buckingham: It was just pretty much a simple kind of crane. But there were—let’s see, what—there was on the crane itself that operated, it had an impact wrench, two hooks. I can’t think of anything else that they had in it. But the impact wrench, they’d go down and be able to get onto these jumpers. And be able to—that was the way they got these, when they had to replace anything. And it was really rather unique situation.

Franklin: So in some ways the jumpers were kind of—they were like the piping between the cells, or kind of like—

Buckingham: They were the piping between the cells, all the electricity, all the instrumentation, everything had to come through those jumpers.

Franklin: But what was being treated didn’t go through the jumpers, right?

Buckingham: No.

Franklin: That went through the stairs.

Buckingham: Well, if it was going from one cell to the next cell, it had to go through one of the jumpers.

Franklin: Oh, okay, so the jumpers were kind of like dual-purpose, that they carried, like you said, the electrical cables and things like that, but then other jumpers would also carry—

Buckingham: Liquids.

Franklin: --various liquids through. Would they carry just the precipitating agents, or would they carry the fuel, the irradiated—

Buckingham: The irradiated stuff. Everything.

Franklin: So you really needed to know which jumper was carrying what.

Buckingham: Yes. [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: Were they clearly marked as to which were hot--

Buckingham: Yes.

Franklin: Or like wet and dry jumpers?

Buckingham: Well, not particularly, hot, wet and dry, but you knew what jumper did what.

Franklin: Okay, it was pretty clear to the crane operator what—

Buckingham: Yeah.

Franklin: Okay, gotcha. And how long would it take to change or replace a jumper in a cell?

Buckingham: Oh, I would say they could do it about—I would say within half an hour, they could do it. Or half an hour to an hour, they could do a lot of changing out in a cell, depending how complicated the equipment was that had to be moved and that time.

Franklin: Yeah. Okay. How did you dispose of contaminated jumpers?

Buckingham: They’d be put into a burial box.

Franklin: Describe a burial box.

Buckingham: Well, as I recall, they were usually—depending on if it was a very radioactive jumper, for example, they would try to put it into a coffin-like container, like a—but it has to be something that they can pick up and move out of that canyon. So it can’t be too awkward. As I recall, it seemed like just a lot of them were plywood.

Franklin: Oh, wow.

Buckingham: Depending on how much radiation. Of course, they could be flushed out in—

Franklin: And where would that be stored, where would it be buried?

Buckingham: Out in the burial ground.

Franklin: Okay. What was the burial ground like when you started at Hanford? I imagine it’s probably different from the burial grounds today.

Buckingham: I don’t think so. I think they were the same. They were out there near the separation plants. They were just big trenches. They would, depending on what was being disposed of in some of them, they actually brought them in on railcars. Built a siting out there for all the failed equipment in as close as they could get it to the pit, and then use bulldozers or something to pull it over into the pit, and start backfilling it.

Franklin: Hmm, okay.

Buckingham: You stayed out of the area when it was being done.

Franklin: Yeah, I bet. Did any items removed from the cell contaminate the canyon floor?

Buckingham: Yes. But that was always something that, they tried not to do that, of course.

Franklin: When that happened, what would the procedure be to—

Buckingham: Well, then they had to—if there was any contamination that got out of the cell itself, it had to be cleaned, cleaned up.

Franklin: How would it be cleaned?

Buckingham: Oh, could be sprayed down with water or acid or something. Flushed out. I can’t remember any time that there was anything seriously lost out of any of the cells. But it could’ve happened.

Franklin: Okay. Who kept track of the amount of product so you could tell if the yield was within acceptable limits?

Buckingham: There was a bunch of people down in headquarters that did that. I don’t have any idea who did keeping track of it. The engineers didn’t.

Franklin: Okay. But I’m sure you furnished your sample results, or—were the sample results when you took samples, were those used to determine the amounts of—because I imagine, that would be a primary concern, right, would be the proper amount of plutonium was making it through the process. That would—because they would—for each fuel element, you would get so much plutonium out of that. So you would want to recover as close to 100% as you could.

Buckingham: As much as we could, right. And I don’t know who kept track of all that stuff. There was—it went into the operating offices up in—and there was somebody in there that did something with it. [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: Okay. Were there ever any unusual incidents worth mentioning while you worked there?

Buckingham: Well, yes, one time during a windstorm, a steam pipe fell. That was one that was a little exciting because it ruptured when it fell. And let’s see. A lot of those, you know, a lot of those jets were run by steam instead of air, too. Let me think if there’s anything else. Oh, we had a pretty bad—blew a bunch of ruthenium out of one of the stacks one time and we had a lot of contamination around the old REDOX plant on the ground.

Franklin: How did the ruthenium go up the stack and leave the facility?

Buckingham: Well, ruthenium is pretty volatile. It was a problem. It was one of our radioactive isotope problems for REDOX facility.

Franklin: Oh, but that’s specifically REDOX and not T Plant? Or did that happen—

Buckingham: It wasn’t so bad in the T Plant. We didn’t seem to have any real serious problems there that I can recall.

Franklin: How long did you work at the T Plant?

Buckingham: About a year.

Franklin: Just about, so ’47-’48 timeframe?

Buckingham: Yeah.

