84 50 4772 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0e8440432471c8a1803b64e803eaa5af.pdf f19f8eb2f3ce83f68c57cd365931b63c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sage Sentinel Subject The topic of the resource Newspapers Description An account of the resource A weekly newspaper for employees of the Hanford Engineer Works. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sage Sentinel April 14, 1944 Subject The topic of the resource Safety; War work; War bonds & funds Description An account of the resource 22.5x30.5 cm. 4 pages. A weekly publication for employees of the Hanford Engineer Works. Includes coverage of work at Hanford, WWII news, and classified ads for area businesses. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 4/14/1944 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspapers Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1B_009 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2/3/2017 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Engineer Works Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF/A Safety War bonds and funds War work https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F30c47faa7fb5db2dbfee18f41f137427.pdf 35402c8a01a7bbc56c044f96c6028494 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sage Sentinel Subject The topic of the resource Newspapers Description An account of the resource A weekly newspaper for employees of the Hanford Engineer Works. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sage Sentinel April 7, 1944 Subject The topic of the resource Safety; War work; War bonds & funds Description An account of the resource 22.5x30.5 cm. 4 pages. A weekly publication for employees of the Hanford Engineer Works. Includes coverage of work at Hanford, WWII news, and classified ads for area businesses. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 4/7/1944 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspapers Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1B_008 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2/3/2017 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Engineer Works Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF/A Safety War bonds and funds War work https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fad3d6686757d832bde0a187c0cb09315.pdf 59dbc9a2eaba3ceabd54cf3e0f863ae7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sage Sentinel Subject The topic of the resource Newspapers Description An account of the resource A weekly newspaper for employees of the Hanford Engineer Works. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sage Sentinel April 14, 1944 Subject The topic of the resource Safety; War work; War bonds & funds Description An account of the resource 22.5x30.5 cm. 4 pages. A weekly publication for employees of the Hanford Engineer Works. Includes coverage of work at Hanford, WWII news, and classified ads for area businesses. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 4/14/1944 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspapers Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1B_007 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2/3/2017 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Engineer Works Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF/A Safety War bonds and funds War work https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F8f2fac5722592c80f0c2b6dbf82298ec.pdf db1dc08372bfd8f65082d8c592e7048f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sage Sentinel Subject The topic of the resource Newspapers Description An account of the resource A weekly newspaper for employees of the Hanford Engineer Works. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sage Sentinel April 14, 1944 Subject The topic of the resource Safety; War work; War bonds & funds Description An account of the resource 22.5x30.5 cm. 4 pages. A weekly publication for employees of the Hanford Engineer Works. Includes coverage of work at Hanford, WWII news, and classified ads for area businesses. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 4/14/1944 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspapers Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1B_006 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2/3/2017 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Engineer Works Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF/A Safety War bonds and funds War work https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fabc3d6c431c4655fc0350d7b2e5637e3.pdf 5a9e93829c4165d7308c1c112d042ed3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sage Sentinel Subject The topic of the resource Newspapers Description An account of the resource A weekly newspaper for employees of the Hanford Engineer Works. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sage Sentinel April 7, 1944 Subject The topic of the resource Safety; War work; War bonds & funds Description An account of the resource 22.5x30.5 cm. 4 pages. A weekly publication for employees of the Hanford Engineer Works. Includes coverage of work at Hanford, WWII news, and classified ads for area businesses. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 4/7/1944 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspapers Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1B_005 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2/3/2017 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Engineer Works Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF/A Safety War bonds and funds War work https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F984243691d523355769813a82fe5a03c.pdf 068be030116af7de97a11788077d8064 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sage Sentinel Subject The topic of the resource Newspapers Description An account of the resource A weekly newspaper for employees of the Hanford Engineer Works. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sage Sentinel March 24, 1944 Subject The topic of the resource Safety; War work; War bonds & funds Description An account of the resource 22.5x30.5 cm. 4 pages. A weekly publication for employees of the Hanford Engineer Works. Includes coverage of work at Hanford, WWII news, and classified ads for area businesses. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/24/1944 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspapers Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1B_004 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2/1/2017 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Engineer Works Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF/A Safety War bonds and funds War work https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F08564d1726f12762dda1fc6a8a030618.pdf 9eda0faab63f5213d45661153799fc35 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sage Sentinel Subject The topic of the resource Newspapers Description An account of the resource A weekly newspaper for employees of the Hanford Engineer Works. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sage Sentinel March 10, 1944 Subject The topic of the resource Safety; War work; War bonds & funds Description An account of the resource 22.5x30.5 cm. 4 pages. A weekly publication for employees of the Hanford Engineer Works. Includes coverage of work at Hanford, WWII news, and classified ads for area businesses. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/10/1944 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspapers Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1B_003 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2/1/2017 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Engineer Works Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF/A Safety War bonds and funds War work https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fb917196a3c18bef2c8a2e39b88120fdc.pdf 39ab00f12822f27b68e4cd4d771ebe66 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sage Sentinel Subject The topic of the resource Newspapers Description An account of the resource A weekly newspaper for employees of the Hanford Engineer Works. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sage Sentinel March 17, 1944 Subject The topic of the resource Safety; War work; War bonds & funds Description An account of the resource 22.5x30.5 cm. 4 pages. A weekly publication for employees of the Hanford Engineer Works. Includes coverage of work at Hanford, WWII news, and classified ads for area businesses. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/17/1944 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspapers Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1B_002 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2/1/2017 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Engineer Works Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF/A Safety War bonds and funds War work https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F6afb1ba73186f9bf6746e22428651609.pdf cc627092cbb8dbb622f8a4854e98cad6 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sage Sentinel Subject The topic of the resource Newspapers Description An account of the resource A weekly newspaper for employees of the Hanford Engineer Works. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sage Sentinel March 31, 1944 Subject The topic of the resource Safety; War work; War bonds & funds Description An account of the resource 22.5x30.5 cm. 4 pages. A weekly publication for employees of the Hanford Engineer Works. Includes coverage of work at Hanford, WWII news, and classified ads for area businesses. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/31/1944 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspapers Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1B_001 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2/1/2017 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Engineer Works Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF/A Safety War bonds and funds War work https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F553a0d1052d72bf58becca961c019cbe.MP3 466fe150c3a60f5d0b8a7382a0973fdf https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F877068013eb9e8ffa6020981a16c9698.MP3 65a76b09f55860805c190166b369d541 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource B Reactor Museum Association Oral Histories Description An account of the resource Oral History Interviews conducted by the B Reactor Museum Association. The collection is split between a series of audio oral histories taken in the late 1990s and early 2000s by Gene Weisskopf that focuses on the T-Plant, and a series of video oral histories done in the early 1990s by Bill Putman that focus on the B Reactor and Hanford construction. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3, DOCX Language A language of the resource English Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed William Baumgartner Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [Start of Interview] Weisskopf: Can you give me your name and… Baumgartner: My name is William Vincent Baumgartner. Weisskopf: And today’s date. Baumgartner: Today is what, April 11th, the year 2001. Weisskopf: I don’t care what direction we go, I am interested in maybe, just how about briefly what were you were doing before you came here? Baumgartner: Oh, I came straight out of school. Got my degree on June 11th and I signed on, on the 15th. Weisskopf: Did you come here specifically from your degree? Baumgartner: Yes. I had two job opportunities. One was DuPont back east. The other one was Hanford here, with GE here. I didn’t have enough money to get back east, so I took this one. Weisskopf: What was your degree in? Baumgartner: Chemistry. Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: Which you would expect. Weisskopf: __(unclear) been a lot of work here? Baumgartner: Right. When we came in, we were tech rads. There were 500 of us. Weisskopf: Every year there were 500? Baumgartner: No, because they were stocking chemists for REDOX. Weisskopf: And what year was that? Baumgartner: 1951. Weisskopf: Was that the fall or? Baumgartner: We came in June and REDOX went online, I think, in ’52 or ’53, and so they were getting us prepared. Think about it, all of these were Q-cleared people so it took several months in my case. It took from June until the end of August. At which time we then went to, I went to T Plant and I was in T Plant from August of ’51 until November of ’52. And at that time we had a lot of changes, a lot of new supervision. The supervisors were changing because B Plant was shutting down or shut down, and so we were picking up those supervisors plus all the new chemists that were wandering through. In the original, from 1945 until at that time, there was only one shift chemist and we had four shifts, you know A, B, C, D shifts, which means we were working seven days a week from the clock. The plant never shut down, it didn’t even shut down for holidays. Weisskopf: But you were working normal eight-hour days. Baumgartner: Normal eight-hour days five days a week, and see you’d work swing, days, and graveyard. Weisskopf: Yeah, and they rotated them rather quickly right? Baumgartner: Well, it would be like seven graveyards… Weisskopf: Seven weeks or seven days. Baumgartner: No seven days. Every 28-day was a cycle. Weisskopf: Yeah. I think they have changed that since then. Baumgartner: Well, it depends. They might be working 10-hour shifts. We don’t have anything now “operating” that needs to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. At that time no one wanted to shut the plants down. We were going into, at that time, the cold war and things were getting really sticky because we knew that the Russians had weapons and they were making lots of them. So we were just in the process of making more and better than anybody else. Weisskopf: So when you arrived, things were gearing up? Baumgartner: We were gearing up for REDOX. B Plant shut down. T Plant was going to shut down as soon as REDOX got going, because REDOX was built to handle not only all of the material that our reactors could produce but what Savannah River could produce; it was that big a plant. Weisskopf: Were they going to ship stuff out here? Baumgartner: They did. They actually did. Our material that we made here had what was called the lowest MWd material, megawatt days per ton that was a unit of measurement. Our plutonium was what we call 500 megawatt days per ton. Savannah River reactors were quite large and they couldn’t give us any material that had less than 1,000 megawatt days per ton, and so we had to end up blending to ours in order to get a weapon that… What do you know about plutonium? Weisskopf: More than the general layperson. Baumgartner: Okay, plutonium as it comes from the reactor, what you really want is plutonium 239 and you don’t want 240 and 241. The higher the MWd the more 240 and 241 is in the plutonium, which is not a weapon. Weisskopf: And it ends up in your finished product… Baumgartner: Right, and you can separate that out easily. You just can’t, not with what we’ve got. That’s plutonium and we use a chemical reaction to get the plutonium separated from everything. Weisskopf: Would a 1,000 megawatt day have more… Baumgartner: 240 and 241, and that’s not a good weapon material so we blended it with our 500 and basically ____ (unclear) 750 megawatt days per ton which was our weapons. And the material that we got from the reactors would sit out in the reactor, in the basins, or in 200 R Area basin for at least 60 days for cooling off. So the law of the short half-life materials were gone and then we would bring it into T Plant cask. 1,500 pounds of metal, dissolve that up, separate the plutonium out of that at T Plant using a bismuth phosphate coprecipitator in the front end of the canyon and then we would transfer it over to 224, and then they would use allantoin. Allantoin brings now more plutonium for less. In other words, the precipitation is such that there is more plutonium per pound on the precipity than there is with bismuth, but bismuth doesn’t bring down fission products in uranium, where as lanthanum would have a tendency to bring out some of these other things. To give you a little insight, at the time when we were running this we were literally using up all the bismuth that was being mined in America. Does that tell ya? So, in other words, we were using a lot of bismuth. Weisskopf: And throwing it out each batch? Baumgartner: That was all going into the waste tanks. Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: Every bit of it, that’s in the waste tanks. One of these days, we’ll mine that. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: You know cause it’s… Anyway, T Plant, then the canyon building had the bismuth extract from the dissolver, and the volume. The final volume of the plutonium was, I think, something on…. if you can get a hold of a C-Manual. Weisskopf: I’ve got it. Baumgartner: Have you? It is a very large book. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: That will tell you chemically everything you need to know. That was classified TS in 1950. Only a few people got a chance to read that, I was one of them. Weisskopf: When you came here did they sit you down with something like that, or? Baumgartner: Well, I was in a very interesting position. When I went to T Plant, the laboratory 222-T, my first assignment…Now we had three chemists instead of one, so my first assignment was to go to 271-T laboratory, which was a “cold” laboratory. In other words, we weren’t handling any of the reactor materials. This was cold solutions that we were using to make these strikes, you know, as we were going up the process. There were like six solutions that we had to make up for this process. Recognize the C-Manual was written from test tube chemistry to this 1,800 foot long canyon building, and so in the early days when they got to operating they didn’t hesitate to make two or three bismuth strikes to get all of the plutonium out, because they wanted the plutonium. But as time went on, making multi-strikes when a single strike should work is what they were going for and when I got there they were averaging three strikes to get all of the plutonium out of a batch. Weisskopf: Another word for strike is… Baumgartner: Is where you precipitate down with bismuth and you ended up having to use three times before you could get all of the plutonium out. Okay, then I went into 271-T Laboratory where we did the cold chemistry. Read the C-Manual, and it turns out that in the C-Manual, if you look at it very carefully the variance on the chemicals that you could use, when it said six normal it didn’t mean four and a half or five, it meant say like five point eight to six point two. Well, what was happening is that we weren’t quite as careful, our laboratory had gotten dirty over the years and so we were walking outside the limits. Even though we were saying it was six point zero, it really wasn’t for a lot of reasons. One is dirty tools, dirty laboratory, and the other is our standards weren’t good, weren’t as good as they could have been. I got in there and I got the dubious job of trying to figure out how we can get it so we can get down to one. And we did that, it took me about a month and we cleaned up all the chemical, all the glassware, went down and got a brand new set of calibrations that was really very fine, that had to meet the specifications. And then when that happened, we went down to a single strike and we were able to get the plutonium out. When that happened, operations then glommed onto me and says “We can’t take any more chances, this guy is going to do that all the time.” So I ended up making solutions for about three or four months. Weisskopf: You’re talking about major gallons of solutions ____ (unclear)? Baumgartner: Yes, yeah yeah approximately. Weisskopf: The cold chemicals that they were using. Baumgartner: Right, the cold chemicals that were used right. And they have to be made up to specification. Yeah, we made like 500 gallons at a crack, type of thing. Ferrous sulfate, we only made like 50 gallons and we used 50 gallons. That was not something that you could leave hanging around, which they did and then therefore the ferrous sulfate solution wasn’t as strong as it should have been, even though yesterday or the day before we measured it and it was like say, so much normality, and it turns out the next day if you leave it sit in the same ____(unclear) it is gonna be a lot less. That was part of the problem and we got that cleaned up, and when we did, then they decided oh golly, we’re now one strike per run, well let’s see if we can’t make a run, a real just see how much this plant could really have produced. And they never had in the earlier days, you know when they only had F, H, and D, in the very early days, the reactors. See and then the R came on and B Plant, you know and F, B, and C Plant, and then the two. When they came, you know as they got more and more, then these B and T Plant they didn’t have to be efficient because they had enough capability to process it all. However, when they were going to go to REDOX they just wanted to see what the plant could really do, and it turned out they could do a lot more than they had thought. Weisskopf: What was the turnaround time when you got there, generally, for when they dumped the fuel into the dissolver until it was ____(unclear) Baumgartner: I don’t know is that declassified yet? In other words, each run was equivalent to a half a piece. Weisskopf: When you say run you’re assuming 1,500… Baumgartner: Grams, 1,500 grams of plutonium. Weisskopf: From 1,500 tons. Baumgartner: From 1,500 pounds. Weisskopf: A ton and a half. Baumgartner: A ton and a half… Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: …well about a ton. I don’t know about the halves, about a ton of metal. Depended on the… Weisskopf: Metric tons or English tons? Yeah…yeah, I’ll have to look this up. Baumgartner: You have to look in the, C-Manual will tell you. Weisskopf: They go back and forth even in there. Baumgartner: I thought the C-Manual will say 1,500 pounds. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: In a batch. Weisskopf: That sounds right to me. Baumgartner: And so it wasn’t quite a ton, it was about ¾ of a ton. Anyway, that’s, look at the C-Manual and it will tell you. You know, for the specific amount. Weisskopf: From the time that you put it in until the time it was heading out of the 200 Area, or let’s say out of… Baumgartner: No, out of the back end of T Plant before it went down to 231, 2345 building it would, when I first got there it would take about a day, three shifts. Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: When we did our master run, it didn’t take a shift. Weisskopf: When you fine-tuned it and got it down to one precipity. Baumgartner: Right. Weisskopf: So that’s like, we’ll call it eight hours that you could… Baumgartner: About 10 hours is what it was actually. Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: Boy that was a lot of stuff. So the old plants could have produced a lot, we wouldn’t have needed REDOX, but REDOX just had so much capability. Then REDOX had its problems and it wasn’t very long when we found out what its problem was because the hexone got nitrated. Weisskopf: No chemist had predicted that? Baumgartner: No they hadn’t, they didn’t think that trinitro hexone was going to do what TNT does, but it did. And so we had some pops in some of the vessels. And so when that happened, well then we went to PUREX. Weisskopf: When you were at T Plant, basically, they had fine-tuned the process over those years. Baumgartner: No, no. Weisskopf: Not to what you really could have done. Baumgartner: Right. Weisskopf: Yeah, okay. Baumgartner: Right. They were willing to take basically one run per day. Weisskopf: And that was taken care of… Baumgartner: That was taking care of everything needed, which they knew that wouldn’t be the future, but it was enough to satisfy the military needs. You know, when you had B and T, so that basically gave you a weapon a day. Weisskopf: So you were spending most of your time in a lab, and not a hot lab. Baumgartner: Yeah well, I lasted there two months up in the cold lab. Then they say well Bill you gotta come on down to the hot lab, we can’t let you stay up there forever. So what we did then is we moved the cold lab over to 222 T so I could do that hot work and the cold work. Weisskopf: Oh, they put them both together. Baumgartner: Yeah, well, we cleaned off one side and we put all the cold chemicals in there so they went and brought all the samples over to the T, you know 222 T, and then I at the same time got the chance then to do the hot stuff. And it turned out that the two things that I ended up doing, I hadn’t educated from, because everything is pipetting. Weisskopf: Right. Baumgartner: Okay, and the final solution was based on five lambda, so you weren’t allowed to go very much over the mark and just exactly to the mark, and then you had to make double dilutions. So you were making some very interesting high-dilutions in order for the counter to count and you had to be within a fairly narrow… And we were having a hard time without reruns running the final solution, you know that went down to 231, just to get the right count for the accountability, because that was the first accountability. Weisskopf: How many samples would you do in one batch as it went through? That’s what you’re talking about now? Baumgartner: Yeah, one sample. Well, you had many samples from the batch because you would have the dissolver solution, and then you would have the first strike, and then you would have the first strike waste because you… Weisskopf: What would you test in the dissolver? I mean, wasn’t that just dissolvent and dissolve it and move it on and that’s it? Baumgartner: No, the dissolver solution was where we tried to get the first guess at how much plutonium was in the metal. Because see… Weisskopf: Yeah, okay. Baumgartner: And so that when you got it at the back end of the process it had better match. Weisskopf: Back up one step farther, the people at the reactors had estimates of what should be in based on the number of hours in the reactor. Baumgartner: Yeah, but it depended on where in the reactor it was. Weisskopf: Right, how close was that? And when you guys did the first test in the dissolver that was your first chemical analysis ____ (unclear) Baumgartner: That’s the first. Weisskopf: Were they usually close to estimates? Did you argue with the reactor guys about what was in there? Baumgartner: All the time… Weisskopf: Oh. Baumgartner: …all the time. Weisskopf: In what way? Baumgartner: Well, when you’d get 1,100 grams instead of 1,500 grams. Weisskopf: At the end… Baumgartner: Or when you’d get it in the dissolver, what happened to the other 400 grams? You know. Did we lose it? You see, then when the discrepancy was too large then you had to rerun everything. Gotta go back and get another sample of the dissolver solution and then see what the hell…and then if it matched what you took the…because remember now sampling is a real art. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: These guys had some, you know you’re only taking two drops and you know that has got to be representative of what’s in there, and… Weisskopf: Against how many gallons? Baumgartner: Like 500 gallons. So, right off of the bat you’ve got an interesting problem. At that time, not too much was statistics and known. We had arbitrary limits and they were as arbitrary as they thought we could meet ‘em based on the laboratory, you know, having a test tube type technology versus 500 gallons is a whole different world. And so we were having our sweats, so that when you fell out of the limits, and that should be in the C-Manual, those numbers… I know what they are but I am not sure if it’s always… If it’s in the C-Manual you can publish it real easy. I hate to give you information that I am not absolutely sure… Weisskopf: Right. Baumgartner: …has been released. Weisskopf: Yeah, and to tell you the truth the specifics are less important then the generality. Baumgartner: Oh, I got you okay. Weisskopf: Always more better than…just to get a general idea what it was. Here is a couple of things from the Tech Manual. The, well here’s the dissolver flow sheet, sort of a check list, the log, the recipe. Baumgartner: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Eight buckets of 105 each at 3,800 gallons of sodium nitrate dissolver three to five hours at four and a half ____(unclear), okay. Heat dissolver to boiling and add 1,100 pounds of sodium hydroxide, digest for two hours. Okay they have released everything, alright good. Good, good, good, good. So, large quantities, these always are big big deals. So the original solution comes in, it’s you know like 5,100, you know ____ (unclear) 5,100 pounds, okay. That’s 5,300 gallons, 500 gallons basically. Okay, when it comes off the back end with plutonium it’s about 15 gallons. When it comes off the back end at 224 it’s about five gallons. When it comes off the back end at 231 it was a liter and a half, and when it comes off the back end at 2345 it’s a piece of metal, okay, so that’s, okay. 5,000 pounds is the general guess and the solutions are large. You know, you… Weisskopf: And how much was in a sample that came into the hot lab? Baumgartner: Two drops. Weisskopf: Two which? Baumgartner: Two drops. Weisskopf: And that was so radioactive they had to put it in a shield? Baumgartner: Yes, three, three inches. Weisskopf: How could two drops be so radioactive you have put it in a shield? To a layperson that doesn’t sound like much. Baumgartner: It was called a doorstop and in it was a bayonet point and in there was just two drops. Weisskopf: And you didn’t just pull out the test tubes? Baumgartner: Hell no. We had a tool that went into the doorstop, grabbed our 25 lambda sample. Weisskopf: What’s a lambda? Baumgartner: A lambda is a thousandth of a cc. Weisskopf: It was how many of those? Baumgartner: 25, that’s 0.025 cc’s. Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: At two drops, I don’t even remember what two drops is anymore, but I can tell you right now it ain’t a hell of a lot because if you reran a doorstop three times you were out of solution. So, it’s about 100 lambda. Weisskopf: You could run it three times? Baumgartner: Yeah. Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: You could run it three times, then you had to take a new solution. We never went past two, but you could run up to three. Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: If you couldn’t get them to match, if you couldn’t the, you know, the two of them to match because one operator would be one and another operator would then run the other run. So you had two guys running the doorstop and they had to match within a given value and if they did then you went on. That became God’s law about what the plutonium concentration was. Weisskopf: You were looking for plutonium in two drops out of 500 gallons? Baumgartner: Yes. Weisskopf: And, what you were looking for is the percentage of plutonium… Baumgartner: You wanted to come up with a number like say 1,500 grams of what’s in that tank. If it was outside of specifications then you didn’t grab that out of the cement, but there was a limit, 1,500 grams plus or minus a 100 grams for instance; just as a case in point. So that if you got 1,350 and your two guys got 1,350, then they had to go back and resample because it’s supposed to be between 1,400 and 1,600 grams okay? So now they resample. If the second sample now agreed with the first one, then that’s what became…then they says ah-ha, there is not 1,500 grams in there, and there’s whatever the number was. Weisskopf: How close would it have to be before you called an agreement? Baumgartner: What? Weisskopf: If the first guy came up with 1,500, how close could the second one be… Baumgartner: It had to be within 50. We were allowed to have, you know the two had to be within 50 of 1,500 grams. Weisskopf: Back it up one more step. You would then take your number…Let’s say you get an accurate number and you say ‘but the reactor guys are saying, you know, 1,800.’ Baumgartner: Alright, if it was supposed to be 1,800 and we say got 1,500 then we had to back and resample. Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: …because it could be the two drops we got wasn’t quite representative of the solution, so we got another one. If those two agreed within say 100, then we said that’s what the number is. However, if two of them did not agree within 100, you know within say 100 grams then we got a third sample and two out of three. Weisskopf: Now if yours are agreeing, but they are different from what the reactor guys estimated… Baumgartner: Then this is what we took. Weisskopf: You took your numbers and said we’ll talk about it later. Baumgartner: That’s the way we go. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: And so that when got out to the back end of 271 T, the last solution out of there, then that had to check. In other words we couldn’t… Weisskopf: Right. Baumgartner: And if it did check fine, and if it didn’t check then we had to go back do the resampling, because see there you weren’t using a doorstop. Weisskopf: Hadn’t you already lost all the, after you do the percentage… Baumgartner: Oh…you leave them in the tanks. Weisskopf: You leave them in the tank until you’re all done and then you would send it to the waste. Baumgartner: Right. See that’s what I’m…you leave solutions, they sit there. These solutions, they just sat there until the run got accepted. When the run got accepted then you could just pump the stuff to the tank farms. Does that make any sense to you? Weisskopf: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Baumgartner: Okay, you’ve got everything here that you need. Weisskopf: It’s enough to get a good idea of how things ran. Baumgartner: Right, right. Weisskopf: What we’re looking for and the kind of… Baumgartner: And these percentages had to be right because they were now recalculated in terms of what the solution had to be that we are going to be adding. You know like six percent or whatever the percentage was and it wasn’t allowed to deviate very far. Weisskopf: You’re saying based on the amount of plutonium that was in the solution? Baumgartner: No, based on this, it is the amount of metal that you dissolve. Weisskopf: It’s what? Baumgartner: It was the amount of metal you dissolve. We always dissolved the same amount of metal. Weisskopf: It was the batch size, not however much plutonium? Baumgartner: Right, that’s what regulated the amount of chemicals you put in. Weisskopf: Would you need, you wouldn’t be using, you could’ve used less bismuth if there was less plutonium in the batch, theoretically? Baumgartner: Not really. Weisskopf: No? Baumgartner: Bismuth, well when we had it fine-tuned yeah. But, see we were expecting them to put slugs in there that gave us the 1,500 grams. We were expecting 1,800 or down to 11. We were expected 1,500 grams. And we expected them to blend those slugs. They knew where they were at and they knew where they had come from, so… Weisskopf: The batch should add up. Baumgartner: It should have added up and that kind of thing was, you know, we didn’t fuss much. That didn’t bother us a lot. Maybe one run out of 10 deviated from what we expected. The rest of the time these guys were pretty good. They knew that reactor pretty well and they pretty well knew that in this pile there was…especially after we got the computer working pretty well. That took some doing, but once they got the computer program that told them what they needed, when to push, and then…See they would push not the whole reactor, so they would just push it for the section. Weisskopf: The tubes of their choice. Baumgartner: Right, right. And that was based on what the computer said was there, based on what they saw in the profile of the number of neutrons per centimeter squared. When all that happened and that computer program was working, I was very fortunate I happened to know the guy that wrote the dang thing. Weisskopf: Yeah? Baumgartner: And we were taking the class together because at the time, well programming was pretty much at the beginning stages, and the language you were using was your own, and the arithmetic was really…that’s where we were having all of problems. The arithmetic was such that getting five or six digits of precision was pretty hard. And so we were looking for better ways of getting the six or seven, eight digits of precision without taking a large amount of time on the computer. Because you remember now the computer in those days was at like 37 milliseconds per cycle. So you weren’t getting very many cycles per second, like you are now where we got 700 megahertz. Weisskopf: 37 milliseconds is 30 cycles per second, give or take. Baumgartner: No it’s 300 I think. Weisskopf: 300. Baumgartner: 300 yeah. And now there are 900 million. In my home, what I got is 333. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: And that’s about three or four years old. So you get what I am trying to say. The computers were small. They were only like six kil, and…So we were looking for methods and the reactor kind of thing was really burning computer time. Weisskopf: Just calculating when the slugs were ready to push out… Baumgartner: Right, when they are ready to push out, so we were taking an inordinate large amount of time. So the guy worked on that problem and we took them out. Weisskopf: Do you remember what department he would have been in to be doing that… Baumgartner: He would have been in the 100 Area, but in operations. Weisskopf: With their own people. Baumgartner: Yeah it was his own, and there weren’t too many computer people at that time. You know there was, I think there was like 10 guys that I knew. Weisskopf: Any reactor operators or… Baumgartner: Well the reactor operators are just pushers of buttons and switches you know, but nuclear engineers…we were teaching the guys nuclear engineering here. I took classes on that. Weisskopf: And realizing too that this idea of estimating when the slugs are ready and then finding out that you were correct… Baumgartner: Right. Weisskopf: And they had to do it… Baumgartner: Well they had to make a whole bunch of experiments and all that kind stuff and it took awhile, it took awhile. Anyway, that’s the precursor to this. At the time, when like I say it was all trying to push metal through and so we had limits and if we deviated from the limits then we did a resampling, and then if the samples were close then we went ahead and continued, got the final one. They checked the front end within a certain limit. In other words, we figured at least 90%, 90%-95% recovery. Weisskopf: Recovery, and you were happy… Baumgartner: Well when it first got there we were happy with that one. When got done we were not happy until we got 99. So, cause then that leaves only a little bit of plutonium in the waste solutions. Weisskopf: Were there any problems you remember overcoming that made a noticeable difference that hey hadn’t seen before or hadn’t been able to correct, or hadn’t realized it was there? Baumgartner: I don’t know, there was an awful lot of chemical engineers in T Plant, I think each shift had like four. Weisskopf: They had been working on it for years. Baumgartner: Yeah, right from the beginning. And they were as dumbfounded as everybody else was because, not realizing some of these problems. It happened that my forte was analytical chemistry and I had thee years of that stuff. When I went to Seattle University, here let me give you my college. Freshman year was Yakima Valley College, so I took beginning chemistry. Sophomore year I went up to Seattle University. I then took analytical chemistry. In my Junior year I came back to Yakima Valley and I got a ____ (unclear), and Junior year I was back at Yakima Valley College, because it cost me my whole year’s of college money and I took organic. My senior year, ah ha now then, I ended up having to take P-chem organics since I had taken it in Yakima Valley. I had to take organic qual and since then I liked what I had done. I had to take advanced analytical chemistry and advanced organic for my senior year. I was taking like 10 hours every quarter chemistry classes. So I got 30 hours my senior year alone. So I had an extra year basically of chemistry just to get my degree. And so I ended up having the kind of thing that they wanted here. Somewhat, because one of solutions was semi-organic. Weisskopf: What kind of automated instruments, electronic instruments were you using back in college? Was it all test tubes and… Baumgartner: Well, most of the stuff that I did in college was in terms of gravimetric. Here it was volumetric. Volumetric was what we called elementary, it was more prone to error. And so that’s what I was getting at. Volumetric analysis is more prone to error, 50 lambda in 10 milliliters, and 25 lambda out of that, so you would have to make sure that everything is stirred, etc, etc, etc. So volumetric lends itself to some real interesting errors. Whereas gravimetric errors, we would have precipitated it, put it onto you know, pull it out on the filtered paper, weighed the filter paper before and after, would have been much tighter tolerance. Weisskopf: With two drops. Baumgartner: Yeah, because filter paper… Weisskopf: Well, that’s what…I’m sorry, but back at Berkley when they discovered plutonium those are the amounts they were working with, tiny, tiny, tiny amounts. Baumgartner: Yeah, they were with a fraction of a gram. Weisskopf: Yeah, okay. Baumgartner: See and that was the total amount and now your going sample that to see how much there was really there. Weisskopf: So the beauty of chemistry is you can do it on big levels or small levels, the equations are the same, it’s just that instrumentation and the beakers are different sizes. Baumgartner: Well, also too in gravimetric if you way say a five gram sample and you have down to the closest 10th of a milligram on possible with a beam balance. You can do that. So that gives me like three orders of magnitude, so a little bit of wait goes a long ways. Secondly, your adding some weight to the precipitate, by you know, putting some more, you know, atoms to the molecule and it was your precipitating so therefore your putting more weight to so its not less, it’s more. And so there, and you correct for it. But the point I’m getting at is you make sure that your gravimetric analysis will allow you at least 99%, so that if you say you can go to the closet 10th of a milligram. You would expect to have at least 10 grams difference in weight. And so in our case we would process something on the order of 50 milligrams, see and that would be 500. So that we should have been able to hit one percent easy with the gravimetric analysis. Whereas with volumetric analysis now, you’re going to titrate and you have to know…. When I first got there they gave me the calibrated solutions to two digits. Weisskopf: As opposed to… what would you have expected? Baumgartner: I would have expected four. With four I can do something with it. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: I can’t do much precision analysis, because now all of a sudden the third digit is half, you know, so now I got I suppose a six normal and I’ve got five that’s almost a percent. And so I got nasty when I went down there at the standards. I says I’ve got to have a minimum of three digits, I’d prefer four. That was very hard for them to give me so they gave me basically about three and a half on the volumetric, but that made the difference. That’s why we ended up getting precisely what we were… It was the little things like this that people weren’t watching. Yeah, if it was really and truly you know six normal, you know, plus or minus 0.1 normal everything was fine, but what happens when it isn’t? You know, then yeah, yeah we ended up striking twice, three times, that kind of thing. Anyway, with me getting the advantage of working with these guys in the cold part, I also was allowed to drive the elevator, in other words the crane. Weisskopf: Yeah? Baumgartner: I got to do that, moving the cell blocks. Weisskopf: Based on what? Baumgartner: Well they began to know me. Weisskopf: Oh…yeah okay. Baumgartner: So I says well why don’t I sit in with you to see what you’re doing. I says ‘how can I help if I don’t know what anybody is doing?’ You know, a chemist can do more than just chemistry if he can watch what people are doing, see what kind of system. In other words, are the cells really as the C-Manual says they are? You know, big hurky stainless steel tanks. In other words, how much volume is sitting between this tank and that thank you know. Pipes two inches in diameter is eight feet long, well there’s somebody in there. It’s the little things like this that they had overlooked that when I saw the equipment that I said ah that makes sense to me. And then we were dropping solutions down through sort of a rig, you know a valve, you know, so this could go into this one and this, oh we’ll let it go into that one. So it was all of those kinds of things. So there were solutions sitting there. Get what I’m trying to say? From the tank where we knew what it was until it ran out the spout down into wherever it was going. Well there was a volume in there. Okay, if that thing sits there for any length of time, well it’s not going to be the same. It’s just little things like this that, when I saw, you know, even though I read it in the manual, but it doesn’t give you these volumes. So, you couldn’t strike a tank with 10 gallons then you had 10 gallons in the pipe. Weisskopf: You wouldn’t be using the fresh solution… Baumgartner: Right. In other words, you ended up having problems and this was all part of the problem. So then I went to these volumes, you know, and how much was being added and we then played around a little bit and we strengthened a couple of them, went to 6.3 instead of 6.0 to make up for what was decaying in the pipery. And when we did that, see that’s how we ended up really fine-tuning one strike, we really could shove it through there. It was little things like that that hadn’t been considered from the chemistry in the laboratory to the big plant. Those are the kinds of things that we discovered on the job. The chemical engineers were looking at this thing in the massive. I was looking at it in terms of chemistry and how much the volumes were involved and what my normalities had to be and all you know. Weisskopf: Who would have been the person at T Plant who knew what the current settings were, like it wasn’t a railroad, it was a chemistry system with pipes, who would have the map that shows how everything is connected? Baumgartner: The maps were what we called on the pipe roll. In other words, here sits the tanks and then we’ve got a big wall, a 12-foot concrete wall, and then on the other side you have these boards like the six three board which was the six three Tank and he had… In other words, he could push valves I could validate which would then allow solution A to drop in B, C, D, E and they knew, you know, well I’m going to add this solution to valve C. So he’d open up valve C and the amount of volume that was up there was the specified volume, you know that was dropped down in there and they would let it five minutes and yell ‘run’ down in there and then they’d close the valve and that thing. These are boards and each section like six had a board, seven had a board, eight had a board, up to 13; each one had a board. And each had groups of valves for whatever they were going to do whether they were exit, import, you know the openings, exit, import, adding solutions and all that kind. And then you know, so there would be maybe 8-10 switches you know for them to open and close that they would do, and there would be an operator in front of each one of those, every shift. And then there would be two, what I call chemical engineers following and they had a log book when they did what and for how long, opened at such and such a time, closed at such and such a time. That was all part of the record. Weisskopf: …in there that are like that, the log pages where you would actually put in what had happened. Baumgartner: Right. Weisskopf: ____ (unclear) supposed to do, here’s the time we start…. Baumgartner: Right, right and that all got put in there and the chemical engineer picked those up. He then scanned them. He went over them to find, you know, to make sure everything was copacetic against whatever rules. So they had a set of rules, we’ll say like five minutes, so they didn’t expect anything between four and a half to five and a half minutes so he expected a time to be like that. Sometimes then an operator would be out maybe smoking a cigarette, God only knows you know, because not everybody was conscious totally with time, you know we’re human beings. So that was the operations part. I knew all that because I had been down to see what they were all doing. This is how I recognized that there was heels. The same way with exporting. The pipe that went into the tank didn’t drain every drop. That sounds elementary, but now you have find out, you know, in other words, because when they built the tank it turns out that each tank, you know there might be three tanks identical, they would have different heels. Weisskopf: Describe what a heel is. Baumgartner: Heel is leftover solution. Now on the surface that doesn’t sound like much, but it turns out that suppose you dissolve up something, but not everything stays in the solution. Suppose you’ve got particulates leftover, it’s you know, it’s all… Especially when you’re making the precipitate you know and it’s falling down. Now when you, you know, pull that precipitate out and go to the next tank…did you get it all? See how much would have stayed in the heel? So those are the…Now the chemical engineers worried about that. Now how do you quantify that? Weisskopf: You can’t go in and look. Baumgartner: No, heck no. So we developed some sample analysis over in the lab with them. We worked together, hand in glove, and then we sat there. I got involved in a lot of that kind of thing just because of the analytical chemistry that I’d had. Not everybody that came out with a BS in chemistry had all the chemistry that I had. And that was, anyway that was fine with me. I enjoyed my time there and I knew the operating people. I was on C, A, and D shifts, so I got to meet different people. Like if you were on C-shift you only met those operators on C shift, but… Weisskopf: Oh you didn’t change with the same shift all the time? Baumgartner: You always stayed with the same shift generally. Weisskopf: So you were with the same operators? Baumgartner: Same operators all the time when you were on C shift. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: But I was very fortunate where I got bumped from C shift, to A shift, to D shift, so I got to meet not only C people, but I got to meet D and A people. And it makes a difference because you can pretty soon, like a technician, you can tell which ones are the good ones, that type of thing. And that made a difference for me. Anyway, I think I’ve answered all…. Weisskopf: How about, you mentioned you got to ride in the crane. Could you describe…how tedious was it. Describe what it must have been like for the crane operator. Baumgartner: Oh…it’s a single lens, no depth perception. So what they did is they would shine light so there would be shadows, you know because to pick up a block. For instance, it was a metal frame you know that came like that and he had to put a hook into there so he could lift the rod. Well with no depth perception, where in the hell is the hook? You know it might be over here…might be… Weisskopf: He could only look down, he couldn’t look from the side? Baumgartner: No, and only one eye. Only one single eye through a whole bunch of going down, because you know he couldn’t look straight down because we were on the side. Weisskopf: You’re right, right. Baumgartner: You know we were on the side. So you were going over a barrier looking down and you couldn’t and then the blocks were all numbered and that kind of stuff. Like he’d have six-three, A, B, C, you know that, A comes first and then you know, and so that you put the three blocks back onto the cell the same way each time, because they were not identical pieces. Weisskopf: Right. When you took the lens off and looked down, there might be a mass of equipment and pipes. What would the crane operator, how would he know which one to take off first? What was that called? His instructions, you know, did he have a sheet of things he was supposed to…. Baumgartner: The chemical engineer told him that maybe I want it, now each pipe had a little thing for him to put the hook on and we had the big hook for the blocks and then we had a little hook for when we wanted to do repair work. For instance, you want to take off a small piece of pipe. Okay he had to go, first of all he had an impact trench which he had to set down on that baby and get onto that nut, and then you undo it. There might be four on one end and four on the other end, pull that pipe out, put another one in its place. He had to do that all with one eye and no depth perception. So, it was all in how the guy wanted the light set so that there would be shadows so that he would know when the hook was….you know how do you know when the hook gets in there and fix it? Weisskopf: Did he have the lights on the crane that he would adjust? Baumgartner: No they were up to high. Weisskopf: So what lights were there? Baumgartner: When they opened a cell, they had like on a rack you know and they have lights shining down. You know it didn’t matter that that got irradiated. Weisskopf: Right. Baumgartner: You know, so, for instance if there was a cell we would move all the blocks from six-three over to seven. You know, okay, so on this end on each end you could have lights or you‘d have two one side so you, whatever the guy specified, the crane operator. And they learned that from scratch. They had four of the best crane operators your ever gonna find, because doing that job with one eye is…. When I, it takes a lot more finesse than you’d think. Weisskopf: And patience. Baumgartner: And these guys are very quick. TAPE 1 SIDE B Baumgartner: …And then you’d have to pull the tank out. So, it was to me, the most skilled individual was a crane operator and they were very good. I can remember him taking all of the three blocks off a cell in less than 10 minutes. I can remember him taking off two pipes, you know bringing your impact wrench down, putting it onto the nuts four on each end, that’s eight bolts, and it was highly magnetized so that bolt stuck, you know to impact wrench, and he had them pulled over and somebody had to, you know you had to undo it. I don’t know how that impact wrench was built, but it allowed him to put the bolts in place. I think they put them into a little thing to where he could go back down and grab a hole. You know, it set down into a block you know with a hole where the bolt then fit down into the hole with a head on top and then he would drop it off and then he’d go and grab the next one. And when had all eight, he could see all eight now, ‘I got them all off’. It’s the little things you know that you don’t….he says well I gotta take off eight bolts, so he wanted to make sure he had them all off. And I can remember we took out a six-three tank one time, the dissolver solution tank and it took one day. There was like four pipes to take off, pull the tank out, put it onto the railroad car…you know six railroad cars away, because this is all over, the tank had sludge in the bottom, hotter than hell…and then that went to the burial ground and the new tank had been sitting there and he went and picked it up and put it down in there. And that had to be oriented so that it just sat only one way, so that all of these hangers just fit perfectly. Because you’re talking about hangers, you know pipes that go to the wall you know where the guy is opening and closing and all that type of thing and he did that in one day. Weisskopf: And there could be no workers anywhere near that… Baumgartner: Not in the canyon. Once you pulled off the cellblocks, now and up to 11, no one on the high end up to cell 11, from six to cell 11, I guess there was a cell five. But anyway, when those blocks were off no one was in the canyon, but I think if he had 12 and 13 you could have someone in the canyon because there wasn’t enough stuff up there anymore to make any difference. I don’t know…have you got pictures of that? Oh here we go. Okay, oh I never saw, yeah. There’s 20 cells I see, but I don’t ever… Weisskopf: Sections… Baumgartner: Yeah, but I never saw us ever go past 13, so I am assuming that that…Now the waste from 224 building and that was recycled. You know, take my word for that. Weisskopf: When you say recycled… Baumgartner: Ran through another run, was added to a solution and up here at about 10 and 11 tank they would add it back into there. It wouldn’t be very much. Weisskopf: Oh you mean the waste from… Baumgartner: The waste from 224. Weisskopf: From their finished process, whatever was left would have a tiny amount of plutonium. Baumgartner: Yeah, whatever it had in there they recycled it and ran it in even though we didn’t think, but we sure there was no plutonium or yeah… Okay, any other questions? Weisskopf: The width… Baumgartner: Oh here we go, that is a nice picture of it. Here you can see where the crane operator was. Weisskopf: Yep. Baumgartner: Yep, yep, yep. Pipe gallery and operator gallery, see this is where these guys were. And then the pipe gallery is where solutions were running. Oh God, it was a mess. Cause you know you make, the solutions were in 271 where the crane operator got into the cab. He would get into the cab in the front end here, he got into the cab in the front end and then you know, and that’s where we made up the solutions. Where we made up the solutions, at that, right where the crane was, where he got in. This is how I got to know the guy, cause the guy had to walk by the laboratory. And then the tank solutions that we were making up were right there and there was just a hallway to his crane. So, you know, and he couldn’t, I don’t remember… The longest I ever saw a guy in there was four hours. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: But most of the time, a guy couldn’t handle much more then about two hours and then he had to have about a 30-minute break, because that was just to…unless he could use both eyes. But, I don’t’ remember anybody ever using two eyes. Weisskopf: No. When there is a batch ready to go, anybody who was holding it up would be under a lot of pressure, whether it was the chemist or the crane operator who had a chore to do, how did that make your daily routine? Was it pretty pressured? Baumgartner: For me, no, we didn’t, for us in the laboratory that was not the case. The only time we ever held anybody up was if we ran out of a solution. Weisskopf: For the cold solution. Baumgartner: For the cold solution, and then they got pissed. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: You’re right, and that only happened, not very often. You know that would be an error on the part of the chemical engineer. Weisskopf: He just didn’t order enough or… Baumgartner: He didn’t make the tank. In other words they ran too much solution through, you know. When we got into the final run that happened to us a couple of times where a guy made up 500 gallons and we used 500 gallons before I made up…because there were two tanks and each one, you know…you’ve got this one running and your making this one up and your trying to make it up as close to the using…of finishing off the using so that you didn’t make too many, because some of these are ____ (s/l oxcit) and reduction solutions and they age poorly, they lose their strength. Weisskopf: How many hours a day or… Baumgartner: Oh ferrous sulfate solution, probably in three or four days would lose 50%. Weisskopf: Oh, okay. Baumgartner: That kind of problem. So you didn’t want to make up a ferrous sulfate solution except maybe just a few hours before you start using it was the best, then it was the closest. I worked out a table for them to, because they would change the amount of volume as it got older. I would give them the moment when it got…when we knew what it was and then as it aged, and then we’d say well okay it’s 6.3, and then two hours later it was 6.2 and that kind of thing. So that they would know how much more, maybe you would add an extra gallon or two or three of that solution just to make sure that it would work, you know. Weisskopf: What about the hot lab though, if they were under pressure to get their numbers done… Baumgartner: That was, the sooner the better because you couldn’t go from 6.3 to 7 or to 8 until you had the answer verified. So, when these operators came in and took those samples and they had to bring them over and then we got right on ‘em. In other words, if we screwed around more than and hour and half by the time they got the answer they were ticked. Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: Because see that means that tank was sitting there, it couldn’t move. Weisskopf: So you always did test at the dissolver to get a first number? Baumgartner: Always. Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: And we did a test on every dang…seven, eight, nine, ten, hey… Weisskopf: And each of those took about an hour? Baumgartner: An hour and a half. Weisskopf: Oh, so that’s a good hunk of the batch time right there. Baumgartner: Well… Weisskopf: Because they were processing… Baumgartner: They were processing. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: See as soon as they got the 6.3 out then they could put another dissolver in there. Weisskopf: Right. Baumgartner: So that they could have, in other words there might be three runs going through the canyon. Weisskopf: And if your numbers didn’t match then you say we have to do another test or take another sample, then you’re starting to hold things up. Baumgartner: Then is when, yeah right, right, right. Weisskopf: If you literally had to go get another sample, how long would it take? Baumgartner: Operators had to go back into the canyon, had to go back into these little doors, go into where the sample, there was a little sample room area where they would have the doorstop and they would do their little thing of agitating solution, etc, etc, etc, etc, and dropping in the two drops. You know, sucking it out about three times into that little drop…sucking it all and doing it about three times to get the right sample size. I watched that operation too. That was a, they weren’t stirring it enough to start with… Weisskopf: Now you said getting a sample. Didn’t some of the cells have a little inset box where they would get the samples at the cell? Baumgartner: No, no, they were all gotten over here. Weisskopf: In the operating gallery or where would…. Baumgartner: No, no, not in the operating, on the other side. On the other side of the canyon Building, on these little doors that you see right here, that allowed them to go into a little room and they could sample three cells. Each one allowed them to sample three cells. So they could, in other words, this one could sample these three cells, and then they overlapped except for the middle one, but they overlapped on one so that if you didn’t like the answer from that one you could go maybe in the next bay and sample it from the other sampler. You know, you had, the only one you couldn’t was the middle one. Weisskopf: And would they enter then from that side… Baumgartner: They would enter from this side and it was just a small room, just a small room. And see these pipes went into the tank, you know they dropped into the tank and it would be a little pipe you know and they’d stir around fresh solution and then… There was a whole… You didn’t take that out of the C-Manual, it tells you, they told them how to do that. And, well here, you’ve got a perfect picture. It’s complicated. See here, all you had to do to take off this one is go down and hit that thing with the impacter and straight down. Yep, here it is. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: You can get a pretty good feel as to what it was doing. Weisskopf: And did they have a map or a chart that would say what’s connected to what? Baumgartner: Absolutely. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: Absolutely. The engineer says you go in and you go to the fourth valve. So the guy had to go down and he had read one, two, three, go and pull that one off. Weisskopf: Would they ever hook it up to the wrong one… Baumgartner: Not easy. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: Because they were all made with different lengths… Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: And different lengths. You couldn’t put this particular hanger on any place but here. So you might get it on here and it wouldn’t fit. It wouldn’t fit. It wouldn’t fit properly. Weisskopf: And if they were replacing a jumper or needed a new one… Baumgartner: Well you had to have, remember you had to pull off two. You had to pull off two to get the jumper off. If you had the wrong jumper it wouldn’t fit… Weisskopf: Right. Baumgartner: …on there. No that was nicely designed. Take my word. Weisskopf: Speaking of design, did you run into, you know DuPont designed the building before they even knew, understood completely how it going to be used. Did it work out well by the time you were there? Was the building… Baumgartner: Oh yeah… Weisskopf: …performing as… Baumgartner: Oh yeah, it was performing like the C-Manual says it should. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: And as a matter of fact when we did the trail laying on the speed runs, I think top management was absolutely flabbergasted that that thing was capable of doing that kind of production. Never, they didn’t think it was possible. And that happened in ’52 just before they went down. I think they shut down in August of ’52. I am not sure when it down. You look it up some place, it’s around somewhere. Well, you’ve got everything here. You’ve got tank farms? Weisskopf: Yeah… Baumgartner: You’ve got the whole Two-West Area. Weisskopf: The Tech-Manual has tons of great, it is almost written for a layman in the sense that it is not full of acronyms and utterly technical terminology. Baumgartner: It was written by DuPont people who were chemists and chemical engineers and this is how they would write a manual for their own things. Weisskopf: It’s very readable. Baumgartner: Oh, it’s real readable. I mean if I could read it, it was readable. So, but you… Weisskopf: What was the last six months before they shut the plant down? They were just processing up to the last day or what kind of things were you doing? Baumgartner: We processed up to the last week, two weeks, and then we cleaned for two weeks. Weisskopf: What type, you know, how exactly… Baumgartner: Run solutions, dummies, didn’t… Weisskopf: Just to flush things out? Baumgartner: Yep, just flushed everything out. This was when we found out that a couple of the tanks had some heels. Because see these tanks should have gotten fairly clean, but they didn’t. Weisskopf: Oh, okay. Baumgartner: They turned out to be pretty hot. Weisskopf: And was the problem that it was hot, or that you were… Baumgartner: It was high gamma. Higher gamma levels. See we thought that after we flushed, we could down to the six-three tank basically and literally go into the canyon building… Weisskopf: Oh… Baumgartner: …and you know, get what I’m trying to say? Weisskopf: And walk around. Baumgartner: Walk around, because what the hell you cleaned it all up. So, but that didn’t really happen that way. Weisskopf: Did they end up just yanking it and burying it or? Baumgartner: I thought they left it in for a zillion years and then was pulled out when they decommissioned it. Weisskopf: Because they had to immediate use for the building right? Baumgartner: Well, but you didn’t, just because we didn’t operate with it didn’t mean we couldn’t. Weisskopf: Right. Baumgartner: And there is nothing that says that if PUREX or REDOX doesn’t blow up, well hey we didn’t know. Weisskopf: Right. But you wanted to keep the building operational. Baumgartner: It was in mothballs. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: And B Plant went off of mothballs. Once we got T Plant running high speed then we didn’t need B Plant anymore. Because now it was doing more than the two plants were doing together. Because before the two plants were doing 30-56, so you know you say well we don’t need B Plant. So B Plant then went and we were starting to process the waste solution and taking out the strontium, and we were. See there are only two really bad actors in the waste solution which would mean that the waste tanks if you took those out after about 15-20 years would be nothing in them, and that is cobalt and strontium. If you pull those two babies out, then your tanks would decay to zero basically in 15 years and that was the goal behind some of this. Some of those tanks, they wanted them to be cold and they were. Though after they had gone though B Plant some of those old tanks really, truthfully, I mean you know you had to literally stuff the CP into it before you could even get a reading. So, it worked, it worked. And they were shipping solutions between West Area and B Plant, and from B Plant and back to West Area. There was a pipeline that runs from the tank farms from B Plant, to all the tank farms. Weisskopf: So they could move stuff… Baumgartner: Yeah they moved stuff, and one of the pipes had hot solution coming in and the other one was the cold solution going out. Let me see, there were three plants built originally to do the same thing; T, B, and U. U Plant never went online and the only thing we did with U Plant was we took and they separated out the uranium from the, you know from the waste solution. And that ran through U Plant and then our product there was yellow cake, in other words yellow powder, it was uranium oxide, and that was shipped wherever, back east probably or I think to Oak Ridge. Weisskopf: Did that lower the tank levels much? Baumgartner: I don’t think so. The only thing that would lower the tank levels basically would be to, would be for the evaporation. Getting rid of the liquid, because once you got rid of the uranium now you’ve got rid of 1,500, you know, you’ve got 500 gallons and you pull out almost most of the weight, what’s left it either bismuth or lanthanum, plus the fission product, plus the aluminum. The you know, the slug can. That was there. Weisskopf: Is that still there? Baumgartner: Yeah, it’s still there. Weisskopf: They never did retrieve those? Baumgartner: Never retrieved a dime of that. There were a lot of proposals put together in the late 50’s for mining the bismuth. Weisskopf: Really? Was it worth that much? Baumgartner: Well, it wasn’t worth enough at that time, but I don’t think it’s ever been re-visited. You know there has been so much anti-nuclear things that trying to recover anything people would be so damn scared that if there was a 10 counts per minute of fission products in the bismuth, why they would be upset. Weisskopf: So how about just giving a brief idea of what you did after left T Plant. Baumgartner: Oh, I went to 231 and 2345. Weisskopf: Yeah, more chemistry? Baumgartner: Yeah, for a year I did chemistry and then after I went into radiation protection. And since I had spent so much time in T, 231, 2345, I was brought back for the Health Physics people to 231, 2345 and all of the material that left that building I signed off on from 1954 to… Weisskopf: Signed off in what way? Baumgartner: Signed off I knew it went out, what the numbers were, that it wasn’t contaminated, etc, etc, etc. What containers it was put into when it left the building. Who took it? And as far as I know those were a terrible ____(unclear). That was GE ____(unclear). So you wouldn’t know, from those you could make some real quick assumptions as to what went on, but from 1954-1958 I was in 2345. That’s when we went from what we call the rubber glove line which was a hood operation with glove to a mechanical line where everything was fairly mechanicalized with little trains, you know. Where you didn’t touch the material as much because when I first got there in ’54, the operators in 2345 building were burning out, in other words they weren’t able to work a year. So we had to have operators, you know not necessarily working 2345 building but they had to be trained and then they were rotated so they could…some of the guys were burning out…in other words they were getting limit of radiation that they were allowed by say August. So there was five, six months when you had to bring in other guys and so it was economically feasible for use to figure out ways in which we could stop doing that. And it wasn’t until like ’58 before we really solved all the problems and were allowing the operators to run the whole year. So, we were able to cut down the, basically cut the exposure more than half so that they could operate the whole year. Also do remember 2345 Building was top secret and everybody got fussy about having so many people having top secret. Weisskopf: Oh you mean just to work there. Baumgartner: Yeah, just work there… Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: Because that was fine to finish plant see, and so the people who were working there saw what the hell it was our products, you know. And you just, you know, operators they weren’t just a dime a dozen. Well it’s a lot training besides. I spent a lot of training time, both Health Physics people as well as operators, because you know a guy can’t just come in there and….it’s a foundry and foundry operations are notoriously famous for, you know, doing all kinds of dumb things you know. And plutonium was no exception. I mean if you could do it with lead, you could do it with plutonium you know and we did it. And so there was a foundry operation, it’s the best description I can give you. I won’t say any more than that, because I don’t know if it’s been declassified… Weisskopf: It would take a while for you find out. Baumgartner: Yeah, I’d have to go and take a look at the pictures and see what’s been declassified. Weisskopf: So… Baumgartner: I think the only thing that is not declassified is the actual production numbers. Weisskopf: They don’t like to talk about that. Baumgartner: And they don’t want you talking about that and they didn’t want you talking about too many details about how the line worked. There were lots of problems you know since you’ve got a foundry. There was crucibles in which you were ____ (unclear) and melting plutonium and it was running down into the shape, crucibles break. How do you stop that? For awhile there we were getting, see we never made our crucibles here, we got them and crucible-breaking problems were really severe. So, that had to be solved. That was not my problem. My problem was making sure the guys weren’t getting too much radiation. It was the only operational building, which wasn’t monitored by operation monitors. Weisskopf: Really? Baumgartner: We used Radiological Science people. At least, in my tenure there, for the four years. Then after I left that, one of my major problems was that we knew that the radiation that the people were being exposed to wasn’t being properly monitored with the batch. Neutrons are very difficult to monitor and we were not doing too good. Weisskopf: A film badge doesn’t pick up neutrons. That’s not meant for neutrons. Baumgartner: It wasn’t meant for neutrons. So you would have had to have something separate and it wasn’t until, let’ see, we went to the new badge. A new film badge, oh I think in ’65 and I left. I went to US Testing, who then had the contract for processing the film badges. The bioassays and the environmental samples and we made further improvements. We did a lot of improving and the last function that I did before I retired, in 1989-1995, was put the new dosimeter in place which measures everything. Weisskopf: How do you measure neutrons? Baumgartner: Lithium six. Weisskopf: Oh, just film impregnated with it? Baumgartner: No, no, these are little squares, little crystals. Lithium six will store the neutron effect and when you heat it up, it gives it off as light and we measure that with a photomultiplier tube. Same way with the lithium seven, it only measures gamma. Lithium six measures gamma and neutrons. And what your doing is your, its only thermal neutrons that your measuring, but your measuring the fast neutrons that hit the body, get moderated, and come back. Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: Because there ain’t no well in hell you’re going to measure fast neutrons, not with anything that I know. Counters you can do, but even then they use moderators, you know like BF-three tubes inside of paraffin casks; very difficult to measure fast neutrons. And secondly, responses for the BF-three tubes changed by a factor of 1,000 between fast and thermal so you have all of these funny little things going on. On film, to go from the old badge, you know the one that had the silver, to the one with four filters, I collected 8,000 data points to get the equations for that thing to work. And then when I did the new badge, I collected I think 12,000 data points to make sure that my responses and the equations that I’ve got in the system are correct. So, it wasn’t done just haphazardly, it was done with a lot of finesse. We had a lot of statistics. We tried to make the equations be within 95% accuracy. We felt, we wanted to move away from 50%. Weisskopf: You said you’d retired what year? Baumgartner: ’95. Weisskopf: And Hanford had stopped production in ’80… Baumgartner: By…. Weisskopf: 89 or? Baumgartner: Well, they started back up. There was a whole bunch of material at N Reactor produced and so it had been sitting there for years and years and years and so then they started PUREX back up and got rid of all that. Weisskopf: So what kind of things were you doing the last five years when there was no longer production? Baumgartner: 2345 Building didn’t go away. Weisskopf: Still, I think, you still had material to work with. Baumgartner: Do you know anything about a weapon? Weisskopf: Well, laypersons. Baumgartner: Alright what does a layperson thing about a nuclear bomb? An atomic bomb? When we make one does it stay an atomic bomb forever, it doesn’t decay, it doesn’t get you know…. It turns out if you make an atomic bomb today that in about seven years if you don’t do anything with it, it ain’t gonna work. Weisskopf: So are we talking the plutonium aspect of it? Or the high explosives and all the… Baumgartner: No, the high explosives. What happens, what is in plutonium that could possibly screw up an atom bomb? Weisskopf: Isotopes and oxidation. Baumgartner: Ahhh, not oxidation. Weisskopf: Unless they took care of that. Baumgartner: That’s not it, it’s the isotopes and 240 and 241 decay at a pretty quick rate and it goes to americium, which is a neutron absorbent, it’s a real suck-up device. And pretty soon you’ve got enough americium sitting there that the thing won’t go off. It’s absorbing the neutrons to where the neutron no longer, you don’t have a certain level of neutrons to start the reaction. Alright? Weisskopf: Rebuilding… Baumgartner: So you gotta take the darn thing apart, get rid of the americium. Weisskopf: It’s a chemical process. Baumgartner: Right. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: You’ve gotta get rid of the americium and then you make it back into…Okay so there has to be a cycle so when Americans are going on to this non-nuclear and they are not reworking anything, pretty soon you don’t have a nuclear capability. So, nuclear rework has to be done. Weisskopf: Why wouldn’t it have been worthwhile to take the plutonium from Hanford and run it though what they were doing at Oak Ridge with uranium to strip out the isotopes they didn’t want? And leave pure… Baumgartner: Ahh, uranium 235 and 238 is three atoms difference. What’s plutonium in 239, 240… one. You’d have to have a diffusion plant that is about a thousand times bigger than what you’ve got. Weisskopf: And run it 10 times longer, yeah. Okay. Baumgartner: You know you’re not going to get the separation you think you are. However, there is something that’s much better. I think it’s classified. Weisskopf: But, those are problems that people thought about. Baumgartner: Oh hey, we thought about that right from the beginning. Weisskopf: Does 240 and 241 fission like 239, is it okay to be in there as far as… Baumgartner: Oh, it’s marvelous. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: It’s marvelous. Weisskopf: It’s the decay that’s the problem. Baumgartner: Yeah, it goes in and it decays over the americium and that’s the weird thing. It’s just cause 240, I think and 241 are beta emitters and so they go higher, they go up to americium, and americium is a real absorber. It just loves neutrons and so the next thing you know all the neutrons are being absorbed by the impurity. Let me see if I can tell you, Exxon did a research and the guy that did it was Charlie ____ (s/l Lindmeyer). He was my physics teacher and he worked with lasers. And I worked, when I took the class we solved the problem for ‘em. What kind of stability do you have to have when you’re trying to separate with a laser, 239 from 240? I won’t go any further than that. Weisskopf: Using a laser to do it… Baumgartner: Yes…laser right now can separate uranium 238 from 235… Weisskopf: By doing what? What effect would a laser have on an isotope, it’s just light. Do they absorb heat differently or something? Baumgartner: They vibrate differently. Weisskopf: Yeah? Okay. Alright. Baumgartner: They vibrate with a different frequency and when they vibrate with a different frequency, if you can make one vibrate in one direction and the other one not, then you can pull them babies out, it’s a gas laser. Weisskopf: Oh. Baumgartner: I’ll let you read up on that. Weisskopf: Yeah, interesting. Baumgartner: Because I knew what it took and like I said, you know early years of the computer were not very good because they only had like 6-8 digits of accuracy. Not the kind of thing that a laser needed, a laser needed much more accuracy. And there is that out there, and also too the stability of a system, you know? People talk about 0.01 %, I mean what the hell that’s only 99.9 when you need 10 digits of accuracy what the hell is 0.01%? See, its peanuts. So you had to work out some other details. Charlie did all that and we got him started when we were doing a class, Introduction to Mathematical Physics, I can tell you that much. Weisskopf: So it was here on site. Baumgartner: Yeah, that was class. I went to school at nights from 1959-1967. See, I was very short on physics and math. I’d only had up to differential equations, which is still a lot more because most of the guys who graduated with a BS in mathematics only had up to differential equations. But, that wasn’t nearly enough for the kind of things that they needed. The kind of accuracy and the early computers just didn’t have the capability either. Weisskopf: And since the process was evolving all the time, I’d guess that taking classes and learning was sort of almost… Baumgartner: It was a must. It was absolutely a must. Yeah, since I didn’t know any physics I had to learn physics. I had to learn Nuclear Engineering. I had to take Atomic Physics, Nuclear Physics that takes… Yeah, but most of it was math. I was taking statistics, variables, introduction mathematical physics. My physics class in college was freshmen physics, you know wedges and time planes…that didn’t do any good out here. Even a second year level of physics, you know, wouldn’t have been enough for the kind of things that we were doing. Atomic Physics in particular was… Weisskopf: But you started again in 50- Baumgartner: One. Weisskopf: ’51. This place had only been running for all of six-seven years. Baumgartner: Yeah and it was… Weisskopf: A brand new industry. Baumgartner: Oh yeah. We were just beginning. In the area of Health Physics in particular we were just beginning. How do you monitor what can go wrong? Hell, we were learning as we were working, you know there wasn’t… I mean now you have people scream when we have things happen today, but then after all we’ve got 40-50 years worth of experience. We don’t have to have that happen anymore. We wouldn’t expect it to happen, but then that was not the case then. Then was…you know, we hadn’t done very much in the first place so we didn’t know exactly what was going to happen you know like pipes breaking, you name it, glassware where there shouldn’t have been glassware, you know in the system, buckets when there shouldn’t have been buckets. We didn’t know anything about criticality. What’s the criticality of volume or mass for different solutions, different volumetrics, different… Weisskopf: Which might not be a straight line…. Baumgartner: That’s right…see like maybe anything that four inches in diameter no matter how full you fill it, it never is going to go critical, but you make a six inches and boy you only got get about two-three inches and it goes critical. Little things like that, that was not known. Those experiments were being run, out here we call ‘em mass criticality laboratory. I was responsible for all of the early work that that was going on, especially the solutions. Weisskopf: Really? Baumgartner: ____ (Eduwine) Clayton was the guy that was leading that was leading that, but we were doing the monitoring on him. And we were trying to figure out how to monitor his neutrons and his radiation soil. Weisskopf: For health reasons… Baumgartner: Yeah, for saving him. I mean we didn’t want that guy getting hurt. And these guys didn’t know where they were going to have an explosion or not explosion, you know. They were working, yeah they blew up a lab. Weisskopf: That was the famous criticality. Baumgartner: Yeah. Weisskopf: Yeah, yeah. Baumgartner: The old farmhouse, over in that area. Well you heard about a criticality down in Los Alamos? Weisskopf: Oh, no I hadn’t. Baumgartner: Where the guy was nudging two pieces together. Weisskopf: That was the earliest one… Baumgartner: Yeah. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: That was two metal pieces. We have had two criticality situations. One at 2345 Building where we had an operation failure and the solution dripped into a bucket, in a three-gallon bucket. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: And not critically safe. Weisskopf: And the bucket was there just catch drips? Baumgartner: No, it shouldn’t have been there. Weisskopf: What were the drips going to go into otherwise? Baumgartner: It should have been a criticality safety container. Weisskopf: Oh, oh, oh, but they put a bucket there to catch it… Baumgartner: Yeah, and it shouldn’t have been, shouldn’t have been. Should have been a 4-inch diameter container instead of…just one of those oversights. Weisskopf: In a perfectly vivid illustration of what the deal is. Baumgartner: Your right, of what happens because we knew it could happen, and it did happen. Yeah, and it went critical several times over a period of many months and I spent swing shift out there, for weeks we never came home. Weisskopf: Really? Baumgartner: Yeah, it happened in our building, it didn’t happen with my operation, you know, but we supply the monitoring people making sure that everything thing was still safe. You’ve got 2345 Building and my God, you’ve got to think about what the hell was out there and we couldn’t go in there and clean it up you know. I mean the line was left with all that stuff and no one knew whether, if you had something go critical over here would it set up ringing effects all over there and all that kind of stuff. Weisskopf: Oh… Baumgartner: Because after all you’ve got material laying around, it might be in a critical safe configuration, but now all of a sudden what happens when a… Weisskopf: Neutrons come in… Baumgartner: Yeah, now you’ve got a big level of neutrons. There is one thing to have say 10 of the sixth neutrons, it’s a whole other thing to have 10 of the 18th…you know. I want that answer right now quick from some nuclear physicist, and that wasn’t that fast in coming. Weisskopf: Yeah, it’s a very complicated situation. Baumgartner: Yeah the guy had to, they had to sit down and work. It was, and they didn’t have an answer right away that’s why we didn’t do anything for quite awhile. We were scared to have anybody close to the building because of the…am I making any sense to you? Weisskopf: Oh yeah, yeah. Baumgartner: See that’s what I say, nowadays now that we know all of that, you know, you wouldn’t do that, so the probability… Weisskopf: In any industry you have to collect a certain amount of work experience to get to a certain level of expertise and your doing it in the beginning, but 20 years later when you look back you say my God how did get anything done back then? Baumgartner: Well, you wouldn’t of, but you didn’t have the safety rules and you know, so you just went in there and you went at it. All I can say is, we were very strong in monitoring. When we saw something that wasn’t quite what we thought was copacetic, we shut it down and discussed it with management and operations people. And if it didn’t suit us, kept it shut down until the top management made the decision. That happened several times. Weisskopf: Like you should of any time you “shut something down”…You were… Baumgartner: You got a lot of static. You know you got a lot of Operating Managers you know. I go straight up to the top management real quick like. Health Physics was one guy and here’s Operations over here and when your shutting those guys down, you know, the only guy that can really settle the argument has gotta put up with both them and so it went there really quick because time is money. Weisskopf: Yeah, or national defense. Baumgartner: Yeah. Weisskopf: I mean that was the overriding premise… Baumgartner: That was the major premise at that time, I don’t think… Weisskopf: You pick up your headlines in the morning. Baumgartner: Right, well, in the days when we were operating we didn’t make a big ‘to do’ about the kinds of levels that they are making a big ‘to do’ now. A 1,000 count per minute level now is a big deal. We didn’t think it was a big deal until they got 10,000, but then when you’re mucking around in zillions, what’s 10,000? Weisskopf: Right… Baumgartner: See, but nothing going on is a whole different thing. Everything has been cleaned up. I can see where a 1,000 is meaningful because that is something you can see. Also too, on some of the areas you couldn’t see 1,000 counts. Weisskopf: They weren’t measuring that low? Baumgartner: Well you had too much background. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: I mean you go into that canyon building. There isn’t hardly any place that you could get that wasn’t reading 500 counts per minute period. Especially when you opened the cell blocks, six-three cell blocks. That whole area you had to set the five-folds for 500 basically. So it was, in other words you always wanted to make sure you got the cell blocks back on during shift change. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: Because when people are going out and in. Weisskopf: Out and in of the canyon. Baumgartner: Canyon, well where their shift change. So that when you go out of the canyon you have to go through the five-fold and when you come in you go through the five-fold. I make sure you’re clean to come in and I make sure you’re clean going out. So, 99.9% of the time the cell blocks were on top of the cells at shift change, because it wasn’t true because you know…I hate to say it but there was megarads coming out of a cell you know, and that is coming off of hitting that ceiling. Weisskopf: As a layperson, that’s what I still don’t have a feeling for. If somebody could show me what the canyon looked like when you took a lid off using light instead of big numbers and…. Baumgartner: Alright…shoot a beam up 20 feet and what’s it going to do when it hits that tall? Weisskopf: Right. Baumgartner: It’s going to scatter. Weisskopf: But if I think of a flashlight it’s like so what, but you’re talking about a big streak like a light they’d use in front of a used-car lot at night…. Baumgartner: Oh…go that by about a hundred thousand. Weisskopf: Yeah, and that’s what I can’t visualize. Baumgartner: Okay a lifetime dose per year was three rem. Suppose I’ve got 1,000 megarads, how long would it take me to get three rads? Not very damn long. Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: Because everything was measured in rads per hour. Weisskopf: And the dissolver full of… Baumgartner: Dissolver solution… Weisskopf: ____ (unclear) uranium. Baumgartner: Read in megarads. To give you an example, a doorstop, two drops with a CP off scale, that’s five rads. TP 20 rads. Weisskopf: Okay how long could you be near that to pick up your three rads then? Baumgartner: Ahh, but I was only allowed to pick up 0.05. Weisskopf: Per day or? Baumgartner: Per week. Weisskopf: Per week. So how long does that take? Baumgartner: Well divide, take 0.05 you know rads total and then say your going to now you’ve got. I need a piece of paper and pencil. Suppose you’ve got one rad… Weisskopf: You want these papers now? Baumgartner: Okay. One rad per hour… Weisskopf: Okay it’s per hour? Baumgartner: Right, it’s always per hour. It’s a rate, it’s always a rate. And now your going to receive, your going to have, your going to receive, your going to measure that by time, T x 1 RO per hour is equal 0.05, because see these cancel. So what does, say take 1 underneath 0.05, so 1 one time is equal to 0.05 over 1R, which is what 20? 1/20. 1/20. 1/20 of an hour. Weisskopf: Three minutes. Baumgartner: Yes. Weisskopf: From two drops. Baumgartner: Yeah. Weisskopf: Wow. So if you screwed around in the lab you might have to leave work for the rest of the week if you were… Baumgartner: That’s right, that’s right. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: And it might only take you three minutes to get it. They were really pissed off at you if you worked three minutes a week. Weisskopf: Right, right. Baumgartner: Am I making any sense to you? Weisskopf: So if you were in the canyon, when they ____ (unclear) opened far into the canyon, down ____ (unclear) and they took the lid off of the dissolver cell, you would be getting a big dose. Baumgartner: Yeah, about five rem per hour, probably you could be down in there maybe about 30 seconds and then you’d have enough for the week. We allowed people to get a maximum of 50 millirem per day, 250 millirem per week. But if you got 250 millirem per week, you’re only allowed three rem so that would be 12 weeks worth of work. So we didn’t let anybody, we didn’t try to let anybody get 250 millirem a week. So we were trying to keep them down at 50, because 50 x 52 is 2.5, that’s 2.6, that’s as far as we wanted them to go. So we were kind of, if he got 50 then you know, if he got 30 minutes, he had 39.5 hours a week that he couldn’t do anything. That was not very efficient. Weisskopf: No. Two things I always like to ask. If the whole process in the canyons wasn’t radioactive, it was just chemical. How big of a plant would it have been? You want to process the same amount of material…. Baumgartner: Not bigger than my house. Weisskopf: Okay. And workers could go around and tune it up and look at gauges, take samples, all the chemistry would have been the same, but forget…it would have been a very straight forward chemical. Baumgartner: Oh God, all that pipery that you see, that would have all disappeared because you’d have gone in there and poured ____ (s/l EL) solutions with the bucket and…it would looked more like a laboratory. You know, what’s 500 gallons…at that end its 500 gallons and at that is 50, you know… Weisskopf: Yeah. The whole, the massive size of that building, all it said was this stuff is radioactive… Baumgartner: Yeah right… Weisskopf: And ____ (unclear). Baumgartner: Now, had they built the building a little thinner, you could have had nothing but super problems. Weisskopf: Nothing but what? Baumgartner: Super problems. Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: Suppose they had…do you know anything about a half-value layer? Weisskopf: A half… Baumgartner: A half-value layer… Weisskopf: No. Baumgartner: A half-value layer is a thickness of material which will, and you put a source on this side will…If I say I’m at three feet and I get a reading of one, now I put a certain amount of material in between the source, you know, such that it now reduces it to 0.5…okay that’s a half-value layer. Weisskopf: Okay, right. Baumgartner: Okay, if I put two half-value layers on there I get .25. Weisskopf: You don’t get zero. Baumgartner: No, no, no, I get a .25. So three half-value layers, okay so I got megarads and I gotta have it down to less than a millirad. So you’re talking about 10 to the ninth. Well how many half-value layers do you have to have to have 10 to the ninth? Okay, if you miss it by very many half-value layer, and you don’t have to miss it by much. Like for instance if it was one millirad now per hour and it couldn’t be that high because you could only work 40 hours a week, you’d have 40, we’d have burned out. So they were guesstimating what it would take and they put 15 feet. Had they put say 12 feet, we would have had three, we would have had to put up lead walls, etc, etc, etc, on the inside. Weisskopf: And nobody ever had to do that… Baumgartner: Nobody, no one, they hadn’t done that before. They hadn’t done that before and so was 15 feet okay? So, what little we knew about absorption, those guys did a good job. Weisskopf: How could they estimate what a full-blown one and a half 1,500 pounds of uranium, they guessed at what the radiation would be, you know educated guesses. Baumgartner: Yeah and then put a factor of 10 safety and that’s about what they did. And thank God they did, because even at that we were getting radiation at the pipe gallery and at the operating levels. Weisskopf: If you went to the wall… Baumgartner: No, where they were operating, where they were moving the dials. Weisskopf: They were getting… Baumgartner: They were getting radiation doses. Weisskopf: Coming through. Baumgartner: Yes, yes. Weisskopf: They were above it too. Baumgartner: Yeah well… Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: See and that’s…you know and that’s going through the shielding…just… Weisskopf: Amazing. Baumgartner: To me, it’s those little things that really lead you believe it was, God it was magnificent. In other words, DuPont did a great job. [PART 2] Baumgartner: …was given the instructions about the reactor and Fermi and those guys says well a 30-foot cube, you know 30 feet wide, deep, and high will be big enough. So they gave that to Greenwalt. He went back and they built the reactors. No one ever, they had some ____ (s/l as bills) that nobody ever looked at. So then when B Reactor went up for the first time they got it loaded and it went up. It went up. Got up a little ways and all of a sudden it started going down. So, Fermi was there and they says ‘Well what’s the scoop here, the reactors doing down. No matter what we do pulling out the rods it don’t make a damn bit of difference. It’s still coming down. What’s in there? What going…you know. Hey, yo-yo.’ And we don’t know how long, you know, it took like days for it to get there and going and they back up again. So they had these little spike short…So Fermi does his calculation and ‘Ahh, I know what it is, xenon’. Xenon is getting generated in these factors, absorbing neutrons. So he does a slide rule calculation, two digits of accuracy. He says “Oh damn.” He says “You know if we’d have that reactor at 32 feet x 32 feet x 32 feet, we could, it would work.” So Greenwalt says “But it is 32 feet x 32 feet.” They just loaded it 30 x 30, you know they put dummies in so that the original load was just 30 x 30 x 30. So what they did then is they took the tubes out, put two more feet, you know, of slugs, put it at 32 feet, it went up and stayed up. All because Greenwalt says, if 30 feet is okay, 32 feet is better. Weisskopf: What engineers need to think about. Baumgartner: Right and that’s what he did. He thought we’d get a little bit of extra capacity just…you know…and it worked. But that’s how close that got. Had they built it originally, they’d have had B and F, and D, would have never made it. Those reactors would have been too small, and as it was why they went to 1,500 megawatts and (bomb noise). Weisskopf: But what do you think in terms of leaving something for prosperity? Both T Plant and B Reactor are being looked at as being of historic significance. How can we show them, keep them, what are we gonna do? What would you like people, your shaking your head, but in what way are shaking your head? Baumgartner: They are too radioactive yet. Weisskopf: What is? Baumgartner: The building. The canyon. You still wouldn’t let anybody in there and to let someone in with a crane, you, the limited capacity of looking, it’s so limited that I don’t… Weisskopf: It’s, yeah, yeah. Baumgartner: I mean, one half hour…that’s not my idea of…16 a day. You know that’s not my idea of… Weisskopf: Perhaps a small model of it that would tell as much as the building itself. Baumgartner: And they have that… Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: We have that. It’s not too small it’s about that big. Weisskopf: Yeah. You know where that might be today? I haven’t seen it. Baumgartner: Go to the science center… Weisskopf: Oh is… Baumgartner: In the Federal Building. It’s in their warehouse someplace. Weisskopf: They were the ones who had possession of it… Baumgartner: They had possession of it. Weisskopf: Okay. What about B Reactor as far as the story you’d want people…What kind of things would you want people to walk away with? When they come to Hanford to learn what things were… Baumgartner: I think the idea of complexity that it was not a simple machine. I think people think this thing was very, very simple. It was not very simple. It took a hell of a lot of know-how. These reactor operators had to learn a hell of a lot of stuff so they could operate. There was a lot of on-hands work in the original days, because remember there was no computers in those days. And there was no, the inner ties to the monitoring system was all manual. The guys were looking at gauges. At that time we didn’t know if the neutron detectors were really correct or not. They weren’t either, most of the time. So these guys were, they were watching temperature gauges on each pipe, a whole slug of things, all manual. Every shift, twice a shift they would go all through the 25 innertubes and record the temperature on the gauges, all that kind of stuff. And that was collected by those reactor engineers, trying to figure out what to do, such things like splines and all that kind of stuff. But that didn’t occur until after the computer came out and we integrated all the stuff so that, you know. Also too, since it was so slow and it was all manual, they ended up having to have what’s called a third safety system. Weisskopf: Right. Baumgartner: You know, where it was going and we had the balls. I was there when we put the balls in. Weisskopf: Yeah. What were you doing there? Baumgartner: I was radiation protection. Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: And those went in in 1953. Weisskopf: You’re talking about when they physically put the system in, replace the liquid tanks with the ball bearings. Baumgartner: Yeah, well what happened with the liquid…the pipes lot the liquid run, you know, and the graphite has got little holes you know so that liquid got in there and just shut the damn reactor down just about. You’d have a cold spot right in the middle of anyplace. So what they did is they then pulled all that out and they had these little balls about the size of marbles, these boron silicate balls, and they would have them in hoppers and they would just drop. And they didn’t have pipes inside the reactor, they just had a hole. Well, when dropped the first batch of, when you know testing it, we’d say we put 6,000 balls in and God we only got 5,600 out. There were 400 balls in there… “ahhhhh.” Weisskopf: Each one of which produces the output of… Baumgartner: Yeah, just like the liquid did. And oh God, so we had to develop a method for sucking them 400 balls out. Weisskopf: Well how did you get them out the first time? You sucked them out then too… Baumgartner: We sucked them out with a hose, like a vacuum cleaner. Weisskopf: It didn’t get them all… Baumgartner: No, no we, so we ended up…they didn’t want to put a pipe in there, but by that time the old reactors had such large holes that the marble could go into the crack, you know between the pieces. I mean when they were machined they were really flush, but by the time they had operated until 1953, which from 1944 to 1953, you know that’s nine years, quite a bit of the graphite had…you know what do they call it…it had come out. Weisskopf: Grown is the word that…. Baumgartner: Well… Weisskopf: …growth going on… Baumgartner: Well no, that’s not what happened at first. What happened at first is that the graphite was hot and so therefore it like, it bled off. So we were getting holes. And then they finally figured out how to stop that. But when they did, all of a sudden the graphite grew, see, but the first problem was the graphite shrank. You know we were dissolving the graphite because remember the reactor is hot, I mean “thermally hot.” You know, after all we’re heating up water and almost all the moderation is being in the graphite not in the water or on the slug, we were cooling the slugs… Weisskopf: Moderation produces heat… Baumgartner: Right and so that had to be fused out through the pipe, you know the aluminum pipe, and on into the water. So the graphite was, I don’t remember exactly what the temperature was, but I think they were talking about 600-700 degrees Fahrenheit, which enough to start vaporizing some of the you know if you had a particular atmosphere and it was…and that’s what had generated these holes. You know these splits, cracks, and so when they you know you 400 marbles. It’s not very many when you’ve got 6,000, but it’s a lot when you’re trying to get the reactor back up. Weisskopf: Plus knowing every time you dump it, you might end up with yet… Baumgartner: Yeah, getting more and more and more in there. Weisskopf: Question, you could only suck water up 30 some feet…because if air pressure only allows it to go that high… Baumgartner: Well that’s when atmosphere, yeah… Weisskopf: How do you suck up ball bearings from the bottom of the reactor? Wasn’t it farther than that…its 30…feet? Baumgartner: Well, yeah, but see you’re using not water. You’re using a high-degree of air. See, you put the tube down and you squirt the air so you loosen you know, and then you suck the, you know they drop down the ball and (sucking noise) you’ve seen them suck balls up. Weisskopf: But you can’t suck a ball up… Baumgartner: With a vacuum you can. Weisskopf: …water… Baumgartner: Huh? Well, a vacuum. Weisskopf: Oh, Yes. Baumgartner: You’re not using a vacuum, we’re pushing air up. You’re pushing up with air. Weisskopf: With water that doesn’t work… Baumgartner: Yeah, well it would too because water has some force, but air is what we used. Weisskopf: Okay… Baumgartner: You wouldn’t want to use water because you’d now get water going in there. Weisskopf: Right, I’m thinking of…if you have a flat column of water you can only raise it 32 feet. Baumgartner: That’s no question, not arguing. Weisskopf: …air up through it your going to be sucking water… Baumgartner: Right, you’re really…see you’re pushing air in the first place. Weisskopf: Right. Baumgartner: And that was all sealed so you could put like 600 pounds of pressure… Weisskopf: Wow, okay. Baumgartner: See… Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: In other words it’s a whole different…what you were thinking. I know what you were thinking is all…you know. No that’s not…you’ve got to think about in terms of…no they put pressure on that baby and they just blew air… Weisskopf: ____ (unclear) Baumgartner: Yes, right. And that well…that just sucked them right out. Weisskopf: And did you end up with 6,000 or? Baumgartner: Well, no we ended up with about, all total I think that method left about 16 left. Weisskopf: 16 balls? Baumgartner: Yeah and then we just burned them up. You know, they’ve only got so much capacity and so that was burned up in a hurry. Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: So, no big, it was no big problem. Weisskopf: Yeah, yeah. So at any rate if there is a B Reactor Museum someday… Baumgartner: I’d love to see that. I love what they’ve got, because they’ve got enough parts there to show you the complication of the front end and the back end, you know you can see all of that. The pipery…ahhh….pig tails… Weisskopf: Yeah… Baumgartner: Gauges, control room. Recognizing it’s not a little itty-bitty computer, this is bank after bank after bank of non-computerized equipment, all analog. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: To me, that’s…I think people should see that, because our kids are growing up without an analog in their mind. Weisskopf: Not even watches. Baumgartner: No, digitally and all. So consequently, I think this is a piece of history that isn’t that old. Weisskopf: Right. Baumgartner: And they would think that it’s extremely old. You know, get what I’m trying to say. I couldn’t be more for it. Weisskopf: Good. Baumgartner: I’m with it. It’s just I’ve been helped for the central reason…reactor wasn’t my big bag. I mean, I was in the 100 Areas for two years, but from 1953 and is you know, from February of 1953 to ’54, and we did the basin work. I was involved in the basin, water runs through the reactor and then runs through a basin and cools down thermally… Weisskopf: Right. Baumgartner: And also to short half-life of the radioactive materials so that by the time it gets to the back end in 30 minutes it’s not as hot and it isn’t going to hurt river as much. The fish…we were really…okay well these basins were made out of concrete and pretty soon the joints, you know from expanding and contracting you know and now it’s hot, water is coming out at 200 degrees, now all of a sudden the water is cold coming out at the cool. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: These joints expanded, cracked, you know those basins are 12 feet deep and so pretty soon we had holes and we had as much water running out between the cracks to the river as we were getting through the main tube. So we ended up having to go in there and fill up the cracks and grout underneath the thing and stop any leaks. Weisskopf: Did you have to shut off the reactor while you did this? Baumgartner: Oh yes, yeah. And when we were doing that was when we were doing Ball 3X. Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: When we were putting Ball 3X we did the basin. So we did reactor after reactor after reactor. And I was in the 100-F Area, which did F, H, and DR, and D, and then went over to B when we did B and C. And monitoring at that time, I was monitoring and we…See basins got hot because if you had a rupture before you could shut the damn thing off… Weisskopf: Something got out. Baumgartner: Something got out…well where did it go? To in the basin, and then it settled out in the basin and so we had a lot of washing to do and… Weisskopf: Before, when you emptied it out of water, was it not so hot that you could walk down there, walk around and take samples and things like that? Baumgartner: Not at first… Weisskopf: Really? Okay. Baumgartner: Not at first. What we did the first was we hosed all the concrete off and you know so when that went down the hole, you know you can’t stop that. Anyway we picked up all that hot water and that went back to the tank farms. And then we, cause see there could be part, pieces of metal… Weisskopf: Sure. Baumgartner: See the slug didn’t necessarily have to be fresh, it could be an old piece of slug. Now you’ve got it reading hotter than hell in little spots, reading 100,000 counts per minute. You know and you walk on that, 3,000 is a millirem, you’ve got 35 millirem. So you couldn’t walk on that. You know 35 millirem you could walk 30 minutes a day. So, and that’s about what they did. So they brought in 200 workers and they got to work 30 minutes each. You know going in and going… Weisskopf: You were the person who was sitting around with a clipboard and you know… Baumgartner: No that was the monitors, that’s the guys working for me. Weisskopf: What were you doing? Baumgartner: I was their boss. Weisskopf: Okay, okay. Baumgartner: I was looking at the readings they were taking. When they went down to see whether we should change the time, changing of the time was my responsibility, making sure the people didn’t get over exposed. Weisskopf: So you were getting pressure at both ends. Baumgartner: Absolutely. Weisskopf: Try to get the work done, but let’s not kill these guys either and… Baumgartner: So I was the interface to the guys out doing operations. Weisskopf: And theoretically everything you did was by a book, there weren’t a lot of subjective decisions to make. Baumgartner: Subjective decision was you don’t get over 250 millirem a week for sure. Weisskopf: But, yeah. Baumgartner: And if you were in a hot job like we were you allowed ‘em up to 50 millirem a day... Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: …and the amount of time it took to make 30 millirem, I mean 50 millirem, that’s all they got to work. Weisskopf: So there wasn’t a lot of room for discussion then. Baumgartner: No. And each guy that went in, you took his time in and you told him when the hell to get out. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: And you had a loud speaker and he says ‘okay Joe Blow get your butt out.’ Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: And you expected them out. And if he didn’t’ get out soon enough then he didn’t go in again. Weisskopf: Right. Baumgartner: Because I would go over to the old supervisor and I’d say ‘that guy didn’t listen, I don’t want him in there.’ Weisskopf: And did you find ____ (unclear) would add up to kind of what you were estimating? Baumgartner: Pretty much. Weisskopf: Yeah, okay. Baumgartner: Pretty much. Again there was a problem where the CP says one thing and the badge says another. So now you’ve got to figure out what the hell is going on. Weisskopf: Did they ever wear multiple badges? Baumgartner: Oh yes. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: Oh yes, some of them, we wore like two days, some of them one day. You know you’d wear them one shift… Weisskopf: Did ever put any on your ankles? Baumgartner: Oh yes. Weisskopf: Oh you did? Baumgartner: Shoes… Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: …inside the shoes, on the forehead, you know in back of the head, the chest, belly, gonads, knees… Weisskopf: At any one time how many would you be wearing? Baumgartner: …wrist. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: And you’d do that, on the basin work we did that for the first three weeks. Weisskopf: And each worker could work at maybe a half an hour a day. Baumgartner: Yeah. We said the CP said you can work 30 minutes. So you’d wear those and when he’d suit up…When he’d suit up underneath, you know on the first pair of coveralls he’d have these badges clipped to it or taped and then he’d have another pair over the top of it and another pair over the top of that, so there was three pair of coveralls on. Because you didn’t want him to get contaminated…cause ahhh…if he contaminated badges it’s bad news because that’s the radiation close, that just screws up the whole radiation reading. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: So we wanted to make damn sure. And then we were, when it was wet then we wore wet suits and a few things like that. It was a, getting ready took longer and going out took longer than it was to work. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: So, that much I can tell you. Weisskopf: And how quickly would you get the badge readings back? The next day or? Baumgartner: We could get the reading the next day. Weisskopf: Were you pretty comfortable with the results… Baumgartner: No we wear them you know, generally speaking for the test that we did with the 10 badges, we would wear them with the badge that he wore… Weisskopf: Oh right. Baumgartner: So that we had a reference point to all these 10 measurements. And that’s, otherwise you can’t correlate it. Also too remember now this…this badge system isn’t necessarily “that accurate at low doses.” So you wanted to have enough dose on there to where you could have reasonable accuracy. And since the guy was taking 50 millirem per day in a week’s time he got 250. So 250 is a very good reading out of a film badge and you know you get good statistics. You could get a good feeling as to what his body was getting. Weisskopf: So you took the 10 badges and then looked at the single badge that was being worn by the same person and said ‘well it looks like when this badge reads this much, his feet were getting this much, his chest was getting this much…’ Baumgartner: Okay, feet…arms and feet can get 10 times what the body can get. So now is this job going to be limiting to the hands, or is this job going to be limiting the body? Weisskopf: Right. Baumgartner: And the only way you know that is to put on the extremities. Weisskopf: And the feet especially, in that case. Baumgartner: Well, also he’s playing with hands…you don’t if he’s kneeling, so therefore the knees…you know… Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: Because these guys do all kinds of dumb things. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: You know, I don’t want to stop them from working. You know, they might go down, they might be on their knees so you had to, we had to correlate. And you had to be sure that you weren’t going say ‘well hell he’s burning out his legs before he gets to 250,’ maybe he’s going to get to the legs 300…you know you can’t do that. So you say ‘hey, you gotta stop. We’re only gonna let you get 30 because you’re limiting to the feet.’ Get what I’m trying to say? So, even though the whole body said it was, you’re well within limits, extremity dose. And see an extremity dose went into the records also. You know, that’s also been recorded for these people. That’s in the guy’s file. Weisskopf: Because you had the badges on. Baumgartner: Right. Whatever dosimeter reading we ever put on a guy, that’s been recorded in his file. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: So, there is a lot of things that were…and we were developing those kinds of thoughts because no one had ever done the basin work before. Also too, its little things like when we were on the concrete once we always kept everything wet, so when they working there we had a spray system. Weisskopf: Just for dust, keep the dust out? Baumgartner: Keep the concrete wet…and I’ll tell you why. Weisskopf: Oh, oh, oh, physically just to keep it at wet… Baumgartner: Wet, so that it can’t move. In C Basin, metal basin, they weren’t careful and on Saturday we had a whirly week and we ____ (unclear). Weisskopf: You mean it just blew the stuff out? Baumgartner: Just sucked it right out there and spread it over the countryside. So we went out one Saturday, that’s when we found the particle problem from West Area. That problem started in the 100 Areas… Weisskopf: Really? Baumgartner: …because we had a dry basin and the 100 Areas when the workers came in on the five-fold, all of a sudden…wow we’ve got the patrolmen coming in, we were setting the five-fold off. They shouldn’t have, you coming to work. So they called us up and so we sent a crew out there and sure enough, there was particles all over. So, we started then trying to delineate this problem. So as we were moving away from B Area, it was getting lighter and lighter and lighter, less and less specks. And we were going down the railroad, and when we were going from B Area say to 2 West Area, Suzie-Q junction. We got to the Suzie-Q junction and it was kind of clean, so the guy said ‘well hell, lets go another half mile.’ So we went down another half mile, and lo and behold it started going up. Now if the source is C, what’s it doing hot over there? And as we got toward West, we got more and more and more, higher, and higher, and higher. So we says well alright, we’ll take a carload of guys and we’ll go over to 2 West Area. So we drove over there with six guys of us and I had one guy that hadn’t gotten out of the car yet and he turned his instrument on, put the probe on the ground, and 10,000 counts per minute. “Ahhhh.” So that’s how we discovered the C-Stock, you know the REDOX plow, the REDOX, the ruthenium problem. And we delineated that that day and then we were totally confused because see a GM doesn’t tell you want the radiation coming from is, it just tells you activity and it wasn’t until we had, at that time, a 256 channel analyzer, it was a big thing. There were only two on the plant, one in 189-D and one down in 300 Area. So now we had to take samples and we took ‘em and it turns out the ruthenium was beta emitter so we were getting like bremsstrahlung on a very low energy (unclear). But the 100 Area stuff gave us a spectra, fission product. Yeah, ‘ahhh what is’, you know so it took us…and we delineated the whole problem and then we had, oh 50-100 monitors, three feet apart and straight head and every time they found a speck the guy from J.E. Jones would go over with a shovel and pick it up, put it in the bucket. Until they… Weisskopf: So these specks were from REDOX or from… Baumgartner: REDOX and from the…yeah, we picked ‘em both up. Weisskopf: Okay, but it was specks, it was not covering the ground. Baumgartner: No no, it was little flecks, you know because uh…it’s like dirt. Little you know, the stuff kind of sticks to something else, or if it was a liquid it got absorbed in a solid material, you know, and was…that’s it. So that’s, so lots of things happened and whose fault was it? Well, too damn late to worry about that, just don’t let it happen again. You know you had your investigations and then you modified your procedures and this is how things got done. Weisskopf: So, it was new industry. Baumgartner: Yes. We never had clean basins before. Hadn’t cleaned a metal basin before and that dried out faster than the concrete. Weisskopf: Wonder why… Baumgartner: Well it’s metal… Weisskopf: Concrete’s absorbent… Baumgartner: Yeah, that’s why it stayed wet. Weisskopf: Oh damp, yeah. Baumgartner: Damp, stayed wet and where the stuff would have stayed down then the air probably wouldn’t have sucked that light particle up, because it would have been tied with water. See after that, boy, it was underneath two inches of water, and water running down the sides and all that kind of stuff. It increased the cost of doing the job, but it should of because we can’t afford the risk of letting things get away from us, that takes us away from T Plant. Weisskopf: Well, it actually is closer to reactor which is very interesting because people, you know, there wasn’t much radiation in the normal cooling water, but over years and years of operation stuff had settled out there. Baumgartner: Well, it was from the particulate coming from the ruptures. Weisskopf: Right. Baumgartner: It was the ruptures that were… Weisskopf: Pure water in itself will come out perfectly… Baumgartner: Pure water and if there is no rupture it will stay why…it will be hot in the sense that you’ve activated the oxygen and nitrogen, but see that’s a short half-life material and so by the time it gets 30 minutes, it’s gone. You know, that’s like 10, 15-20 half-lives. Anything that goes more than 10-20 half-lives is pretty much gone and it’s not that high to start with, you know you’re talking about a couple thousand count per minute so what went back to the river was really low, except when you had a rupture. There are no filters out there. At least there weren’t then. I don’t think there is any now. When a rupture, but see now we have such fast equipment that…. Weisskopf: You mean in a regular reactor? Baumgartner: Yeah. Weisskopf: Such as if the primary coolant ruptured into the secondary. Baumgartner: Well no… Weisskopf: Or something like that… Baumgartner: That one we could handle, but even then you had to stop, you know you had the water flow. It has to go through…but, see most of that flow, a rupture would have gone through the cooling water and goes right down to the basin and out she goes and as far as I know there’s no filter on that. Weisskopf: Right. Baumgartner: And I don’t think it would have caught these small particles anyway. Weisskopf: Well it would have been… Baumgartner: You can’t drive 55,000 gallons, let’s be honest. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: You just can’t drive that through a HEPA filter. Weisskopf: And change it every hour. Baumgartner: Yeah. So, that make any sense? Weisskopf: Oh yeah. It all makes sense, it’s all good, and I think before we burn you out completely. You have your burn in out in how long you can talk, you know but it’s all relevant. You know, right now we are looking at T Plant, some of the things that ____ (unclear)… Baumgartner: Yeah. Weisskopf: So a lot of things you talked about were great for that, but the work at the reactor with the Ball 3X) and the basins is the first time I have talked to somebody who worked on cleaning out the basins. So that was interesting. Baumgartner: Oh there were a lot of things. Weisskopf: Yeah? Baumgartner: I was very lucky because I got to move. I got into places…. Weisskopf: Everybody did. I don’t know of anybody who had one job for like 20 years. Baumgartner: No, no. Weisskopf: Certainly not in the early days. Baumgartner: No, not during time of operation. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: The most you were allowed to stay in any one place is a year, except when I went to 2345 I stayed from, you know 1954 to 1958. Weisskopf: Did they encourage you to move around? Baumgartner: Oh absolutely, they wanted you to be able to go anyplace. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: Since I had been in the 100 Areas they didn’t hesitate to call me if they had a problem out there to whip me out there. Weisskopf: So that must of been the security issues of not letting anybody learn too much about any particular process, that was less of an issue then. --- I wish we had more opportunity to do it in a more relaxed, you know sort of an ongoing thing, but other people too. Because otherwise you know you spend your whole life in this career and now we’re asking for this much of it. Baumgartner: Yeah, pretty much, pretty much. Weisskopf: And, you’re getting just a little tip of the iceberg sample of it. Baumgartner: And there is no way, I don’t think there is anyway that we can give all to you in any way. Weisskopf: Some people like to write their autobiographies, some people go teach a class, but otherwise there is no direct ongoing way to ____ (unclear). Baumgartner: See for instance like the first and third Wednesday of every month at the… Weisskopf: Right… Baumgartner: …the monitors meet, guys that I used to work with. Weisskopf: Like Bob is there... Baumgartner: Yeah. And these guys have that early knowledge because they’re all retirees and they all had come in and either like, most of the guys that come in about 1949. Prior to that, it was the guys that were management were then down monitoring. Weisskopf: Right. Baumgartner: In my early years, I had an instrument in my hand a lot. If we were really deeply concerned about the radiation problems and that, I went in. I wouldn’t let my monitors go in. Up until ’58, at which time then the union had come in and only the monitors could monitor and then we had to step back, but I was allowed to go until ’58 and the reason for that is because I had been in 2345 Building a long time and we had an interesting monitoring problem. Secondly, I was working on monitoring problems, the doses associated with taking this reading and then what’s the dose, coming up with rules of thumb. We worked, I worked on that. Also too, I was involved in investigations and no one had more incidents than we had in the 200 Areas, it was profound. Whether it happened at REDOX or T Plant or 2345, or 231, or at B Plant, or you know…it was all…I mean and there was a lot going on, a lot we were learning and from investigating. And then you didn’t always get the truth from everybody when they told you oh I did this, I did that, you had to kind of figure out…that’s not the way it was…the way it really was and then after you tell them the way it was, then they try and say ‘yeah that’s the way was.’ But it, sometimes to go, it took quite a bit of effort to….because people are naturally defensive, you know it’s their job…yeah, yeah there you got involved. And no one wants to admit to a mistake, I don’t care who it is…whether, today’s world is no different and it was hard to get some of these things out. We had lots of interesting incidents you know like a piece of plutonium in a guys arm…that’s in… had a guy put his hand who put his hand in the bottom of a TTPA solution of plutonium and it went right through the glove and everything right into his hand you know, millions of ____ (s/l dperem). Days and days where he never went home obviously. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: Millions of ____ (s/l dperem) and I was involved in all of them. I got involved in all of, I got pulled of my regular assignment. I also built analog models to see how well DDTA works, EDTA, DTPA, how well these things work in terms of removing things that were causing confusion. Weisskopf: There wasn’t anywhere to go for the books right? Baumgartner: We were writing it, we were writing it. And no one knew how much to give, you know, I give how much, what can I expect? And from the very meager data that we had and the very meager number of cases we had, we developed models that have held up very well, held up for 40 years. So, the work we did wasn’t that bad. I think that we did, I think personally we did very good work. I think the guys that I worked with were sterling. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: Oh God, they, it was, I guess it was the right people at the right time. Really and truly it was, I’m very proud of the record we’ve got when you think we didn’t know anything and we never killed anybody. And the guys that we could have hurt, you know the guys with the heavy incidents, not too many of those died say from like leukemia or anything like that. Most of them died of heart, and not at young ages…79, 80…oh all this kind of stuff, and those that did die from things that….they’ve been compensated as far as I know, they might have had to go to court and all that, but nevertheless I don’t think we’ve been very belligerent. So, it’s just, I don’t know… Weisskopf: It’s interesting because every industry has a fatality factor right…and you guys were starting out in an industry that no track record and look back is how you go and… Baumgartner: Yeah… Weisskopf: …compare it to other industries, other chemical industries, heavy industries… Baumgartner: Yeah. We’re the only industry that I know that has…since people aren’t dying right from the amount of radiation they got based on the epidemiology, that we have healthy workers and they predicated that, because we got our physicals and we got monitored and so consequently we must have seen things early and so therefore they didn’t die. The alternative to that is that maybe fellas…they didn’t get as much radiation as you thought they got. Weisskopf: Yeah, okay. Baumgartner: You know that’s an alternative. Maybe we weren’t healthier than anybody else, I don’t think we were, and just because we were getting medical doesn’t necessarily mean we aren’t dying from heart, stroke, or everything else just like everybody else is. So, but how do you prove that we didn’t have as much radiation as they’re putting in the files? So, I worked with Ethel Gilbert for five years who was the epidemiologist for the plant, who said we should have so many deaths and Jack Fick’s is now the guy that has that. I worked for him and we proved, or I proved I thought, that the amount of fast neutron dose that was given to our employees was considerably less than what they’ve got on the file. Weisskopf: Really? Baumgartner: Yeah. Because they automatically added 15 millirem per week of neutrons to every worker, operator, pipe fitter… Weisskopf: Just as a safety factor? Baumgartner: Yeah it’s just a booby factor. And that’s what makes our numbers look so big see…the amount of neutrons exceeds the gamma and that’s not possible. That’s where I came from. Weisskopf: What… Baumgartner: That’s the safety factor to give you the best estimate of how many people should be dying by when and what. Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: And see okay you say well we should be getting so many deaths, well then if they’re not dying, now what? Well, they said we have a safety factor, healthy employees, when in truth maybe your estimate of exposure is a little bit high. Weisskopf: The other alternative is that the radiation was good for them. Baumgartner: That’s an alternative which many of us in Health Physics have indicated for the simple reason, background is 300 millirem per year from the sun, from the ground, and so you ask yourself if we are getting 300 millirem you know, we’ve been having that since birth, even before birth, is that injuring us? “Are we any dumber than the Ape man was?” 10,000 years, 100,000 years…everything was higher then than it is now, because now the things decayed you know. Every 94,000 years is a half-life or 10, or whatever uranium 238 I think is quite a bit, but 2345. So you ask yourself these questions and you come up with, you know you wonder whether people aren’t better off. Weisskopf: Do things like bacteria have the same susceptibility to radiation as the human cell? Baumgartner: Yes, that’s…fundamentally bacteria are one cell… Weisskopf: Okay… Baumgartner: And so therefore… Weisskopf: it’s not as if you’re perhaps killing off bacteria before your hurting yourself. Baumgartner: No, no you’re getting mutants so they are getting used to…. I can believe that. But, I think we’re generating more mutants via the chemical route then we are ever with radiation. Personally, that just…and the reason for that is 10 to the 10th photons per centimeter squared is a rad. Okay, that’s 10 to the 10th. Now lets go back, how many atoms or molecules are there in a molecular wave and it’s 6 x 7 to the 23rd …okay so I if can’t see a million, oh so I’ll be generous, a billion. One part in a billion is what? Take 9 from 23, you get 14. That’s still 4 orders of magnitude higher than 1 rad. So therefore chemically, bigger numbers. One part per million is 10 to the 17th, kinds of things…we’re talking about 10 to the 10th which is a rad and we’re talking about 0.3 a year. You get the idea of the…the chemical in my judgement is much more fearsome or fearing. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: Due to the fact that’s seven orders of magnitude or 10 orders of magnitude. Different, higher and so therefore that’s a much more severe problem. Weisskopf: Interesting. Baumgartner: Am I, give you a coruler, to me I find 10 to the 10th a good-sized number. This is what my…am I making sense? Weisskopf: Yeah. But there is also the fact though that we are exposed to the chemicals every day of our life in every situation. Where radiation… Baumgartner: That we’re willing to accept, just like we are willing to accept 65,000 deaths on the highway. Weisskopf: That’s where, I know. Baumgartner: And that’s per year. See, so there’s a funny, we have a funny sense of value. Weisskopf: What do you think it is that put nuclear, all things nuclear, in the light that their in today? Baumgartner: Fear of the unknown. None of us people could get up in front of a hearing, a senate hearing and say, will one rad, how much torque will that give? I can’t tell you. You know, they can tell you what a mile of road will do, but they can tell you what a rad (unclear) will do. Weisskopf: But, that mile of road is only based on statistics from what happened the year before… Baumgartner: Right. Weisskopf: …it’s not like a physical thing. Baumgartner: Right and we couldn’t, and see even though you haven’t had an incident you start with epidemiology and you play games. A case in point is the reactor incident in New York, you know, where the reactor blew up and they’re arguing, two PhD’s are arguing, whether it caused a half a death or a whole death. Weisskopf: Right, statistically, yeah. Baumgartner: Yeah. I rest my case. And, and these arguments gets enraged in the papers, scare the hell out of everybody. Weisskopf: I presume the same thing is going to be happening with genetically engineered things for better or worse, for right or wrong. Baumgartner: I don’t think so. Weisskopf: You don’t think people are going be real worried about it? Baumgartner: No. If they were, there would be upheaval…and there is no upheaval in the paper…not like there was against nuclear. Starting in ’56 my God anti-nuclear was…Ralph Nader was in the paper everyday. Weisskopf: But it wasn’t nuclear reactors back then was it? It was nuclear… Baumgartner: He sure as hell did go after…well yeah…but see they equated everything to bomb. There was nothing but a bomb. You didn’t have a reactor, that didn’t mean anything. Weisskopf: It was just a controlled bomb. Baumgartner: Yeah, I mean it was a bomb, it was a bomb. Everything was bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb. Nuclear power, didn’t even want to, they wouldn’t let us hardly build any reactors in the United States. I think we have what about 10, 12. France has about 30. You know, they’re tweaking their nose at all of us saying go ahead let their price of gasoline get high, we don’t care we’ll go build another six reactors. They’ve operated now for 50 years and they’re doing really fine. Our reactors have done fine. I mean the worst criticality incident we had might have cause a half a death…maximum a one death. Now is that something to be outrageously feared? Weisskopf: No. Baumgartner: How many reactor years have we got? We must have, by now we must have 300-400 years of reactor years with experience and we’re not even thinking about it. Weisskopf: But when you started, did you feel like you were getting into the industry that was going to replace the oil industry? I mean was it… Baumgartner: No, no, no. No, no that didn’t’ happen until…we never went into those kinds of things until 1956. For instance when Eisenhower, he had the Atoms for Peace Program where we gave away 500 reactors you know swimming the pool type reactors. Khadafy got three of them at 100 kilowatts which is two bombs a year for those people who…If you want to see something interesting, Dan Rather had a special one time in which he was reporting on how many airplanes had been left in the desert. We didn’t need them you know, B-24s and B-17s, and… Weisskopf: During what period? Baumgartner: After World War II. Weisskopf: Just left them there? Baumgartner: Just left them there, it didn’t pay to bring them back. The thing that was interesting is…all of the tails were missing. You know the part that rises? Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: Here you’ve got 300 airplanes on the deck and not one of them has got a tail. Now what’s with that? Well that’s strange and then I read the Washington State Law, which allows Boeing Airplane Company to put 1,500 pounds of uranium into the tail of a ’47, 500 pounds into a 707. Did you know that? Weisskopf: Just for balance? Baumgartner: Yeah, cause see uranium weighs (unclear) of 19, lead is only 11. So that for the same volume I almost get twice as much weight and you don’t have that much space. However, it’s only depleted uranium. Weisskopf: Oh. Baumgartner: So, we’re getting rid of that big pile of depleted uranium that we…. However, what is depleted uranium? Weisskopf: It’s uranium that’s been through a reactor or a separations process. Baumgartner: And what’s the primary nucleon? Weisskopf: 238. Baumgartner: Beautiful. And what is 238? It’s the mother atom of plutonium. Weisskopf: If you put it, yeah… Baumgartner: If I put a neutron into 238 it goes uranium 239, later it goes off and becomes plutonium 239, ahhh so… we let 300 airplanes with 500 pounds of uranium go to Khadafy. I’m sure that he can put them through a roller and make ¼ inch thick uranium sheets and line 17-foot pool reactors with that and let all the… Weisskopf: Make is similar, yeah… Baumgartner: Yeah, and let it sit, but who the hell cares? And you know then every once and awhile, maybe once a year or once every two years, you to take that out, put another sheet in there and then go over to a laboratory with a hood and dissolve that baby up and… The chemistry of plutonium is well-known by everybody. I mean if Russia’s got it, Khadafy’s got it. So, the guy, he doesn’t have to steal plutonium from the Israelis. Just like the Israelis didn’t steal it from anybody else, they made their own. So how can you keep, with 500 reactors out there, how can you keep plutonium not from happening to people? Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: Anyway and that happened to us. Once we knew those reactors were going against our judgement, because Eisenhower says no we want to let everybody have the nuclear, because we want them to make the measurements on metal fatigue and so on, so on. It sounded good, but you buy this problem which we did. Which we have, and anyway I helped write state law. Weisskopf: You helped what? Baumgartner: Write the state law for us being an agreement state. Weisskopf: Which state law. Baumgartner: Washington State. Weisskopf: About what. Baumgartner: Nuclear. Weisskopf: Oh. Baumgartner: Go read it, it’s down at the library. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: I think its 208 or something like that. And then you go back in there and you look at what they can put into an airplane and there is a whole bunch of little things in there that scare the hell out of ya. You know for a guy who’s been in radiation protection. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: So, that’s… Weisskopf: Interesting. It’s a whole tangent I hadn’t imagined. Baumgartner: Yeah, well…you’re not, you’ve never been in the field. Weisskopf: No. Baumgartner: And so you wouldn’t…would you ask a question? No. I’ve given you more information then the questions you’ve asked, because there are interesting little aspects that go with this whole thing. They are not necessarily good for the T Plant. Weisskopf: Well and the other thing is, just asking questions might be not what’s interesting or ____ (unclear) other things you’ve done. You know I might be asking questions that don’t really relate to you too. Baumgartner: Yeah. Weisskopf: So I think that I always do better if I shut-up a bit and let people talk about the things.. Baumgartner: Lets us talk… Weisskopf: …they’re comfortable about or interested in, or find important. Baumgartner: Yeah, and all of us have had, like you say, had interesting careers. There isn’t hardly any guy that you’ll talk to that doesn’t felt that he did a good job. At least in radiation protection. Weisskopf: Now did you have any friends who quit because they didn’t think it was safe? Baumgartner: Oh yes. Weisskopf: Or didn’t like the management? Baumgartner: Oh yes, oh yes…lots. We brought in 500 chemists and we lost 75 the first year. Weisskopf: Just the green… Baumgartner: From as soon as they found out what the hell was here, they didn’t want any part of that… nuclear bomb. I had a good friend who no longer could do the job that I ended up getting after he left. Signing off on all those weapons. Weisskopf: Oh, not for… TAPE #2 SIDE B Baumgartner: Like for instance an H-Bomb, that’s so hellaciously large and that’s not against just military. That has to be against civilian population. Weisskopf: What military installation is that big? Baumgartner: Is that big? You know, you know… Weisskopf: New York City is that big…. Baumgartner: Yeah right. And so you get rid of the back up for the military which is the people, and that’s what H-Bomb, and it’s so hellaciously large that you’ve ruined your political system if you drop it. I mean you know you drop seven bombs on Russia and you haven’t got enough big cities left or enough politicians left to do anything. And if you let those people, if you warn them and then you destroyed the city after they’re out, what do you do with all these locusts? I mean they, just you have anarchy so, there isn’t anybody that I know of in the political system that is so paranoid that would use a weapon. The reason they won’t is because, like Khadafy, he’s only got three cities and then he hasn’t got anything left. I mean what’s he going to be ruler of? You know, so you drop nine bombs on America and you’ve got like 75 million people, what are you going to do with 75 million people out in the countryside. Weisskopf: Now, would somebody have stayed here working at 2345 if they were adamantly against nuclear weapons? And the policy of having nuclear weapons? Baumgartner: Yeah, but I didn’t meet too many of those. The only one I met was one the guy who was signing off when he realized how many weapons there were, the number was so large, it was so mind boggling that to build any more he thought was, you know, crazy. Weisskopf: And politically you were still comfortable with what was going on? ____ (unclear) Baumgartner: Well we were…. Weisskopf: …reasonable approach. Baumgartner: I felt much more comfortable once we had the H-Bomb, because see the A-Bomb is small enough to where it could be a tactical weapon and we built a lot of cannon shells, but there is no… The H-Bomb is a whole different thing and if you ever escalate, my God, I would assume soon the political boys would take care of us. Weisskopf: So you thought that the sheer lunacy of even trying to use one… Baumgartner: The sheer lunacy of going against America with 30,000 weapons is lunacy, even if you figure on getting 90%… Weisskopf: Right, it’s still not… Baumgartner: No…it’s just crazy. And we can’t afford to go against Russia even with 6,000. I mean 60. What are we going to do against 60? Or 600? I mean it’s crazy. Weisskopf: You would have more deaths civilian and otherwise in the first half-hour of the war then…. Baumgartner: Yeah, you would no longer have any capability, in my judgement, of attacking further. In other words, there is no way you can invade us nor can we invade them because there is too much anarchy. There is just no law and order. I don’t care what anybody says. Weisskopf: So you thought it was a reasonable approach to international…. Baumgartner: Yeah, the bigger pile was, the better I liked it, because now I don’t care…even a little paranoia stops you from using it. You no longer have to worry about large paranoia, just even a little, even a little bit. Any sane man, even a sane man is scared much less a paranoid. That’s the way I thought. I’ve let my views be known and you didn’t agree or not agree, but that’s the way I felt. It just didn’t make sense. There aren’t 600 targets out there or 6,000 targets out in this world, there just aren’t. And then when people started talking about China… I went to China, 25 years ago admittedly, but I was worried, but there is no way in hell China can do anything. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: I mean what can they do with a sampan? You know, sure they got 7,000 or 10,000 sampans, but they aren’t going to be able to come across the ocean. I mean remember when they invaded Vietnam? Maybe that was before your time. After we left Vietnam, China went to invade Vietnam. And they got 7 miles into the country and couldn’t go any further, and you know why? The single transportation that they had was a single railroad line that were bringing supplies from 1,000 miles back out to the front. So when they sent a soldier to the front, he had a knapsack full of whatever the hell they put in there, but he can’t put a ton in there. I mean if he puts 90 pounds in there for a little guy like that he’s got a lot. Okay, how much food is that, how much ammunition is that, etc. How long will he last? A week? 10 days? 15 at the most, and then what does he do? Then you’ve got to retreat…and that’s exactly what happened. So they put…ah…Remember the Tiamen Square fiasco? Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: Well, I was in Peking a few years before that and to give you an example of a problem. When I was there, there were two filling stations in Peking for the military vehicles and for everything else. During the day the military vehicles were loaded with food stuffs which they brought into town and dropped off and the people then picked it up with (unclear) and then the military, at night then could go out, pick up soldiers and bring them in. Well, how many, I think they had like 15-20 trucks one-ton trucks, well how many guys can you pick up with 25 trucks, until you can get an army of 10,000 guys? It takes weeks and if you recall they were running around Tiamen Square for weeks before they finally quelled them and that’s because it took them that long to get the 10,000 GI’s in there to do it. So you can…to me China is not a threat. They’re a threat in terms of nuclear, but their sure not a threat…now if they could blow us out of the world okay then you know that’s a threat. Now they might be the ones who might use a nuclear weapon with a rocket. Weisskopf: Theoretically, I mean the theory that anybody who understands them well enough and knows how to use them offensively, would never do it again somebody who has equal weapons. Baumgartner: No and they’re even more conservative than we are, so…Anyway I… Weisskopf: You can’t be world power without it… Baumgartner: Right, right. Weisskopf: You don’t feel like your part of the big boys unless you do have the capability. Baumgartner: Right, right. Weisskopf: Germany, France, or England, or China. Baumgartner: Right, right, right. So, anyway…I have gone to these countries just to see what’s, you know, what’s there. To give you an example, inside of Peking there are two roads, four lanes. One going east and west and one going north and south and as soon as you get to the edge of the city…now how do you know you’re at the edge of city? Because that’s the last house, which is a high-rise apartment, and then it’s a two-lane highway. And how do I know that was a two-lane highway? Because we went to the China Wall. So we went out north and went to the China Wall, and then when we came in we were going to go to the coastline and as soon as we got out of the south end it was a two-lane highway. And if you want to see how they made the road, down at Kweilin which is way down south, they were making it in three-foot squares and they had a manual tamper like we have you know, and a three foot square that big was all that that half-ton truck could hold. So they made it in three-foot squares. Can you imagine going down the highway, and I was looking at this, and there was this quilt of three-foot squares and when I saw that I, you know, I couldn’t imagine it until I asked somebody. I said “what is this?” and he says well that’s….so each truck load gave a three-foot square, and the next truck. When I saw all that I says why worry? We’ve got enough power, no one is going to attack. We will not use it, because there aren’t enough targets anyplace. And if you notice all of the stuff that, they’ve always stayed with explosives. Weisskopf: They’ve what? Baumgartner: Everybody’s always stayed with explosives, TNT, plastic…they’ve stayed away from nuclear. Weisskopf: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting in 50 year’s time. Baumgartner: Yeah. Weisskopf: There has never been an occasion to use one. Baumgartner: The only nuclear material we have every used against anybody was when we were at the Gulf War… Weisskopf: Oh the depleted uranium… Baumgartner: The depleted uranium shells… Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: Oh I was upset when I heard that. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: Wow. Weisskopf: Just because it’s not a good metal to be breathing in or? Baumgartner: You’re spreading uranium all over hell. Weisskopf: Oh uranium that could be useful to somebody. Baumgartner: Yeah, my feeling is there is a, I’ve got these five million shells, I mean we’ve given them a gift. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: Does he have to steal anything? No. (unclear), you know the guy is not an ignorant guy. Weisskopf: Can you buy uranium on the open market? Baumgartner: No. Weisskopf: It’s regulated or? Baumgartner: Well, read the state law and I’ll give you a hint. After the second, third resale value of an airplane it is no longer controlled. Weisskopf: The airplane is new and then it’s sold used…. Baumgartner: And then sold used, and sold used again, and when that happens it’s no longer regulated, no longer put on the books. And if you go to some of these small airports you will see 707’s with tails missing. Weisskopf: Okay, I’m gonna watch for it. Baumgartner: Watch for it when you’re in these foreign countries. Weisskopf: How many pounds do they put in? Baumgartner: 500. Weisskopf: Oh, okay. Baumgartner: It’s an appreciable amount. You don’t have to, I mean that will make quite a bit of ¼ inch thick sheeting. Thermal neutrons will not go through more than a ¼ inch. Weisskopf: And is it depleted uranium only because it’s more valuable for other uses when it’s not depleted? Or? Baumgartner: Well, 235. Weisskopf: Or is it that they won’t sell real uranium in a metallic version? Baumgartner: Oh they sell regular uranium all the time. That’s in the open market. There’s a uranium market in the world. Weisskopf: But, why do they use depleted in the back of… Baumgartner: Oh because we have this big warehouse full of it you know that’s about 17 miles long and 18 miles wide that’s… Weisskopf: Really? Okay. Baumgartner: You know where we sucked out the 0.35% and made reactor material at 5%, so… Weisskopf: I never heard that before. Baumgartner: Well, and then you, what do you do with the reactor material that you rerun? You know, we are such a rich nation that we have not yet at this point in time redissolved a single slug that has gone through a power reactor. Weisskopf: That’s right. Let alone, taking depleted uranium, mixing in plutonium and saying hey we got fuel again. Baumgartner: Yeah. Weisskopf: Well…and we have no plans to recycle fuel. Baumgartner: Not that I, yeah we’re going to de-bury it. It’s crazy. Weisskopf: Have you at all read about what they do in France with their fuel? Baumgartner: um-hum. Weisskopf: Yeah? Baumgartner: They’re recycling. Weisskopf: How modern or different is it from what you were doing here? Baumgartner: Not any more modern than we proposed, which we already know all about because we had done all the preliminary, we’ve done all the chemistry. Weisskopf: Oh, the one that was going to be back east, that was the one they were going to build. Baumgartner: Yeah, well France has, I think, three of them. Weisskopf: Okay, they ship hot fuel around to various plants. Baumgartner: No, no, no they remake it. Weisskopf: No, but they ship it from the reactor to a separations plant. Baumgartner: To a separations plant. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: Yes, then they remake it. Then see, what people don’t understand is that the plutonium that’s in there is really much better than the plutonium that we’ve got because our plutonium is weapons grade, but if you want a reactor grade plutonium…. Weisskopf: Oh… Baumgartner: …you want something that has maybe like 50% of 240. Weisskopf: You like that… Baumgartner: Yeah, cause when it splits, when it hits the neutrons, see instead of giving you…ahh let me see, uranium is 1.4 neutrons, I think, per event. Yeah and plutonium is I think 1.9, 239; 240 I think is 2.6…so now you get 1.6 atoms of plutonium back for every atom used…ha ha….I mean breeder concept is here to stay, now every ton of uranium becomes a ton of plutonium and ….MEV’s is enormous, 9.3 MEV per event…oh God. Weisskopf: It’s a whole different kind of energy production then we have ever had before. Baumgartner: Yeah well… Weisskopf: Especially if you burn it…. Baumgartner: In the 50’s when we through the mathematics of it we said that we have enough uranium on hand at that time, just the uranium part, that we would have 400 years with a 2% growth per year. You know where we go to reactors, and if we went the breeder concept, we have no idea how much. I mean it’s like having 10,000 oil fields. Because now instead of 0.35% of the uranium going into plutonium atoms, you’ve got to stop talking about the whole works. And 0.35 is something like the factor of 300. So now 400 years x 300. You know you say to yourself…well…and that’s without the new found uranium, without…so…it’s such a large number that I guess people didn’t believe it. You know because at least the Americans didn’t. So, it’s just a… I could study, but I stopped worrying about studies in ’67, by that time we had done all the ways there were. We had done all the recovery. We already had the classification. We had them on a monolith, with making it into a great big monolith of concrete, with you know, which was do you want to go with what levels? There were two other methods for making little glass balls…so there was a whole bunch of methods that we had developed all here. Weisskopf: How much waste was there going to be, or is there in France from a modern efficient, recycling of hot fuel. Baumgartner: Each reactor produces a tube of material 17 feet long and one-foot in diameter per year. Weisskopf: A tube of unusable material? Baumgartner: Of fission products, not plutonium and not uranium. Weisskopf: But, which you know you can take out and reuse. 17 feet long and how big around? Baumgartner: One foot in diameter. Weisskopf: And that would be very hot stuff. Baumgartner: No necessarily, because you’ve also taken out the strontium and you’ve also taken out the cobalt. Weisskopf: I wonder if they’re doing that in France… Baumgartner: Yes, yes, yes. Weisskopf: Okay. Baumgartner: They’re using the technology we developed in the ‘60s. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: I can tell you that right now. The separations plant is a PUREX plant. Weisskopf: And do they have a permanent waste storage for the stuff they… Baumgartner: Yes they do…yes they do. But remember now, these old slugs, these old 17-foot long, some of them are innocuous almost. They’ve been around 25 years, so after 25 years as far as I’m concerned that’s no longer a problem. But, you leave it where it’s at and it’s not that big of deal. So there, I think they’ve got what 30 reactors, so they’ve got 30 of these tubes per year. I mean, you know, if you can put them in the ground and if they’re not generating enough heat anymore, especially the old ones, you don’t need to you know hardly do anything with them. You know…a little bit of water-cooling and that’s just undoable, you know to a pipe. Weisskopf: Was there any talk 25 years ago getting the tanks emptied out in the 200 Areas? Baumgartner: Oh yes, oh yes, that’s when we talked about getting the bismuth and the aluminum and all that type of thing. Weisskopf: But they never took the time or the money to set up a system of doing it? Baumgartner: We did all the preliminary work, like I call the test tube work, so we know what the reaction, we know what it takes to do it. Yes. So, deep geological storage was just the ____ enthima, I mean that was crazy, crazy, crazy, all that uranium. And that’s all 5% and we haven’t burned 5%… Weisskopf: Oh…in a modern reactor. Baumgartner: In a modern reactor is 5% uranium 235. Weisskopf: So, it’s still more enriched than natural uranium. Baumgartner: Oh absolutely, but at least an order of magnitude. Weisskopf: So if you just pull out the uranium, isotopes and all, you end up with something that’s more enriched than… Baumgartner: Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. Oh yeah. Weisskopf: And there’s how many thousands of tons waiting to be buried. Baumgartner: Oh Jesus. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: I mean… Weisskopf: It’s interesting. Baumgartner: I’m sorry, it’s crazy. We’re such a rich country we don’t need to do that. Weisskopf: And oil is not so expensive yet. Baumgartner: No it’s not very high yet, power’s not high yet. Did you know that some of the cheapest power shortly is going to be in that one spot? Weisskopf: Yeah? Baumgartner: Well because we were not satisfied until we had put a penalty on the Hydroelectric power plants of 500 million dollars per year. That’s how much the fish are costing us right now. So right now, they can’t sell power from the dams which cost roughly I think 1.6 cents a kilowatt or maybe a tenth of that, but it now costs 5.4 cents and we can make power out here, I know but it’d 4.6. So nuclear power right now is cheaper than dam power. Weisskopf: That’s interesting. Baumgartner: And gas power is now going to be about 12 cents, maybe 18 cents, I don’t know I haven’t seen the latest numbers on the BTUs. The same with oil, see oil doesn’t have to pay the tax. They are burning 24 dollars a barrel type of thing, they’re not paying like we are a few dollars a gallon you know. Weisskopf: Interesting. Baumgartner: So, and these are…we, all of that is in that library out there, I can tell you that now, because all of those became documents that we wrote and that we used to go to meetings, because you know the Health Physics was kind of interested in going to nuclear power, because after all that was our future because we knew ultimately that these reactors would shut down. And so for the monitors and the workers to work, they were going to have to go to reactors and so our future was in private power, you know by the nuclear power. So, we obviously as…since that’s the kind of thing that health physicists, you don’t need them except in you know nuclear plants and separations plants, you know and canyon. So, consequently, they wanted to have all of the reasons why power should be coming along. Anyway, that’s… Weisskopf: Well, it’s interesting how we can move off in other directions so easily, I like that. Baumgartner: Remember that we worked on all of that really early. You know people always say…You haven’t heard Nader say anything in the last 10 years against nuclear power. It isn’t there, because he’s got to read 70,000 documents and lawyers are notoriously famous for reading about two or three and that’s it. Weisskopf: Were you looking forward to retirement when the time came? Baumgartner: Yeah, I had spent 44 years. Weisskopf: Yeah. Baumgartner: It was long enough, I think it was time for guys like me to go away and let the young guys… No I didn’t have any problem with that. Weisskopf: Still enjoy living in Richland? Baumgartner: Oh absolutely. There’s no traffic. Weisskopf: That’s right. Baumgartner: Short distance. Weisskopf: You don’t realize it until you go anywhere else. Baumgartner: I just came from Phoenix, one and a half million people, like I said 100 blocks took me 45 minutes. I mean I could drive to Pasco in 15. Weisskopf: But why do you need to go to Pasco? Baumgartner: Yeah, but I’m saying…you know. Weisskopf: You’d have to find a reason to go… Baumgartner: Yeah. Weisskopf: No, I laugh literally, I’m self-employed so I work at home and I put 3,000 miles a year on my car. Baumgartner: So, hardly pays to buy a new one. Weisskopf: No it doesn’t, not at all. Baumgartner: You’re rusting through, just from sitting. Weisskopf: But no, it’s easy to live around here. How long have you been in this house? Baumgartner: 1965. I had it built, first owner. We had lots of first owners here. There is only about three of us left and you’d expect that. Weisskopf: I’m going to turn this off now. Baumgartner: Go ahead. [End of Interview] Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1 hour, 38 minutes Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with William Baumgartner (2 PARTS) Description An account of the resource An oral history interview with William Baumgartner conducted by the B Reactor Museum Association. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F97cee4095329c8afb12f2a945f3a563e.MP3 34e4d4f3c18d3c8fbdcae90936b8fd55 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource B Reactor Museum Association Oral Histories Description An account of the resource Oral History Interviews conducted by the B Reactor Museum Association. The collection is split between a series of audio oral histories taken in the late 1990s and early 2000s by Gene Weisskopf that focuses on the T-Plant, and a series of video oral histories done in the early 1990s by Bill Putman that focus on the B Reactor and Hanford construction. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3, DOCX Language A language of the resource English Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Alex Smith Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [Start of Interview] Weisskopf: Today is October 27, 1999. And why don’t you give us your name and spell the last name. Smith: Alex Smith, S-m-i-t-h. Weisskopf: Did anybody know you by a nickname when you worked here? Smith: Smitty. Weisskopf: Smitty? Okay. Smith: In the early days. Later on, they didn’t. Weisskopf: And why don’t you start out, let’s talk about what you were doing before you were assigned here and how you came to Richland. Smith: I was working at Remington Arms in Salt Lake City making 30 and 50 caliber cartridges. And the first year in operation we made enough cartridges to shoot 200 rounds at every Axis shoulder and civilian. And we made so much, and there were three other plants besides the Salt Lake plant. And we drained all the coppers all the countries’ copper stockpile, eventually had to start drawing them from steel. Naturally, they were obsolete ammunition used in World War I, so a lot of them were never used after the first year, so they closed the Salt Lake plant down. Weisskopf: Where were the other two plants? Smith: There was one in Kansas City and one in Oklahoma. And, of course, back in Remington Arms main plant. Weisskopf: Okay. So they were going to close the plant you were working in? Smith: Yes. And since Remington Arms was a subsidiary of DuPont Company, and DuPont Company was doing construction of the plant at Hanford, those who wanted to go were given opportunities of being transferred up there on a job if they had qualifications of what they needed up there. So in a very short time after March or April sometime, 1943, by the time I got there in December the 9th, they had assembled some 60,000 workers from every state in the union. At that time there were only 48 states. And they sent recruiters out all over. Weisskopf: How did they present the job to you before you went out? How did they tell you what it was? Smith: They told us nothing. They told us the interviewer says he found out I had some machine shop experience, he said if we were to be called upon to design a shop of course, later on I could tell, after I saw the shop, I saw he was trying to get people who would know how to make a layout for mass production, to machine a product, is the way he put it, to set up the machinery. And he referred to most of it as carpenter machinery. Around the room, how you’d have it designed and have your assembly lines and machining lines to get the best results. That was about the only thing that he told me. I mean, anything that had any relation to the job I was to do. Weisskopf: And did that sound better than what was your other option, if you hadn’t taken him up on that? Smith: He didn’t have one. He was specifically looking for somebody to work in the 101 Building, I suppose. Weisskopf: Okay. When did you have the interview versus actually arriving in Pasco? What was the time lag, do you think? Smith: I was on my way in about three days. Weisskopf: Did you drive out? Smith: No, they put us on a train. They paid our transportation. There was quite a I would say there were probably about 50 people came up with me. Some of them didn’t stay very long. Some of them left in a hurry. There was a the whole desert was torn up, had the first windstorm of course, this was the 9th of December, and it was cold. I remember we had what we called the cattle cars with a big semi-trailer, and it had benches on either side, and the windows were all frosted up, you couldn’t see out. When we came through Richland, they had started constructing the houses, but you couldn’t see anything. You could try to scrape a thing. And at the time I came here, construction people, the engineers and people, they were DuPont employees, would get a house in probably three or four months. They had top priority, before us. The thing went along, and they started building, they of course built three reactors first. But I guess as they knew more of what they were doing, they decided that they didn’t need that many, so they concentrated on B and finished it first. Weisskopf: And you got here in December of ‘43. Smith: Yeah, December the 9th. I remember the date. Weisskopf: How many days later was it before you showed up on the job and they were Smith: I showed up the next morning. And I was taken out to 101 Building. I already apparently had enough clearance, because there was no delay in getting in. Weisskopf: You mean the basic clearance. Smith: Yeah. Weisskopf: Not a secrecy you didn’t have a real clearance? Smith: No. Weisskopf: But you were good enough for the job. They didn’t have to investigate further. Smith: Yeah. Well, I think they anybody that worked in the arms department had to have some kind of clearance. Weisskopf: Okay. Smith: Had to pass a security test. Because they had gone out to people in high school, college, university. Weisskopf: Was the 101 Building up and running when you got there? Smith: Yes. Weisskopf: It was producing already? Smith: No, they had a yeah, they had one assembly line up. Weisskopf: And it was milling graphite? Smith: Yes. It was very crude, and of course it wasn’t anything like the one we finished up with. I think there was it was two or three lines, I can’t remember for sure. Weisskopf: Let me ask you again: The 101 Building, at least then, was only used for milling graphite? Smith: That’s all. Weisskopf: That was the primary purpose. Okay. Smith: Storage. Had a big storage area for raw graphite that come in un-machined. Weisskopf: And when you went in there, what did you do the first or second day? How did they orient you to ? Smith: Well, that was in the engineering department. It was a separate they worked they reported directly to DuPont. As I remember this organization, DuPont was the construction engineer, and they furnished all the design, and the equipment, and the engineering reports, write-ups and everything, how things were to be done. But this Washington, being a strong union state, why, each craft worked for their own particular craft and they were hired out of the union hall. And there was, for example, Newberry, Chandler and Lord was the electrical contractor. I can’t remember the pipefitters. But the millwrights of course was another contractor. They all reported to their separate supervision. It was a very cumbersome organization and hard to work, but the very fact that it was a war, it would never work in peacetime, but the very fact that people loyalty was at stake, and everybody cooperated and bent backwards to try to get along and work the best they could. And DuPont Company itself, they