Franklin: And then you went to the REDOX plant?

Buckingham: Well, REDOX was just on the verge of getting started; they were working on it. Then I went down and just worked on 300 Area in what they called the standards lab for about a year. And then went into the process chemistry.

Franklin: After bismuth phosphate was—because bismuth phosphate was kind of retired as a process when REDOX came online.

Buckingham: Yup.

Franklin: Correct? What other missions did the T Plant have in its life that you know of? And were you involved in any of them?

Buckingham: I wasn’t involved in any of them. I think it essentially—well, Battelle ran some experiments up there, but I don’t think they were using the plant; I think they were using what they called the head end. It was where they were checking ventilation kind of stuff. So it was used for—a lot of it was used for ventilation studies.

Franklin: Was the head end where the fuel elements came in, or—

Buckingham: That’s where the fuel elements came in.

Franklin: Where the train would back up and—

Buckingham: Yeah.

Franklin: Yeah. Okay. Is there anything else you wanted to say about T Plant?

Buckingham: Well, I like to always—when I was doing tours, I would tell people that there was only something like four grams of plutonium in each one of those fuel elements that was put into T Plant. So it was really a—they had to add this additional chemical to make it—to help separate the plutonium out.

Franklin: To kind of find it, right, in all of the—

Buckingham: Yeah. And the process worked successfully. Also, you know, when you stop to think of all that engineering that went into that scale-up, it’s really kind of mind-boggling. Because we just didn’t really know how things were going to go. [LAUGHTER] I—

Franklin: Did you—oh, sorry.

Buckingham: I think that the mere fact that they were able to do it is a—

Franklin: Would you consider it comparable to the engineering feat of building the B Reactor? Because—is there a comparison there, because there had been a small graphite reactor that was scaled up to be the B. And is the same kind of true with T? There was this laboratory process that was proven, but had not been done on that scale. Is that a comparable—

Buckingham: That’s comparable, yeah. They didn’t—I don’t even think they had a laboratory at Oak Ridge that they were doing anything with this scale on.

Franklin: Is the T Plant kind of the—kind of the same—what’s the word I’m looking for—kind of the same thing to chemical engineering as B is to nuclear reactors? Would you say it’s a milestone?

Buckingham: I’d say it was a milestone, then, because, well, there was almost every chemical process you could think of that was being used in it.

Franklin: Right, and it played this really crucial role in this process. Right? Because it feels like the reactors are kind of—you know, they get a lot of the coverage, but this chemical separations process is crucial.

Buckingham: Oh, good heavens, yes! We had to get that plutonium out of that element somehow or other. You just don’t go in and pick it out with a pair of pliers! [LAUGHTER]

Franklin: Right. Well, is there anything else that you wanted to add about T Plant or—reflections on your year spent at the T Plant?

Buckingham: Well, mine were really pretty minimal, and being just in the laboratory out there doing the analytical work, it was an experience. [LAUGHTER] It was the first time that I will say that I was using some of my experience that I received in analytical chemistry at good old Washington State College. [LAUGHTER] In fact, I went to tell—went over to visit one time, and I mentioned it to my analytical professor, I told him, he says, now I understand why you were such a stinker in the lab of having things well-organized and in place.

[LAUGHTER]

Franklin: You hadn’t quite appreciated it at the time, right?

Buckingham: Yeah, because, you know, we were using micro—you couldn’t use a large sample. You had to use—we were using very small samples for everything because they were so damned radioactive.

Franklin: Right, so you really had to have everything calibrated properly—

Buckingham: Properly.

Franklin: And well-organized.

Buckingham: And you were very careful with everything. You had to have a neat desk, a neat bench, to get anything done. It was an experience, I will—

Franklin; Great, well, Steve, thank you very much for coming. I know it was only a short period of your work at Hanford, but thank you for going into such detail. It’s really important to capture this information and make the case for preserving the T Plant.

Buckingham: Well, I feel like there’s so many little odds and ends that are just being forgotten. I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done here over the years. It’s just—to me, it’s just something that’s unbelievable. Unbelievable in science.

Franklin: Right, yeah. Well, testing out all of these new processes.

Buckingham: And the other scientific work that was being done here on the radiation and the movement of radioactive nuclides around and everything—gosh, we did a lot of interesting things. We had wells dug out there by the weather tower that we were trying to study what it was doing down under the ground. I think we knew more about what was moving around—

And I feel kind of angry when they start belittling some of the stuff that was done. It’s—it just—in the whole study of the environment that we’ve done around here is, to me, is unbelievable, the work that they’ve produced. And the transportation of radionuclides in the plants that’s still going on.

Franklin: Well, Steve, thank you so much for coming and talking to us about T Plant.

Buckingham: My pleasure. I think I kind of jumbled a lot of stuff around.

Franklin: No, I understand—I think I understand what was going on there, finally, a little bit better than—because I tried reading the documentation and it’s a little—I appreciate you putting it in a simpler form that, you know, even a historian can understand.

[LAUGHTER] 



View interview on Youtube.

REDOX
T Plant
B Plant
U Plant
F Reactor
PUREX
224 Building
231 Building
B Reactor
D Reactor
F Reactor
C Reactor
K East Reactor
K West Reactor
N Reactor
DR Reactor

1947-