were a pretty smart outfit. They’d been through a lot of wars, ever since the Civil well, Revolution, I guess. Weisskopf: So what were you doing the second day that they showed you the room, the building? Smith: I spent two or three days with engineers, going over the whole plan, showing us from the very beginning out to the raw storage shed place, and followed everything through. And I was going to be see, at that time they only had one shift. And I spent a week in orientation. And then I was put in charge of the swing shift. And, of course, I had a lot of people that knew what they were doing that worked on days. Weisskopf: Back then, if it wasn’t top secret, if you were to come home and describe to somebody what your job was, or what the purpose of the building was, how would you have described it? Secrecy didn’t matter, what was it that the building was doing that you were there to do? Smith: We were there to machine graphite to a lot of different shapes and sizes to very precise dimensions. And we at that time knew nothing about what it was for, what we were doing. Weisskopf: Were you familiar with graphite at all before then? Smith: Well, yes, in a way. My background was mining geology, and of course we had a lot to do with the raw materials and stuff like that. Weisskopf: And did you know you were on a war effort? That must have been pretty obvious. Smith: Oh, yes. That was made very obvious. Everybody knew. Weisskopf: Have any clue what they were going to be using graphite for? Smith: No. Not a clue. Weisskopf: Did you know how much was going to be run through there, the quantities? Smith: No idea. At that point I had never seen a reactor, never seen the place it was going. Weisskopf: Okay. So they started you as the guy running the swing shift, you said? Smith: Yes. Weisskopf: And what was that like the first few days that you did it? What was the routine? Smith: Learning for several weeks. I had a lot of here again, everybody had the spirit of cooperation. There was no jealousy, no anything as far as the fact that the others had been here the only thing I could figure out was the others have been here long enough to make several mistakes, and I hadn’t, and that was the reason I got the job. Of course, the fact that I was a shift supervisor in the arms plant, I don’t know when that was. But I do know that I had a lot of good, intelligent individuals working for me, the engineers. A lot of them who weren’t engineers but were, you know, within the limits of their background and knowledge, they were doing engineering work. There was just nothing but good cooperation on their part to help me learn my job. Weisskopf: What were some of the things that you were told that were really, really important about the graphite? Smith: Each piece of graphite has a particular place to go, so they have to each of them has to be accounted for, and we have to have a method, and they had already worked out this method. Apparently it was very much a success, because you can imagine what would happen if one of those pieces of graphite that was in the center of the pile was one that was supposed to have the receiver rod, the pipe, tube, was in there, and you shoved that in the blank, in order to keep that place cool, they had no idea whether they were going to be able to do the job or not, but certainly they would never have started up if they discovered that that would happen. So everything had to be in place. Weisskopf: Did they give you a list of sizes and pieces? Smith: Yes. They had drawings of everything. I can’t remember, but it was between two and three hundred different sizes and shapes of blocks. Weisskopf: And other than the sizes and shapes, what were the other things that they emphasized was critical about the job? Smith: Well, like I say, those that required holes drilled the length of the block, which was was it three and a half or four feet long? Weisskopf: Four feet, I think. Smith: Four? Yeah, four feet. Weisskopf: And you tempered the edges? Smith: Yes, all had to be tempered. Weisskopf: And you didn’t know why you were doing that, it was just part of the specification? Smith: Yes. Weisskopf: Were there small pieces, too? Smith: Yes, there were small, just two or three inches long, some block. It was different sizes. Mostly they were they weren’t much shorter than a foot, as I remember, make everything come out even, I guess. And then there was, over those blocks, there was blocks that had instrumentation that went into the center of the controls, and they were very special, too. Weisskopf: And you were milling them down to the finished size? Smith: Yes. Weisskopf: Till they were ready to be used? Smith: Right. They were…We had to stack them in very precise piles, all labeled, and they were to leave, to be loaded in a certain order, taken out. And one of the things that came up early on was the fact that we were we had practice runs with running the ones for 305, for the little reactor in 300 area. So we had a lot of practice in getting things done. Went out and laid that pile up. Weisskopf: You were doing that as well? Smith: Yes. It was yeah. They had already if I remember right, they had already started shipping it out for the 300 area. It wasn’t very long till they had. Weisskopf: Before they laid the graphite in the B Reactor, I know they talked about they laid up like 10 or 15 rows to make sure it all was exact, and then they’d take it out and put it into the pile. Were they doing that at the 101 Building? Smith: No. They didn’t do that on purpose out there, at 100-B. This is what I was going to tell you, that one of the sharp engineers that was there developed this method of measuring, so they didn’t have to they were going through before that calibrating everything, see? So in order this wouldn’t do in a mass production situation. So he had set up a machine and worked with that before it got up to speed and high production. He had this developed so he had sensors in three locations along the edge the length of the block. Three or four, depending on how long it was. And he could take this block and put it on a machine table, shoving it under those little lights on a screen I mean the sensors on a screen, it would position that when he shoved it under there. And that would tell us, if all the lights were green, it passed. If all the lights, or any one of them, was red, you had to pull it out and measure it by hand. Weisskopf: So instead of having to make a dozen different hand checks, you just shoved it in the box and it had Smith: Shoved it under there. It was done on a machine table, and you just shoved it in. And of course then you had to pull it out and turn one over, because you had to have two dimensions, plus the length. So there were sensors on the length, too. So it measured the length and the two sides with one push, and then you pulled it out and shoved it back in again, turned it over 90 degrees, and shoved it back in again. If it passed all dimensions, you would send it out. Well, what we weren’t sharp enough to foresee was the fact that if every if one went through just a thousandth on the high side, you multiply that by 14... And, so, (inaudible)*. Anyway, the majority of it was on the high side, but it was all well within specification. Weisskopf: Let me rephrase that. Did specifications say plus or minus so many thousandths Smith: Three-thousandths. Weisskopf: three thousandths of an inch, you expect them to average out. Smith: Yes. Weisskopf: Some less, some more. But you’re saying they were all heading towards the plus size. Smith: That’s right. So when we started to take them out, they rolled them out, take about 12 to lay them down in a pile that’s probably not the terminology that they used but anyway, that’s what we used. So by the time they worked up see, all the shielding block with the cooling water holes were already up to receive the aluminum what was that? The lining. Stainless steel. Weisskopf: The tubes? The fuel tubes were aluminum, you had 2,000 of them. Smith: Yeah. I wasn’t sure about that aluminum. I thought surely they’d be stainless, but they were aluminum. Weisskopf: Had to be aluminum. Otherwise the stainless would have shut down the reaction too much, I think. Smith: Is that a fact? Okay. All right, that’s why it was aluminum. All right. So when they shoved the aluminum tubes in, the 14th layer was the first one that had holes to receive the aluminum tubes, and they wouldn’t go in. Weisskopf: This was in the reactor itself? Smith: Yeah. It wouldn’t go past the shielding form. So the first thing somebody thought of, of course, or everybody realized that there was no control over so Weisskopf: Let me ask you again: The first 14 rows up, the first row of holes for the process tubes, none of the tubes would go in? Smith: No. Weisskopf: Okay. Smith: It was just that close. It was very close. It couldn’t have been if you had say if it was just a thousandth, it would be 14 thousandths off. They had to fit. They had to fit precisely. There couldn’t be air space or anything between the graphite and the aluminum tube. Weisskopf: And that’s when they discovered that the error had been plus, plus, plus? Smith: Yes. So we didn’t have to take it all out, but we had to take enough out and this is another thing, just keeping track of how they did a masterful job out there, and I don’t know how they did it, because I haven’t --- of keeping the of taking it out, keeping it in order, and sending certain layers I don’t remember how many they sent back, but it couldn’t have been over two or three and machined enough out to bring them down off of those, to distribute the error as much as possible, but it was down in a zone where there was no action at all, and so apparently a few thousandths off didn’t matter. Weisskopf: And if the pile was what was it? 36 feet tall, and those blocks were about 4 inches, so that’s 3 blocks per foot, it was over 100 blocks tall. And they had to come out at the top, so that last process tube would go all the way through without binding or anything else. Smith: Yeah. Weisskopf: That’s amazing. Smith: And they worked out a system after that, after that for the other reactors of course, they had to account for it for the rest of these, because there was tubing that had to go up every so often. Weisskopf: Do you remember how you identified the blocks? When you were all finished with one, it met tolerance and you were done with it, and they stamped it, we saw them in the movie stamping it with an identifier, do you remember what those IDs were, letters or numbers were? Smith: No. When you saw this, was this done you couldn’t stop them once they were all in this they had to be stamped before they were put in. Weisskopf: Oh. It looked like they were doing it at the very end. But they did put an identifying mark on them, didn’t they, at the pile, when they were laying it up, they’d know which block went where? Smith: Normally it depends on position on the roof, or how they took it out. There was four well, I don’t remember… Weisskopf: You wrapped them in paper when you were done? Smith: No. Weisskopf: Just left them bare and stacked them? Smith: We stacked them, but we covered them. We covered them all. They were always kept covered, and nobody was allowed in there. And, of course, there was no smoking in there, no chewing tobacco, or anything like that. Weisskopf: Right. What kind of clothing were you wearing while you were inside the building working? Smith: Well, they all I wore my regular street clothes, but if I was out, went out into the graphite area, I put on a pair of coveralls. Weisskopf: It was separated from the rest of the building? Smith: Yeah. Weisskopf: Okay. Just sort of a clean room for its day? Smith: Somebody’s sending a fax. Weisskopf: So you normally just wore a suit and tie, or how dressed up were you? Smith: No, just casual clothes. See, it was too hot to do that. The only one I knew that wore a shirt was always the staff, he was the department manager, and he was the son of one of the DuPont engineers. One of the big shots. But he was sharp. He wasn’t there because of his it was because he did a good job. Weisskopf: How long do you think you were there milling, you know, working with the graphite? You started in December ‘43. Smith: Fourteen months. Weisskopf: Really? So you did all three reactors, then? Smith: Yes. I finished I was one of the last construction workers to leave. Because I wasn’t going to leave, and they kept me here as long as they could. And I was identifying equipment. All this equipment was needed elsewhere. Navy had first priority on it, and the Army had second, and DuPont had third. So we would get up and then there was other organizations lower than that. So you’d go out each morning I’d go into the office, receive a teletype from either Kansas City or some other plant, either someplace in mostly in Minnesota. I can’t remember where all the DuPont plants and they would tell me what they needed, describe it. And I’d go out searching the whole field for these. And I had tickets to put on there. Well, if it was somebody from the Navy or Army, they’d come along, they wanted to rip that ticket off. By the time I got a construction crew ready to go to load it on the freight car, why, it would be gone a lot of times. So I worked out of course, I being one of the ones that was there, the Navy and the Army personnel was a little arrogant about the things, and so they were very happy to accommodate me and let me know that they had ripped that off, so we’d load it on and take it. Told me that was legal. And I don’t know whether the Navy needed it worse than we did or not, but Weisskopf: So 14 months from December would be like February or March of ‘45? Smith: Yeah. Weisskopf: All the reactors were up and running. Smith: Yes. Weisskopf: The whole plant was running at that point. Okay. And Smith: Well, I don’t think well, they’d have to be. Weisskopf: Well, B Reactor started in September ‘44, about nine months or ten months after you started, and Smith: It wasn’t very far behind. Weisskopf: No, a couple, few months. I think by March they were all up and running. Smith: I can’t verify that one way or the other. Weisskopf: I’d have to look it up. So that was the last part of your job at the 101 Building was decommissioning it, getting rid of the milling equipment and everything got distributed to other people at other places. Smith: Uh-huh. Weisskopf: And then where were you left after that was done? Smith: Well, on my rounds around the plant I became associated, not friends but associated with the maintenance superintendent of 100-F. And we were on a first-name basis and everything. I told him I was wound up here, and they were looking for a place to either get rid of me, send me into the Army, or I wanted a job in operations. And obviously they had planned on three more reactors and two more separations plants, and they had one of the two built. They had four planned, and they only ever finished and operated two of them. One is still a hole in the ground. As far as I know, it’s still out there. Weisskopf: C Plant, I think, in the East area. Smith: Yeah. Let’s see, the two were built in 200 west, but one was never started up. Weisskopf: That was U. Smith: U. It was finally converted to a waste processing plant. So they did the same for operations, they hired, shipped in a lot more people than they ever needed, so jobs weren’t that easy to get in operations. So he says I can’t remember who this manager, apparently he had some kind of they thought the other superintendents thought he was getting all the breaks. So when I they hired me, he sat me down, he was going to make some kind of a junior engineer or something, so I was glad to get anything. So I went down there, was interviewed, sent out to 200 west. I thought I was going out there, some kind of engineering job, and they said “No, you’re going to be an area mechanic.” So I was an area mechanic for about six months before I finally got a promotion. But that proved invaluable to me when I got back in the engineering department, having had that experience. Weisskopf: Dealing with the day-to-day Smith: I got a chance on hands-on with all the equipment, at least in the 200 areas. Weisskopf: As opposed to just working with blueprints and specifications and things like that. Smith: Yes. So I had served as a machinist apprentice until the depression come along, and me and everybody else, I went back to college. So it was really a good thing later on, because I was picked for certain jobs. Of course, when the engineering department and the maintenance department divided up into two different… why, the superintendent, who was then the superintendent of both, was going to be superintendent of maintenance, and he came and I was working in town then, in the Federal Building. It wasn’t the Federal Building then. He said he was going to send me out to 200 east, and so I went out. He didn’t tell me. He said “You’ll know why I did this later on.” Of course, three weeks later they announced the separation, and I was out in maintenance. So that was another good break, because I’d had enough practical experience. Here again, it was the spirit of cooperation, being put in charge of a maintenance crew, not having been a craftsman myself, but I’d had a good background. Well, I was, really, I had that experience, it worked out fine. [Tape changed] Smith: Through conjecture, they didn’t know either. I don’t think there were over 50 people on the plant, both AEC and or was it still the Army no, it was AEC then. Weisskopf: 1947 I think AEC started. Smith: Well, then, it was still under the Army, wasn’t it. Well, of course, a lot of the Army knew about it, high brass, I’m sure. But I would venture to say, then, there wasn’t over 100 that knew it until the bomb was dropped. Weisskopf: Did you know anything more after you’d been there for six months? Any feeling for what you were doing? Before the bomb was dropped, did you have any inkling of what was going on at the plant? Smith: No. No. We had a lot of as I say, I talked to enough engineers in the field, this field and that, and mostly, of course, they’d mostly be scientists, like physicists and that, but I had friends, but they didn’t know. Weisskopf: Did you know of radiation? Smith: Oh, yes. Weisskopf: You knew about that. Smith: We had to take all the precautions. Weisskopf: And they called it radiation? Smith: Yes. Every craftsman knew that. They had a whole of course, they still got them, the radiologists, what do they call them now? I can’t remember. Weisskopf: You’ve got your health physicists. Smith: Health physicists, yeah, it was the health physicists. Of course, they were very good craftsmen. Like I told you about that incident that the pipefitter that worked in my organization, an operation supervisor and an operator went in to prepare this cask for another load of waste, of cesium, of strontium I suppose, one or the other, I don’t know what it was. But, anyway, they went in and opened the valves, and the cask was supposed to be clean, at least drained and flushed. And he opened this drain, and some of this greenish stuff rolled out. And immediately the supervisor hollered “Get out!”. And he left, and the operator knew enough to get out. But the pipefitter, he decided to be a hero and put a stop to it. Weisskopf: Turn it off? Smith: Turn it off. Not turn it, put the plug back in. And, of course, that didn’t fit the way it did, and they yelled at him again and he finally left. Well, of course, he had gloves, rubber gloves and everything else, whatnot, and they washed him off as soon as they could. And everything of course, he was done, made all kinds of tests. The darned thing didn’t manifest itself until the scalp started coming up on the outside, and this probably was so the radiation, the damage was deep, but it came to the surface. So then I had to drive him to the University of Washington, medical. And then after that, why, we had to send him over once a month, until it healed up. Weisskopf: Was it strictly localized on his head? Smith: Yes. He must have taken internally quite a jolt, too, but apparently he didn’t, because actually I guess the radiation limits we were told were, I don’t know, a fraction of what there was any danger of damage. Weisskopf: What year do you think that was, give or take? Smith: Yes. It was in B Plant, and it was after B Plant had no, it was in T Plant, because it was when they were no, won’t say that. I guess it was B Plant. Because I had the pipefitters in both areas. I think it was the B Plant. And it would have to be 19... Let’s see, when did B Plant start? It would have to be about 1970. Give or take five years. Weisskopf: Okay. So let’s go back to 1945. You knew of radiation before the bomb was dropped, you knew that the plant had something to do with that, but no indication as to what was going on. So tell me what you thought when you did find out, when the bomb was dropped and the news came out. Did that make you look at Hanford in awe or in a new light? Smith: It wasn’t till later we found out that bomb was actually made at Oak Ridge. It was the uranium bomb. Weisskopf: Right. Smith: And the one a few days later was plutonium, I guess. So we found that out. Of course, we were claiming credit right away for a day or two till it got straightened out. Weisskopf: And did that kind of make your job seem much more interesting? Smith: Oh, yes. But the other thing is, is the atmosphere was here, this is a wartime project and the war is over now, are we all going to be out of a job? And there were all these homes here, and people with was paying 37 dollars and 60 cents rent. Should have saved a lot of money, but I don’t know if they did or not. And they were making good wages, and what we were going to do. This is going to be a time of readjustment, and all the industries geared up for war, and we’re and there was a so that was why I told you about this big red permanent building going up in the center of town, DuPont looked at it as a great morale builder, and I believe it was. People here are donating a lot of money. This is the first time the church ever built a building on leased land. Weisskopf: Which one was that? Where is that? Smith: That’s the one in the center of town, over on the big hill, overlooking when they started building that church that was the uptown district was a swamp. Weisskopf: Are you talking about the one on Jadwin? Smith: Yes. Weisskopf: Jadwin and Symons, up in that area? Smith: Yeah. Weisskopf: Okay. Yeah, I live right near there. Smith: Oh, do you? Weisskopf: Yeah. Smith: See, that was just a swamp area down in there. Weisskopf: Oh, by the creek that runs through, maybe. Smith: Yeah. It was four feet of water there. It was just a swamp. They had to have four feet of landfill in there to build that up, to build that store. I was coming through there one day, back ally on a cold winter night, and one of the owners of six of those buildings was in he came in here before the war and started a plumbing business in Pasco, Braden Plumbing. And here he was in that Japanese or Chinese restaurant there, fixing the plumbing. I said “What in the world are you doing this for?” He’s probably a millionaire. He said “I like to keep my hand in the work. I don’t want to ever lose this ability to be a plumber.” And he was fixing that up. He just come in there, I guess, and they needed help. And I thought that was the oddest thing. He owned six of those buildings. Weisskopf: So, you heard about the bomb being dropped Smith: Yes. Weisskopf: the 6th of August. Another one was dropped on the 9th of August. The war was over the 14th, or something like that. Smith: Yes. Weisskopf: So literally a week after you learned what you were doing there, your job might have been done, theoretically. Smith: Yes. We were just wondering what we were going to do. We had a certain amount of debts, we had started to one very interesting thing, the car I had was a ‘39 Chevy coupe that I had before the war. Of course, you couldn’t buy one. So I drove that all the way until I could buy a new car. In 1949, ten years later, I sold it for $15 more than I paid for it in 1940. Weisskopf: Really. Sharp businessman. Smith: Yeah, sharp businessman. I kept it in good shape. Weisskopf: Were your kids already born before the war was over? Do you have children? Smith: No. Yeah, oh, yeah. There was only two. This is another interesting little thing. I had a secretary out at work, and she was a good Catholic, and she (inaudible)*, and I only had we had these two children, and the youngest one was five years old. And she said “How many children have you got?” I said “Two.” “Two!” So she didn’t say anything about it. I says, “Well, my wife had such hard labor the last time, she said if we had any more I was going to have to have them.” So years later she came to some kind of a bazaar of some kind that we had at our church, and she came in, and she was married then. And I was towing two little kids around, one in each arm. And she looked at them and she looked at me and says “Did you have a hard labor?” Get back on the subject, but I guess that’s one of the things that happened, though. Weisskopf: Yeah. I was just curious, that transition between wartime effort, you learn what the job is about, and then a week later the war is over. How much time was there before you felt like you were back in the loop of having a real job with DuPont? Smith: Well, DuPont didn’t want to stay here themselves, and they never did push this. But once GE came in here and said this is the industry of the future, they started talking about power reactors and peacetime use of this product was far greater. It’s unfortunate that it had its bad example with the production of the bomb. But the idea of peacetime reactors is to get as much mileage out of a few elements and create as little waste as possible. And, of course, the weapons program generated all the waste, all the high level stuff and whatnot. So it’s unfortunate that this is how atomic energy had its introduction. It was an invaluable method of generating electricity. It could be cheap, too. Weisskopf: What were you thinking way back, like, say, 1948, ‘49 and ‘50, about where we would be 50 years later with atomic energy? Smith: I guess I didn’t have that much... Weisskopf: I mean, did it seem to you also that it must be the power of the future? Smith: Yes. Oh, yes. I felt, well, we’ve got a career right here. I’d always thought I’d get back in the mining business. Even after I’d gone to work for DuPont, I’d gone to Denver to train how to make ammunition. And the superintendent of the tunnel that I worked on came there to buy equipment, and he looked me up, and he wanted me to go to South America. They had a mine there, in Chuckacumada and they were going to drill a tunnel way down low and bring the ore out without hoisting it way up and up the mountain. Be a lot cheaper. Of course, they can still get it out. I guess they drilled, put the tunnel in the mountain. So I said “Well, the minute I leave this job, I’ll be in the Army,” they’re not going to let me leave the country. I was married after Pearl Harbor. So I went and helped him buy some equipment, whatnot like that. And he knew a lot about mining and tunnel equipment, and he was sent over there to buy it by Anaconda. But, of course, we’re off the subject again. Weisskopf: That’s all right. Well, let’s change subjects, then, too. Working on this history of T Plant, you were in the separations area on and off. Do you have any remembrances, stories about the crane equipment in either the 221-T or E Plant? Smith: Yes. I told you about the rotating hook. Weisskopf: Yeah. What I didn’t know is when was that and where were you at the time. Smith: I was at REDOX. Weisskopf: That was REDOX? Okay. Smith: And that was the only, really, only separations plant. It was before PUREX was on line. And PUREX initially didn’t have the capability of dissolvers to take in the E metal. Weisskopf: To take what? Smith: E metal. Enriched. Weisskopf: Oh, right, which came along in the later years. Smith: So for a while, during the early part of the Cold War, the only weapons plant, separations plant that was running full blast was REDOX. And it was designed originally, initially, it was secret before, but it was originally designed for four tons. In order to keep up with the production, we were going to have to do 14 tons a day. So we had a bunch of good, sharp instruments, and with the help of I had a small engineering crew. With the help of them, we designed each panel was run separated by an operator. So instead of the big control rooms, like they have now and like they had in PUREX, it was just individual boards, just like the old bismuth phosphate plant. So these guys were sharp enough to redesign that and locate three control locations. And they made a lot of other improvements, a lot of the times with this rotating equipment. The coarse material was eating out the graphite bearings. So we went over I went back to Lawrence Pump and I saw one of these big sludge pumps, and there was an opening in the tank. Ordinarily we had the deep well turbines with the graphite. We tried glass bearings, which lasted longer. But we were changing out these $125,000 units every shutting down to do that, about every two weeks or less. Sometimes they’d last a week. We tried different bearing material. So I went back and got Lawrence Pump to build one along the designs that just a regular New York sludge pump that they used for their sewer, and made it small enough so it would go down through the big opening. We installed that, one pump, and made an extra one. We never they closed the plant down 18 months later, and we still had the original pump in there. It had some drawbacks, because we had to have so much liquid in the tank before it would start. Had a siphon tube down to the bottom of the tank, because it wasn’t long enough, and it wasn’t practical to redesign or build one, so we put this suction. And, of course, as long as it kept it running and everything going, kept the tank a certain level, there was no problem. But if it did happen to go below, they just had to add water and fill it up so it would prime itself. Weisskopf: Okay. Now, the first six months you spent in maintenance, early on? You said they sent you out to the 200 areas? Smith: Yes. Weisskopf: What kind of work were you doing in there? Smith: In those days, there was no union, and there was no differentiation between pipefitter, and millwright and machinist. I worked in the machine shop for a while, and then they put me on the shift and I’d go out to the various buildings and worked on mechanical equipment mostly. Weisskopf: Did you ever go into the canyons? Smith: Oh, yes. Weisskopf: What was the typical job where you might be sent into one of the canyons? Smith: Well, when they first started the T Plant, they just got hot, a couple of them. I had a problem with a jumper, and they couldn’t get it to fit in up there, so they put a couple of us down in the cell. We had a very short time limit. It hadn’t gotten real hot yet. We went up and tried that jumper so we got it to fit in place. Weisskopf: What would they have done if it had been hot? What could they have done? Smith: They probably had to take the thing out and well, we couldn’t have gone down there. They’d probably take this out. In those days, we had later on, of course, we had a decontaminator, we had the capability of doing that, but we didn’t then. Wouldn’t even suggest it. They’d have sent it to the shop. We had superintendent later on, this is now. They’d have gone back to the shop, pipe shop, and got another one built. Weisskopf: Okay. And just replace the whole jumper? Smith: It was very interesting thing that might be interesting now. There was two different theories here. At Hanford, we built the jumpers very rigid. They had they didn’t bend very much. They had to be right, and they had a lot of stiff framework on them. And one of the big improvements over the bismuth phosphate plant was that they were a flat surface to surface, or the seal was, but the ones later on were oval, concave, so they could be tilted a little bit, and you could get away with that, see. Well, going back to Savannah River, of course I must have known in the back of my mind before this, but I got back there and found out they make them [jumpers] as flimsy as they can. They put one end down and then can bend the other one into place. Take the spare hook or something like that if it didn’t fit. They just didn’t depend on a good fit. They made it out of schedule 10 pipe instead of 40, and when they put them on there, why, they could draw themselves they didn’t have that oval head like we had, but they didn’t have to sit straight, or anything else, they got away with this. Weisskopf: The original design was a flat connection? Smith: Yes. Weisskopf: And where was the oval used at Hanford? Smith: At REDOX. Weisskopf: REDOX, Okay. They improved the connection. Smith: Yes. They improved that here. Weisskopf: But at T Plant, the connections all had to fit precisely? Smith: Yes. Weisskopf: When you laid it in there, it had to line up and then just Smith: Yeah. Weisskopf: fit perfectly. Smith: Yeah. Weisskopf: How did you get down in the cell for that job when you Smith: Well, we had ladders then, put them off the top of the tank. But something went wrong and something got out, you see, and I don’t know how they even I wasn’t there when they corrected whatever was wrong, because we were told to scram out of there. Weisskopf: Were you dressed in whites, coveralls? Smith: Oh, yes. Coveralls. In fact, we had the plastic suit. Weisskopf: Were you impressed at the size of the place? Smith: Oh, I saw that I think the T Building had an extra length, they had an extra operation. Weisskopf: The laboratory. The semi works that they had. Smith: Oh, yeah. I think it was 900 feet long. Weisskopf: Just about. Almost. Its 965, something like that. Smith: Is it? Weisskopf: Yeah 865. Smith: And I couldn’t believe that. Plus the fact that the walls in places were 8-foot thick. Big concrete blocks on top of them. One interesting thing, on the crane, the REDOX crane developed this problem of going around, down the track skeewampus. There was no way it was so hot in those days, you only had 30 seconds to go up there and look. Something like that. Now, this was when I was maintenance manager with REDOX. And it was wearing the rail out and everything else. All kinds of problems. So Andy Eckert and I went up, and we got allowance to take I don’t know how many, a year’s supply of radiation, something like that. Went up there, and it so happened on those old-fashioned cranes, they had one big motor in the center, and they had a flange on either side that drove the wheels, both sides, the motor too, worked from both sides. That was right in the center. And Andy noticed down there a big nut laying on the got looking there, and that crane was being powered from one side, and the other all gores were either sheared off or laying around there. Those bolts. Nobody had thought of that for two or three weeks. Weisskopf: So it was always skewed as it went down the track? Smith: Yeah. Every once in a while we’d have to go down to the end and bang it against the end to straighten it out again. And they did that so much, once they broke the rail on one. Weisskopf: That’s funny. Did you ever work on the cranes at T Plant or B Plant? Smith: Yes. Weisskopf: What types of things would you be doing with those? Smith: Oh, actually, most of the things was electrical. But we had to go up and lubricate the thing. And then... well, let’s see... Weisskopf: Let me ask you this: There were two periscopes that the operator used. Smith: Yes. Weisskopf: Do you remember there being television, a little closed circuit television in the cab? Smith: No. There wasn’t anything like that that I know. The first television we got put in, and we put one on before we shut down at REDOX, but it never was satisfactory enough to see what you were doing. Weisskopf: At REDOX. So at T Plant and B Plant, you don’t remember TV being there at all? Smith: No. No, there wasn’t any. Weisskopf: Yeah. Is it possible they installed it and never used it? Smith: No. Well, yes, later on in T Plant it became the main decontamination of the Weisskopf: No, no, I mean in the beginning. Smith: No. Weisskopf: In the beginning, there wasn’t a little TV screen in the cab that they never used? Smith: No. It wouldn’t be in the cab anyway, it would have to be out in the Weisskopf: No, the screen itself. Smith: The screen. Excuse me, I’m sorry. Okay. Weisskopf: Okay. Well, I’ve heard it from plenty of people; it must be true. Did you ever talk to any of the crane operators? Smith: All the time. Weisskopf: Were they swaggering, like a fighter pilot? Were they cocky and proud of their job because they Smith: They were proud of their job, but they were very humble, too, because they had so much at stake. The whole plant depended on them. The whole they were the one key but it’s amazing, though, how we would often schedule shutdowns for the top crane operator to be on shift, at least when we installed the equipment. Dismantling it was no problem. But when we started installing it, why, we... Weisskopf: So you’d schedule it around his schedule, to make sure that the top guy was there. Smith: There were very few that weren’t good operators. But there were a few that we just didn’t have any confidence in. Weisskopf: How many hours would they spend on a shift inside the cab, working it? Would they be there the whole time? Smith: No, no. They came out for something to eat, to take lunch. But they put in four hours, probably. Weisskopf: Okay. Pretty tiring job? Smith: Oh, it is, when they’re putting jumpers on. But most of the time, of course, they can only do so much, they have to get instructions on the process. Each operating department had an engineer working for the production. He was the production engineer, and he knew the facility very well, and he had all the blueprints, and he worked with the crane operator, told him this is the next jumper to use. They got to the point where they were pretty good at it themselves, but they had a certain order that they had to go on, because some were overlapping the others. You had to avoid putting one that was on top, and then it would have to be removed to put the other one in. Weisskopf: Would they give them charts or something, or lists on how they were to go about? Smith: I think mostly they worked by the telephone. Weisskopf: Okay. Smith: I don’t know. I can’t answer that. Weisskopf: Did you ever hang out in the cab with them? Smith: Oh, yes. Weisskopf: What kind of stuff were you doing? What was your job? Smith: Well, they would show me when you look down on that, I don’t see how in the world they ever operated. Weisskopf: Looking through the periscope? Smith: Yeah. It took a certain see, the order of promotion was that they put heavy equipment operators I mean, crane operators that operated outside cranes. But I don’t know what the percentage of them was, but there was a certain percentage that just, by mutual agreement, they weren’t going to cut it. But they did have a lot of pride in the job, but as I say, most of them were very thankful there was a being that was helping them, the chances of everything fitting in place. The jumpers had to be all fit. A lot of times we would make new ones completely in getting them all. And, of course, if one didn’t get on, why, we had to go back to the shop and get another one built. We had to call up people at night, get a crew up there and put a jumper together sometimes. Weisskopf: There must have been some pretty extreme pressures to keep the thing running. Smith: Oh, in REDOX, I’m telling you. Weisskopf: Especially at REDOX? Smith: Especially REDOX, because PUREX wasn’t up. You know, it was quite a while, we had had all the cold runs to do and a lot of other things. I don’t remember the timing. For a while, for whatever reason, none of the dissolvers had the analysts where you could put a concrete cylinder down the center, through the cavity. And they didn’t have the capability of doing this as E metal in Richland, and I don’t know, I guess it’s the enriched uranium. Weisskopf: Which you didn’t have to worry about in the old days because they weren’t using any, right? Smith: That’s right. All the old dissolvers would just dump they dumped the whole thing in. Weisskopf: And the only time they worried about criticality was probably after it got out of the T Plant into the other buildings, maybe at the end of the cycles? Smith: Yeah. There was a place in 233 in REDOX where we were worried about criticality, and we didn’t trust valves or anything. Whenever we had to use that line, we went in and we took a flange, it had two flanges, and took a line right out and molded blanks. Weisskopf: Disconnected the pipe? Smith: Disconnected the pipe and put blanks on. And then during this operation, we went in, and during that time, at one time it about got away. And we had to I had an engineer by the name of John I don’t know whether I should say the name or not. Dugan was his last name. He went in to try and save the day, and he took a big overdose of radiation, and he was never allowed to work in radiation after that. Weisskopf: Took a lifetime dose? Smith: Yeah. So he went to grape farming out in Benton City after. He went there for a long time. He’s got a grape farm up there, so he took his full time. But he didn’t come to work for me till after he was working for the engineering department then, because after that he came to work in maintenance, in our organization. And then he quit. [End of Interview] Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1 hour, 2 minutes, 27 seconds Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Alex Smith Description An account of the resource An oral history interview with Alex Smith conducted by the B Reactor Museum Association. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fb6ff5a963a5145a17740f4cfcfa037f0.MP3 941610da76725375c756675855c7ff4f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource B Reactor Museum Association Oral Histories Description An account of the resource Oral History Interviews conducted by the B Reactor Museum Association. The collection is split between a series of audio oral histories taken in the late 1990s and early 2000s by Gene Weisskopf that focuses on the T-Plant, and a series of video oral histories done in the early 1990s by Bill Putman that focus on the B Reactor and Hanford construction. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3, DOCX Language A language of the resource English Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Harry Zwiefel Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound START Okay, well my name is Harry Zweifel and I was a shift at B area during the startup, I was a uh, shift supervisor on what they called patrol. We wandered around the building and saw that everything was as it should be, no radiation, undue radiation and so on. What was your experience before Hanford? Well my experience before Hanford started out in uh, with DuPont in explosives, uh, TNT back at Kankakee and then I ran a training school in Wisconsin up at uh, Barksdale for TNT operators. And during the period of a 1940, latter part of ‘41 and ‘42 uh, I was in, as I say, in operations and in training school and uh, we followed the construction of the TNT lines and then the startups thereof and I was sort of a monohouse what they call a monohouse specialist. And then following the, as soon as all twelve were operating why uh, I became in charge of a shift in uh, TNT and uh, then was on days as the senior supervisor, actually an apprentice senior supervisor, I guess, and uh, one day early in uh 1944 I received a call from the head office TNT and the superintendent told me that uh effective, it was Friday, effective that Monday I was transferred on loan from DuPont to the University of Chicago. And I said “Well what am I going to do?” and he says “I don’t know, nobody told me, they’ll tell you when you get up there.” On Monday morning, uh, I think it was early February by that time that I went up and I was told by a fella named Dr. Kircher Q. Bellis that uh, that they’re going to split the atom, they’re going to make an atom bomb. And my job was going to be helpin em develop the uh, semaworks(?) under west stands doing the separations, developing the process for separating plutonium from the metals and I stayed there until I came out here and that was uh, I think that really was, things are starting to blur now but it was the end of a 1944. And we uh, I was following construction of the B reactor, my particular responsibility was what they call Bellfield valves. You remember those George? They were uh, they were the valves that permitted us to quickly drop the, so called, poison solution into the vertical safety rods in case of a uh, of a an event where the reactor was gonna run away and you couldn’t get the VSR’S in and then this liquid went in all the thimbles. I spent about 3 months up there workin on the Bellfield valves and droppin the materials and timing it and so on. And then once construction was done why I went in to uh, as I say, the patrol unit. What was your experience in Chicago? Well in Chicago, when I went up there, we went in to the uh, under the west stands the (unclear) works and it was quite an experience. We had the, we had the squash court right next to Dr. Fermi’s reactor, his first reactor was... and they were just finishing their experiments and decided that yeah they could uh, keep the uh, reaction going and uh, we were building then the (unclear) works and we built it all ourselves because they wouldn’t let any laboring people in based on the security. You were building the? The tanks, we, all the tanks and the piping for the, run running the solutions. We had our own little dissolver and then we’d jet over into these tanks. We had plastic lines and oh we had quite a time. We learned how to melt lead bricks, built our own shielding and so on. We did it all ourselves. Later on why we even got into a what later became the redux operation, we were doin uh, extraction with the liquids (unclear). We built that ourselves. And I became a, towards the end, I became the uh, supervisor in charge of the actual operation there. What did Fermi do in Chicago and you in relation to that? Well ok. Fermi was strictly on the reactor side. And he was uh, he was the man that was doing all the studies on the graphite, how they moderate it, how the neutrons acted and so on. And at that time they were still trying to prove that they could sustain the uh, nuclear reaction. And uh, that was uh, I think that was the time it may have been in B reactor startup but I don’t think so. Something about the Italian navigator has landed and so on; which was the signal that uh, the reactor could be made self-sustaining. And that was, that was a key right there, if it, if it hadn’t that would have been it. What was the nature of the fuel in Chicago and how handled? Uh George, I don’t, the fuel, I don’t really know exactly, as I say, I was, you know, they, I was on the chemical side. But uh, they had a radioactive solution, rather potent, I think, a source that they were using. And beyond that, I really don’t know how their, how their reaction... It may not have been slugs at all? Oh no, no I don’t think it was, no. Uh, I’m not, well they could have uh gotten Clinton slugs, they had some, you know, from their reactor down there. And later on we started up our summer works that’s what we were running is the Clinton slugs, they were sending those up. But, it if I can digress a little bit, Fermi was such a wonderful character, I just, (?). Uh, when we first, when I first got up there, he, they held an orientation for, oh maybe, 20 people. And uh, Ave Compton was there, Regner was there, Phil Morrison was there talkin physics and uh, they would each get up and they said what they had - these people there doin this and these people there doin that. There’s several sites, you see. Uh, Fermi, they all stood at the rostrum and uh, rather formal. Uh, Fermi got up there and he, first thing he sat on the edge of a table lookin at...and he always had a little stub of a pencil. No, maybe two, three inches long, that’s all, he played with that and so he stuck it in his ear and so on. So he was telling us what he did. He said: “Well I have these people at site B, they do this and I have these people over there, that do this.” He said: “Well I’ve got people all over, I don’t know what they’re doin.” He was kind of a breath of fresh air. He could meet em in the halls and of course there’s long halls in front of the squash courts and you could stop him, ask him a question, he’d stop and answer. So would Morrison. But some of the rest of em were more standoffish and too busy to mess around with a guy like me. But uh, Fermi was there and I really had nothing to do with him except meeting him in the halls and hearing him in a lecture and so on. He did have a certain charisma. Oh, he, he was, he was. He was just a comfortable old shoe. (Chatter) What was the importance of DuPont in this? Absolutely. The function of the DuPont Company I don’t think they ever received all the recognition that they should have. When, when you consider the design and the construction of these facilities and how successful they were, right from the beginning, it it’s astounding. I just think it’s beyond belief that they could do it and as far as I’m concerned DuPont was were the star of the whole outfit. And they sent good people out here; they had, boy, they had good people, top notch. Such that... (Chatter). Well DuPont, DuPont would, I think that they never received the applause that they should have for the job they did. With the, nobody’d ever had a reactor other than the few blocks of graphite laid up and uh, in B squash court, uh, and we built the thing, designed and built it and it was successful almost right from the beginning as far as the reactor goes. There was a mistake made in how many, how much uranium you needed to keep the reactor goin so that you weren’t poisoned out by the iodine, but uh, it was an astounding thing. Uh, as I said, they had excellent management and they sent their best out here. They had some real good people and they were so much different than some that we had from then on, it seems to me. Why do you think DuPont chose to leave when they did? I think that DuPont at that time were kind of fed up with the way things were being run here. Uh, later on I think they were, you know, they were brought back in to Savannah and I think they hated that. And I really believe that this work and the Savannah work really set them behind as a chemical company, if you look at em now they’re havin a tough time, they’re, where it was all owned by the family now its own considerably by uh, Bronfran (?) who’s a liquor distiller and uh, and in a, not happily. I think that they, they really got behind on a lot of their research and so on in that long period where they were doing other things. How were you recruited or were you assigned to come out here? Like I say, they called me in on a Friday afternoon and said you’re transferred on loan to the University of Chicago, be up there on Monday morning. We were in Kankakee, of course and just 35 miles outside of Chicago so it was no great big thing bein there but it was a shock especially when you ask the superintendent of TNT “Well, what am I going to do there?” And he says “Nobody told me, he says, I don’t know.” And it was an entirely new, different group of people, you know, more uh, uh, scientifically oriented. PHD’s all over the place and some names you had heard and so on. What was the transition to Hanford then? Well that was uh, I was just telling George, Ward Botsford who was a friend of mine and he was he was back there at site B makin mirrors for instrumentation. So we were gonna come out here together and we both had cars, so we rented a tow bar. And his car was bigger so we towed mine. And so we drove out here. And I think, along about a, a little bit south of Spokane we both would have gladly turned around and gone back, what are we doing in a place like this? You know. It was quite a shock from a pair of city boys to see the desert and nothing, nothin around there and couldn’t see how we could do anything out here. Of course, we both knew what we were gonna do out here, but sure didn’t look like a very good place to do it. You were towing one car because of gas rationing? Yeah, um uh. And uh, that way we could both drive and we made a few side trips, did a day’s fishing at Yellowstone Park. But we got out here and went into the transient quarters and wasn’t went through the next day security and then we were, I was out in the area and Ward was, I’ve forgotten where they sent him. But there was an interesting thing there too on this transition. After being for a year and a half in uh, chemical separations and so on, I got out here and they said I was gonna be in the reactor. I’d never, I’d seen a reactor and it was really a surprise. And I didn’t want to do it because I really had an awful lot of experience in the one place and uh, I really had quite a bit of jump, you might say, on most of the other people who would be here. But it was real interesting, all my notebooks from (unclear) I got out here and they were too classified for me to see. I never did get em. So we went out to, we went out to the area, I went out to the area then, B and uh, followed construction, went through the startup and went through startup of F and then I went over to 200 areas for uh, more construction following and startup over there. I got, that’s where I got the unfortunate name of bein in construction and startups I think is that followed me all the rest of my life. What was the overall mood of country? That’s, it was. Well, you know, we were still losin a lot of lot of uh, soldiers and marines uh, going into these various islands, the McArthur island hopping. And uh, you saw the uh bloody pictures of Tarawa and you saw a lot of the pictures of Guadalcanal and so on and so forth. Uh, I think that there was still a great deal of tension and so on while you began to see that on the long run that uh, that the Japanese were going to lose but at the same time you knew that there was gonna be an awful lot of American lives lost. It was not a happy situation. And, of course, that’s one reason why I was happy to see em drop the bomb because I’m convinced that saved many many thousands of American lives. (And Japanese lives perhaps). It might have because, you know, by that time they’d had their fire storms over Tokyo and it’s questionable whether uh whether the bomb killed more than those fire storms did over Tokyo, I’m not sure. What was it like to see the project for the first time? Through the dust storms, well we saw the through the dust storms and that’s where you, a lot like we had this spring. Those we would have called termination winds in the old days. But, it was an amazing thing. I think, if I remember the numbers, there was over 100,000 construction workers here and they had their dormitories uh, from uh, the old Hanford area and down in there. And actually, that was one of the places we used to be able to go at night to get a pitcher of beer. But you never went by yourself because there was some rough characters. There was all sorts of stories in those days, uh, about, you know they kept the men and women separated by big barb wire fences and there was all sorts of stories goin on there. And there were fights, a lot of fights, and uh, a patrolman at that time, I don’t know whether he was kiddin me or not, came off a shift and he said he’d found a body in a garbage can. That’s quite possible cause there was some rough people. But uh, dust storms, all the houses were still being, most houses were still being built. And you had the big argument about what kind a house you’re gonna have. And of course, well I lived in a dormitory for three months. My wife was back in Illinois, with our one little boy. And it was not a particularly happy period. You looked at it as, well this is a job, there’s others in the Army doin a lot worse that this, so uh, you’d grit your teeth and you didn’t sign up for the termination wind (unclear). What about the scope of the project? Well, time let’s see, what was it, the 550 square miles if I’m not mistaken it was something like 5 to 600,000,000 dollars’ worth of construction and uh, it was so vast it, we didn’t know everything that was goin on, what was bein built, and being built fast. And then, there was a shortage of material. You waited a lot of times for some valves to come in, of course, we had it a lot easier than any place else in the country other, of getting material. That was real interesting, you know, there was an awful lot of waste, a lot of thievery went on, cause a, a lot of the people in construction they had they’d gather them from anywhere they could. Can you remember the first time you saw B Reactor? It looked monstrous, it looked so big. And you gotta bear in mind. Can you give me a full statement? Yeah, the first time I saw a reactor was the first reactor I’d ever seen, other than the little pile. (Chatter) When I first went in there why I was pretty green about the reactors. I had to start readin manuals real fast to find out what was, what the was gonna do there and how it happened. Because uh, there was this tremendous block and of course they were still, still putting up a, a the B blocks and so on and they were starting puttin up graphite inside there and we got to see all that and uh, uh, that was quite uh, edify, for my edification and education. But it was a tremendous place. I be, I’d wondered whether I’d ever understand what it was all about and how to get around it. And then, of course, there was, we were a little leery about that much radiation, uh, the emphasis certainly was on safety. That’s why I found it so difficult to think, to hear that DuPont did so much other, down in Savannah, something doesn’t ring true. Or else it’s a different breed of cattle maybe, I don’t know. Refrigeration Facilities. Well, it, the facility, refrigeration facilities were in B. Each one of the reac, water plants, you know, had something a little different to them. And I think you’re right. I think B had a refrigeration system. F had somethin about a water treatment system, I don’t remember what uh, D had. But uh, they were tremendous units, but there again George, the separations of the people, I never went over into a water plant. You know, to see what was going there. First of all, we didn’t, we didn’t leave the building in uh, the early days toward, after we started up why then they started goin to the change house to each lunch. But outside of that you didn’t go. And you certainly, if you were a reactor man, you didn’t go over and go around the water plant, you know. So we were uh, we knew of course, how much water was comin over. We knew somethin about the quality of it, we knew the pressure. We knew a little bit more about 190 and the pumping because that was so important to us. But when you start gettin down on the, as you say the refrigeration, or some of the water treatments or the filtration plant of the river, I think it was probably uh, I don’t think I got to the river pump house until after I came back here in ‘46 and was in engineering design and did some work down at the river pump house. Only then did I see some of that stuff. It was probably intended to cool the water. Yeah, that that’s right. You, you weren’t, you, like a I heard Don say on the cooling, we were always trying something different, you know, and there was so much unknown in the beginning. I marvel sometime at how quickly we’ve progressed because really in the beginning uh, you were cautious because you didn’t know that much, how it was gonna, bear, look look - as an example that uh, while Fermi and Compton had an idea that the reactor might die from pois, xe, xenon poisoning, but uh, they weren’t real sure of that. They weren’t sure enough that they didn’t go ahead and start and see what happened. And that was a lot of our, a lot of our training. Uh, but you lean so far over backwards on safety that uh, I never, I never felt endangered. Tell us about instrumentation for measuring radiation levels. Well, you’re probably more George, as far as instrumentation measurin, you probably know way more about that than I do. Of course, we all had our chances in the early days of carryin a Beckman (?) around and when we did anything. But uh, they were pretty crude. And you got one arm longer than the other. They must of weighed 35 pounds wouldn’t you think? And we’d traipse all around checkin on leaks and doin this and that, uh... (Chatter) Beckman was an instrument, George can tell you more about it, for really, just only measured (?)(?) (?). Didn’t it George? And uh, we would go around the building with these, we were always checkin to make sure that there were no leaks and no stray radiation and uh, uh, that was one of the jobs that the patrol people did and in com in combining with the radiation monitoring experts. Were you checking with each level? Yeah, yeah, at the doors to the rear face, you know, to make sure that the air flow was in the right direction and nothin leakin out from the door. We went across the top of the reactor and uh, made sure that there was no gas leaking up there. Of course, we didn’t go within the circle of the VSR’s. So you were working in B at the same time as patrol? In B, yeah. (You were there at startup?) Oh, yeah. Well that was, that was a terrible thing cause we didn’t know that much about it. But we started up and uh, very low level, of course, and I was on 4 to 12 at that time. And we came in the next day and everybody had a long face and they were all unhappy that the reactor was dying from the xenon poisoning. And uh, well it went down. Fermi and Marshall, Dr. Marshall and his wife, they were a young pair of physicists and very good. They worked with a Fermi a lot and uh, Morrison was there, Compton was there and they were burnin up their slide rulers. And uh, it didn’t take them too long and they said well okay you just have to put in uh, several more slugs per column and uh, we think we’ll be alright. As I remember, that’s what they said, we think we’ll be alright. So we went up very fast and as I recall, we put in about uh, about 50 more inches of slugs and uh, we were doin that as fast as we could, as a matter of fact it’s kind of interesting. Doc Marshall was a nice young guy and you could talk to him a lot, and uh, we had these old charging machines. Uh, you put a, you put your slug, you take it out of a box, you put it on a little ramp and it rolled down and then you had a lever and you pushed that. And I got him on one of the machines charging and then wouldn’t give him any relief. And he, he kept talkin “Come on, I gotta go somewhere” and I said well, you just stay and do a few more tubes and you’ll be alright. And he laughed and he was a good sport about it but uh, uh, that was a real critical period. And you wondered, you know, you had, you had to have faith that Compton and those guys knew what they were doin and they did. How did information about the second startup hit you? Well, on the second startup how did we feel. Well, you had to have confidence, especially those that came from Chicago, there weren’t too many but, but we had great confidence in Fermi and Morrison and the uh, and the Marshals. And like I say, as you had heard, you could look from the office into the control room and you could see them and they’re burnin up their slide rules and talking and so on and they came out and with the solution, proposed solution, adding extra uranium and uh, you know, at that time as I say, we were not that knowledgeable. A lot, especially me, coming from the 200 area operation you know I, I didn’t uh, it took a long time, I had a fine guy workin, that I was workin for at that time, Fran Mask, very intelligent guy and had achieved a lot of na, of knowledge at Clinton Labs. And he explained to me about iodine and how it degraded into xenon and xenon captured the neutrons so that there wasn’t uh, could be a sustained reaction. So, it was, it was a bad period because there wasn’t the confidence that the thing would, gonna go, you know, general confidence. You hoped and you thought it probably would, but you didn’t dare bet on it. And we were we were all anxiously waiting that next startup and, as I say, I was on 4 to 12 and we uh, between the 4 to 12 people and the l2, 12 to 8 people we finished the recharging the extra metal and they started up on day shift. And uh, the boy, when we came on at 4:00 then the boys on the day shift were breathing a big sigh of relief. That was obviously a milestone. A tremendous milestone. What other milestones were there in that process? Well, you gotta, you know, after a prolonged period is kinda what I looked at, if you remember that the reactors were said to be designed for 250 megawatts, and uh, I think one of the big, big milestones was when we raised from 250 to 400 megawatts. Of course, that paled to the 2,000 that we got later on. But uh, it was awful big, awful big. You had to make a little changes, raise the pressure of your 190 pumps and uh, do a little reorificing and so on. But it was a great thing, because we, by that time we knew, hey we can run these things. And uh, a matter of fact we were probably gettin a little cocky, but uh, that was the big one. Feedback and upgrading- was that significant? Well, it was to me because, you see, I left in May of ‘45, I left the 200 areas and went to rocket powder and uh, went around after rocket powder went to 3 or 4 more plants for du, for DuPont and by that time I was firmly in the design phase, design and construction and startup. And I was goin from plant to plant, so. We had two children at that time so uh, I quit DuPont and I hated to do that and came back here. And when I came back here I went into operations for a short time again, just to get my feet on the ground, but then I went into straight engineering design and I, I had part of building DR, building and design DR & H and uh, eventually ended up following all of the K reactors for opera for operations. Being in on design of those, so. In this early period, was there any problem with fuel failure? Oh yeah. That, that’s probably another milestone with the fuel failures. And uh, we were a frightened bunch of puppies when we realized that we had a slug with a hole in it, you know. And uh, uh, the first the first episodes at getting that out and how to do it, the, all learning, hadn’t been done anywhere before, you know. And uh, had to build all the equipment, how to push it, what do you do with it when you push it out the rear pigtail into the pool. How do you handle that? What about the water there, is it gonna be contaminated so badly. So that was a, that was a real milestone, George, I’m glad you mentioned that. Later on, of course, we ran at such high power levels and uh, high temperatures and we had a lot of em and I can remember one time we had a, we had a, it was at H, we had a critical W - you remember that’s when you shut down for lack of, for lack of electrical backup. And, we had been watching a specific tube in the H reactor, feeling that it was going to be a rupture or gonna stick. So when they shut down uh, we went into getting that out. Sure enough it was a sticker, but we got it out before the critical W was over. And that was, that was quite different than the first time. I think the first ruptured slug or stuck slug we were down for a week. Some did occur at B Reactor during the initial low level operation. Well George, whether there was an original loading, whether there was any fuel elements, I guess I’ve forgotten that if it did. It’s kinda, it certainly is uh, I think, probable but I just don’t remember if we did. Marshall- One of the early professional women out there. I think she was. Um uh. As you know, in the beginning, we had no women out there. The nurse was the only woman in the area. Uh, but, Mrs. Marshall, I’ve forgotten what her name was now, she was a good physicist in her own right and I don’t remember any other women being active in the work at that time. She was a Fermi protégé. What factors made it possible to achieve this? First of all, I think it had number one priority in the country, backed by the president. It was in a war time period where there was a different attitude towards work, I think. You had your Rosie the Riveters and we had our people out here just as dedicated, I think. Get it done, get it done. And uh, you worked. Well, in the beginning, you know, we worked 12 hours a day, 6 days a week - we didn’t uh take time off. We’d get home, go down to the cafeteria and eat go back to our dormitory a couple hours playin bridge or whatever, go to bed, get up and do the same thing all over. Uh, so you had the priorities, you had the work ethic and you had a pretty high cadre of well-trained people. Well, here’s an example. Uh, if you were asst. superintendent back with DuPont back there you came out here you what they called an area supervisor. If you were a uh, area supervisor and you came out here you’d be a senior supervisor. I was a senior supervisor, came out here and was a shift supervisor. So, you had, you had people, one, almost 100% engineers or chemists or whatever the discipline was required and most of them had shown some potential or they wouldn’t have been here. There was an awful lot of real good people left back - Kankakee, Memphis and a few other places. They skimmed the cream off, they thought. Some of em weren’t so creamy. DuPont was a great company. Well, of course I don’t, my thought is that DuPont was the best. Uh, and my feeling is that each succeeding contractor went down just a little bit and uh right towards to end, well I think it started with GE. You sent two type of people out here, as far as I’m concerned. This may be heresy but, you sent two type of people out here. You sent out young ones that you want to see whether they can advance to the next dead, or you set, sent out some people who were at a dead end and uh, sent out here, okay here’s a little reward but we’re gonna get rid of you too. But I think you had excellent people. Design wise, design and engineering wise, DuPont at that time, was the best in the country, I’m sure of that. Overall technical and industrial capacity of the U.S. made it possible. Oh, well yeah. We’re on the war time footing, you know, and we’re putting out the maximum effort with good people. The work ethic was there. My chemical experience here was, when I left, after we got B & F reactor, as you might imagine, the 200 areas were behind the reactors in construction. The main the primary job here was to get the reactors built and then the separations. So I followed the design and construction of a 221B and 221U. The only one I missed was 221T. And uh, I stayed there then for the startup of 221B, I was I was in charge of the control office. And uh, then of course that’s when I left there in September, May of ‘45. I didn’t want to leave. I tried to stay another week but Bill Kay said “You get out of here, you’re transferred.” So then you went where? Oh then I went to Hercules rocket powder and we learned to make rocket powder there. Then I went down to Indiana plant 2 and we built that rocket plant. It was a $75,000,000 plant as I re, no $275,000,000. We made 207,000 pounds of rocket powder, we started up in about uh, mid-June. Dropped the bomb August the 8th and we shut it, started shuttin down on the 9th. We made 205, 207 pounds of rocket powder. I had an interesting experience there uh, I was in charge at that time of what they call final testing. It was a, ultrasonic testing, x-ray and fine final inspection. And uh, my boss told me, plant one was smokeless powder and they were gonna shut down there, he said go on over there and interview those people and hire 70 operators. So I went over there and I met with all these operators and I told them how great it was they were gonna get laid off here but they could have a job here and rocket powder was so much more important at this time that you’ll work much longer. Zweifel interview Part Two I had an interesting experience there. I was in charge at that time of what they call final testing. It was uh, ultrasonic testing, x-ray and then final inspection. And uh - plant one was smokeless powder and they were gonna shut down there - he said go on over there and interview those people and hire 70 uh, operators. So I went over there and I met with all these operators and I told them how great it was they were gonna get laid off here but they could have a job here and rocket powder was so much more important at this time that you’ll work much, much longer. Well I hired em in June and in August my boss said “Go and lay em off now.” And they were, they were not happy. What was that rocket powder to have been used for? Oh, well you’ve seen these rockets in the war games and so on, at uh, the propellant for explosives, you know. And, boy, we’d burn, it was really? 50% nitroglycerin, 50% nitrocotton; and uh we made a lot of different shapes but they were (unclear) shape. Mark, mark 18 was 39 pounds, and we burned the, in the testing we burned the uh, 39 pounds in a little over 2 seconds. What did that end up in as far as the weapon? Well God, they put em in tanks George and they had, you’ve seen these Russians had a big batteries of them that fired and we did that too. It was quite a thing. Where were you in August of 1945? I was makin rocket powder at plant 2 in Indiana. And we were living in mud flats. And when they dropped the bomb there were a lot of people there that had come from out here, not a lot but some. And then we heard that the Japanese were gonna surrender. We had a two day party. I guess you could say “I was there”. I was there, that’s right. Remember immediate reaction when you heard that? Oh man. Well, return to, return to a peace time life. Get outta mud flats, at the, living conditions there were the, way worse than out here. We had a little pot belly wood stove in the living room and uh, water recirculated through there for hot water. It was miserable and uh, uh, just well, you can imagine. No more of your friends were gonna be gettin shot up uh, we could live a lot different. You know, after a while your, there were a lot of things that were short. Stand in line for this and that. And uh, just lookin forward to peace time. Any other Reflections on the whole experience? Well, in reflecting back I always felt privileged to have been a part of it. And uh, you always felt in those days, well, you should have been in the service. And I went, I went up in Chicago and twice tried to get into the Navy and each time they’d say - “Well, what are you doin now?” And I’d say well I’m in explosives. “There’s the door, get out.” But uh, you AL, you always felt that you should have been, in your age group, you should have been in the army and not out here. You felt glad that was over. But you did feel that uh, some sense of gratification that you had some part in ending the war. Anything else you’d like to pass to future generations? Well, I wish I could tell more of this generation that they’re makin a big mistake if they don’t proceed with a use, the peaceful use of the atom. Forget all this stuff, the unfounded rumors of what might happen and so on that our friends in Portland and Seattle seem to thrive on. And uh, we’ve sure raised a lot of family here, haven’t we George. And none of em have two heads and none of em have been poisoned. It’s quite possible to have a healthy nuclear industry. I just wish we’d get on with it because petroleum’s running out and besides petroleum’s too good to be burning in gas, in automobiles, it should be making chemicals and medicines. I have no more that I can think of. END Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Harry Zwiefel Description An account of the resource An oral history interview with Harry Zwiefel conducted by the B Reactor Museum Association. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F34fe7977cc487f38553e63f5f46d04d9.MP3 943160e343640675695db9aa989a3cbe Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource B Reactor Museum Association Oral Histories Description An account of the resource Oral History Interviews conducted by the B Reactor Museum Association. The collection is split between a series of audio oral histories taken in the late 1990s and early 2000s by Gene Weisskopf that focuses on the T-Plant, and a series of video oral histories done in the early 1990s by Bill Putman that focus on the B Reactor and Hanford construction. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3, DOCX Language A language of the resource English Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Russ Night Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [Start of Interview] Weisskopf: If there’s someplace you’d like to start. Otherwise, do you want to go all the way back to what you were doing in World War II and sort of segue into how you ended up at Hanford? Knight: I could do that real quickly. You bet. Weisskopf: Basically, last time we talked you told me what you were doing, the top secret kind of work, you had a clearance during the war. Knight: That’s right. Weisskopf: Well, how about that? Knight: Okay. Let me say this. I originated out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and joined the Army Air Corps, because they were taking fellows in with a little bit of education. I say a little bit. High school, minimum. Weisskopf: Right. Knight: And from there, why, I went through the training, and then was assigned to the Eighth Air Force. And very shortly thereafter there was a big push to get personnel into what was called the troop carrier command then. And I went into the first troop carrier command, and during my stay there, training pilots, and we were then well, after I had been in training for about 14 months training pilots, decided that I’d like to get a part of the war effort, too. So I volunteered to go into the war. And at that stage I was assigned to a troop carrier unit that was to go overseas, and again was requested to submit to special training. At that time I was trained as a pathfinder. Part of that training took place at MIT, the electronics training, and the field training then took place at Pope Field in North Carolina, Fayetteville. And from there, why, I went over to the European theater of operations. Weisskopf: And what year was that? Knight: That was in 1943. Late ‘43. And from there I participated in the war, and of course the top secret clearance type thing took place at my training at MIT and also in the field training at Fayetteville, North Carolina. So then I came home in December 1945. And at that time I came by the Richland area, because I had met some real good people and had some friends here. And everybody, during my visit, said “Oh, you better sign up and go to work here at Hanford, because this is the future of mankind.” Weisskopf: You had actually felt that this was something new happening? Knight: That’s right. And so I said, “Oh, I don’t think that they would want me, but I’ll go down and submit an application.” Because I came from the East Coast originally, as I stated, and I had been offered a job by one of the officers in the Army to work for Standard Oil of New Jersey. And I thought, well, that was close to home and be a good opportunity, so that had been my original plan. But after submitting my application at Hanford, why, with my background and with the military clearance and just out of the service within weeks, why, they gave me my exam, gave me my clearance the same day, and told me to report to 100 West area the following morning. Weisskopf: They were happy to have you. Knight: It was really strange, because the people that knew me said “That’s impossible, Russ, they can’t do that. They’ll stop you before you get out there. But anyhow we’re happy that you did sign up.” So the net result was everything went the way that I was told that it would when I signed in. Weisskopf: This is probably early 1946 at this point? Knight: That was in January ‘46. January 14th, to be exact. Weisskopf: Well, okay, great. That was the first day you showed up for work? Knight: That’s correct. And so in doing so, I got on the bus, and at that time the bus rides were free, and the bus depot was fairly close to town. As a matter of fact, it was almost on the corner of Williams and Thayer, about a block to the west. So I went to the bus area and got on a bus like they said. It was labeled to the 200 area. Now, these were small military type buses. They were even painted the OD color. And I got on this thing and started out, and when we got to the 300 area, there was the major barricade across the road. Now, this was manned by military personnel. And when I looked over at the 300 area to my right, why, there was guard towers all around the area. And it was hard wire fencing and barbed wire at the top. And low profile barracks type military style construction. And I thought, Uh-oh, I don’t recall the looks of that. But, anyhow, on we went. And the reason that I make this comment was I had just, on my return to the United States I had been stationed just outside of Munich, Germany, and they had Dachau concentration camps just 17 miles out of town, and I had visited that prior to coming home. And it had a very similar position in my mind, that, hey, this is another concentration type of thing, and what in the world are we doing here? So I didn’t feel too comfortable, the 26 miles on out to the 200 areas. And as we came up the hill closest to the 200 East area and flattened out, I looked over to the right and here I could see this real long concrete building and a large smokestack, or at least a discharge stack of some sort, 200 feet in the air, and I thought, Uh-oh, no windows in this facility, and I was really getting very uncomfortable. And I thought, Well, I don’t know whether I like this or not, I don’t want to be a part of something that’s like the concentration camps where... Weisskopf: Yeah. Knight: So on we went to the 200 West area. When I got off the bus, why, I had the real strong feeling that I wanted to go back to town. So I went in the batch house and I asked them what time the next bus went back to town. Because there were no private vehicles at that time. And they said oh, there wouldn’t be another bus, there’d be a shuttle bus later on, that I might be able to they said, “By the way, who do you want to see?” And at that time I was asked to get in touch with Randy Fenninger (phonetic) of DuPont. So they said, “Well, here, we’ll get him on the phone.” So they called Randy, and he answered very quickly, and he says “We’ll be right up to pick you up.” So in just a very few moments, here came a car, a company car, and again it was in the OD color. And I got in the car, and they started down, and I told them, I said, “I’m really uncomfortable about this.” And Randy says “Well, you needn’t be, we’ll explain a few things to you as we go.” So he started telling me a little story about and, of course, the news on what was going on at Hanford had already broken and had been published in the papers. That was one of the reasons that I came home very early. So the story continued to be, “All right, we’re going down to the laboratory, and this is the 222-T laboratory, and we’ll start here and give you a little bit of an insight.” But they said “Bear in mind that everything that is on the site is very much in the high security type activities. Anything related to processing is strictly on a need-to-know basis.” So that was the beginning and the start of my introduction to Hanford. And I got into the laboratory and immediately met some really fine people and started working. And then after I had established myself in about three or four weeks, why, they said “We need your type of help over in the 200 East area also, same building, same type of activity, for B Plant operation.” So I worked a half a day in T Plant and a half a day in the B Plant laboratories. Weisskopf: In the same day. Knight: For several years. Weisskopf: Oh, between the two? Knight: Yes. A half a day in each. And that was kind of interesting. But then we got into what was happening and the processing. And, of course, the process at that time was what they called bismuth phosphate processing. It was a batch type process. They had the cells in the canyon building, which was a long concrete structure, approximately 800 feet long, and was equipped with 40 in-ground cells from ground level and deep into the ground 28 feet. And the cells were equipped with the necessary processing equipment, and all the processing equipment in the cells were stainless steel. Weisskopf: Let me ask you this: You had a pretty good technical background just in general technical issues, but why did they take you to a laboratory for strictly chemical process, do you think? Knight: As I look back on it now, Gene, my only thoughts were that the whole process then had to be hinging around chemical operations. And that would be an ideal spot to start out and really learn the processes from the ground up. Weisskopf: Okay. Yeah. Knight: And I was very fortunate, because that was the case. The more I started learning about the process, the more intense my desire to learn. It grew and grew to where it was really exciting, because the more I learned about the process, then the more I understood about it. And the more I understood about these things, the greater the “awe” effect became, that My goodness, they’ve done all these things in such short periods of time, such as building a complete facility in 17 months, building a tank farm to support that facility in the same time frame, and at the same time doing a lot of research along the way to actually assure themselves that the process would actually work. Because most of the work initially was done on a very small scale to begin with, and then it was blown up to be a full-fledged process in a large volume plant. Weisskopf: So by the time you got there, at least it had already been proven that the process, the entire Hanford process, works. Knight: That’s correct. Weisskopf: At least you got to step in saying Oh, whatever they were trying to do actually works. Now we can go on from that point. Knight: That’s right. And they were constantly in the experimental stage to improve their capability and abilities as to what was going on. Now, I mentioned initially that the canyon had 40 cells in it in the initial startup and operation of the facilities, and we ran that way for a number of years with using only 20 of the cells. Weisskopf: Okay. Knight: And then as we continued to forge ahead, and the needs and the operation continued to grow and became more and more interesting as to what happened in the process and how they could improve their abilities to produce at a higher rate. They put the second series of cells into play, and this was called parallel operation. Weisskopf: Oh, okay. Knight: And we increased the output from the plant. Because, bear in mind that as this process went, it was very slow and very meticulous and very tedious in getting the maximum amount of plutonium out of the uranium that was being processed. And it was very strange, because the initial volume of material that was put into play, the uranium was in the tonnage levels, and the extracted material, the plutonium, was in the gram phase. Weisskopf: Right. Knight: And that was tremendous, to run through large volumes of processing in a tank, two, three, four thousand up to as much as six thousand gallon vessels, and continue to control this, and make sure that you knew exactly what you had and where you had it in a given time in the process. Very unique. And, of course, that’s where the laboratory came in. It was actually called the process control lab. And in order to adjust and maintain the process, why, samples had to be taken at each step during the processing. As the material went from one phase of extraction in the separation to reduction, oxidation reduction type phase, why, you had to sample at all stages. And not only did you sample for the product, but you also sampled the waste streams to ensure that none of the product was going out in the waste streams. Or if there was any going out, it was an absolute minimum allowable. Weisskopf: Let me ask I think what is probably always going to be there, but because it was such a nationally critical material, the faster you guys got it processed, the better; and the faster you could do the sampling, the faster you could make the chemistry go, the better it would be all around? Knight: That’s correct. Weisskopf: Okay. Knight: Now, the process was all designed to accommodate those needs. And this was another thing that was just amazing, to know that here was a brand new introduction to a this type of energy that we had never even considered that would be available to us on a daily basis. And to have started all of this with instantaneous construction, building, and putting the buildings into what we call a turnkey operation to begin with, once it was built, you would turn the key and open the door and went in and started the processing. That was amazing. And since the construction of the process facilities was done in such a secretive manner that the construction workers that were assigned to do certain phases of putting in interconnecting piping and what not were moved from time to time, and that was usually on a day or every-other-day basis, so that they never really had a true configuration in their minds as to what was being done and how the system was being built and what it would be used for. So all of those things were highly, just mind-boggling. Weisskopf: How did that affect your job? You said they were introducing you to the entire process, the best way to learn was in the lab. How did security impinge on your knowledge of at least the separations process? Did they limit you in any way? Knight: Oh, yes. They had a very large technical manual that was available at that time of the whole buildup and the history of what was taking place in this technical manual, but you didn’t have full authorization to take the technical manual and sit down and read it at that stage. Weisskopf: Oh, okay. Knight: That came later, that they made the technical manuals available to almost anyone that worked there after a period of time. Weisskopf: Did you know where the fuel was coming from, or how it was processed before it got to you guys? Knight: They started telling us this early on, that the uranium was put into a process mode and put into the reactors. And at that stage, why, it was being transmitted transmuted, I should say, to make the plutonium. Weisskopf: And what about within your process itself? Did you know when the material that you were processing ended up leaving the building and going to the concentration building. Did you understand that whole leg of the process, too? Knight: Yes, we did. Because that was all in well, within a stone’s throw of the canyon building was the laboratory, and next to the laboratory was the first phase of the concentration. It was the first phase through the operation. And once we got the plutonium in the rough-cut stage, I’ll put it that way, then it was moved from 224-T Building down to the 231-Z Building, which was the final concentration and purification operation. And the all of this was controlled, as I said, through the laboratory, and samples had to be taken in the processing facilities. In the canyon facility they had to keep the canyon in prime clean condition, because in order to get samples the way the system was built then was to take people right in on the processing deck with all the cells closed, and they had sample systems that they would go in and turn on what we called the air circulation, which was a circulated process, solution out of the vessel up through a sample receiving cup and back into the processing vessel. Well, they would circulate this for a minimum of ten minutes to ensure that they have gotten a representative sample out of this large vessel. And then they had special equipment that they inserted down into the sample cup and pulled the sample into it, and the high activity samples in the early process we used what they called a shielded trombone sampler. It was an all-stainless unit, and it had a release on it that lowered the actual sampling tip down into the solution. Then they used a syringe to pull the solution into a pipette that was at the bottom of this sampler. And those pipettes that were used on the bottom of the sampler were calibrated to a ½ or 1 ml. And the real hot ones, of course, we only took a ½ ml. And then the unit was retracted up into a shielded portion of the sampler, and then we had a shielded container called a doorstop that was placed very close to the sample port that was immediately transferred then into the doorstop. And at that point the sample pipette was disengaged from the sampler assembly, and then the lid on the doorstop was closed with a handle that clamped down and held the top of it sealed so in the event that it was tipped over it didn’t spill. And then they carried that by hand to a wagon. In the early stages, we didn’t have the wagons to begin with, and they would carry these then from there to the building, and that was to the 222 T Building, where I was. Then when the samplers came in the door of the 222 laboratory, they had a special window right inside the door on the right-hand side as they entered, and they rang a bell, which was a push-button bell at the window, and then they set the sampling equipment up on the Dutch door type platform on top of the at the bottom of the window. Weisskopf: So they wouldn’t actually have to come into the lab? Knight: They did not. Then we’d open the door and pull the sampler equipment in and set it down on the stainless steel benches. Weisskopf: Would you pull just the doorstop, or all the trombone and everything else? Knight: Any sampling equipment that they brought over at that time. Sometimes it would take two or three samples while they were in the building, or in the canyon, and would take the process samples that contained the product. And that’s what it was always referred to, we never talked about it being plutonium. You always spoke of the product. And then they would also take waste samples, because, as I said, as they processed from stage to stage in the canyon building, they would take the sample of the product to ensure that they still had it, and the volume and the condition of it as far as isolation. And then the waste that came off of that, they took samples of those waste streams and brought those over to the building. And naturally as you’re processing this way, wastes are very important to get out of the building. Otherwise they’d back up and fill your vessels, would shut you down. Weisskopf: Right. Knight: So that’s kind of the way the process always emanated and controlled, and it was really very interesting. Weisskopf: What was your job actually, then, you know, a few months after you got there? What was your daily routine? You were in the lab? Knight: In the lab. As soon as they found out that I could use the pipetting equipment, because, again, college chemistry, if you remember, taking samples, everybody used to draw the sample up into the pipettes in college labs by mouth. And this was an absolute no-no, and you didn’t do that sort of thing. So the way we done it out there was we had these small syringes, the same type that the medical profession uses to inoculate you. And different sizes. The smaller volumes that you were going to work with, the smaller the syringe that you needed, down to where but you couldn’t go too tiny because you were going to hold this in your hand. And attached to the end of the syringe was a small piece of intravenous tubing that we used, and then the pipette was placed into the intravenous tubing to actually get a sample, especially the waste samples, were by hand. Weisskopf: If they took just a 1 ml sample, would that be enough for you guys to work with, then? Knight: It was enough to give us at least two complete analyses. If we ran an analysis and it didn’t meet the expectation that we anticipated at that phase of the process, then we were asked to verify the analysis, so we had enough sample to run it again. Weisskopf: Okay. Let me ask you this: If you took that sample early on in the process so it was hot, how close could you get to it and how long could you be near it? Knight: All right. For the real hot samples in the laboratory, we had a breakdown facility I say breakdown; actually, a dilution-type facility and it was called the Rube Goldberg, where we actually set the doorstop in behind this leaded shield window, and then we had a remote pipetter that we put a fresh pipette in, and then we would open the doorstop, and just turn it. It was on a swivel, and we’d turn it, put the pipette down into the doorstop sampler that contained the real hot stuff, and then we had a 10 ml flask units that we used to set in adjacent to that prior to opening everything up. You got everything in position before you opened the doorstop. And then you would take a minute amount, like 100 ml, of this half we had ½ ml to begin with, and then we would take 100 lambda of that and dilute it in this 10 ml vial that was almost already full of solution. And then after we done that, then we would close the doorstops and take these small vials and then dilute them to a calibrated mark so that we could make back calculations as to what volumes we were working with. Weisskopf: Right. Okay. Knight: So this was very, very important that all, when you pipette it out of the doorstop, you pipette it up to a given line on the TAPE RAN OUT Knight: to get it right on the get the meniscus right on the mark, and then transfer that into the 10 ml flask. And that was the way we worked the hot ones. That was quite routine, and it became people became very and highly proficient in doing these operations, and without getting themselves into any kind of an exposure problem. Weisskopf: And when you took a sample, was the process basically stopped at that point before they would transfer the materials on to the next step? Knight: No, no, they always waited for the results to come back before the material was moved to the next step. Weisskopf: It was. So the process would be held up while you guys were doing your work. Knight: That’s correct. Weisskopf: And what was the pressure for you guys to get it right if for some reason you didn’t find the numbers the way you wanted? Knight: Well, they had pretty good time frames as to how long it would take the laboratory to make an analysis for them. And the only time that they really got outstandingly pushy against the laboratory was when we would have a result that they didn’t felt met the criteria for the batch that they were moving. And if that be the case, then they’d call for a re-sample, and that meant the samplers had to come back, run over and take a sample out of the canyon, rush it over to us, and that was put on what we called the rush category, and that had to be done immediately. Weisskopf: How long would that take, do you think? If you got the word that you needed a new sample until you actually had the sample in hand, would it be minutes, or an hour, or...? Knight: Well, they could have a sample to us in 30 minutes. And in most cases that would always be the situation. However, if they were going to be working in another cell in the process, like a leak or something like this, why, they would have, if they were going to have a cell block off, they normally did not let anybody in on deck when that was happening. So they would have to put a cover block back on before they could do that, and that would take by the time that they knew that they had to take a sample, they’d already told the crane operator that they had to close up because they had to take a sample. Weisskopf: Okay. And the crane operator was theoretically the only one in the canyon while things were going on? Knight: That’s correct. And he was behind a shielded parapet wall. And from his position in the crane cab, which was behind that parapet wall, then he was in a solid steel cube. Actually, I say solid steel cube, it was a cube with an operational area in it that was heavy eight-inch steel all the way around him. And then we had modified Navy periscopes, the same type that they used on the submarines, that had been modified so that they could project on a horizontal plane out, and the magnifying heads could be rotated to give him views down the canyon or straight down. And it had a three-power configuration where he could change his magnification when he was up above looking and moving, and then go down closer. And then when the cell block was off, actually get right down to where he was seeing in the cell with very good visibility. Weisskopf: Where were the lights for looking down into a cell? Knight: They had lights on the crane itself. Weisskopf: That would shine straight down? Knight: That’s right. As well as ceiling lights in the canyon. But the crane operators always used, naturally, the lights on the crane because they were a high intensity spotlight type thing. And they had four or five on each side of the bridge, as I remember, and they’d shine straight down so that his work areas were highly lit and visible. Weisskopf: If the crane operator was doing his job right, everything went, if something went wrong, there wasn’t anybody on the canyon floor to correct what he was doing or to make it easier. An awful lot of it fell on his shoulders. Knight: That’s correct. And if it was a really touchy job that he had to do, why, it was a very common practice that someone from the operations building would actually go up and ride with him when he was doing that particular job. Weisskopf: Okay. Knight: And that’s what I was going to say, that having had experience, some experience over the years of going out and working at the 100 B Reactor, for example, on a special project, and having been transferred out of the laboratory into the operations side of the business, and having worked in the tank farm operations over the years, why, it makes it pretty easy for me to talk about these things, Gene. Because when you’ve worked in all the different places, then you really can focus and get a good idea of all of the outcroppings and the work that went on. Weisskopf: Okay. You’ve seen the whole picture. Knight: It kind of gives you the big picture, yes. That doesn’t make me an expert, say, in the 100 areas nor in the processing facilities, because we had people that well, we had the working groups available in the various facilities, such as the chemists were working, and most of them would work in laboratories, chemical engineering personnel in the facilities, and then we always had the process chemistry group, which were all the high technical process engineering or chemical engineering type people that were always constantly looking at what was going on in the process and tell you what adjustments had to be made to get us to where we wanted to be. So it was well-controlled and well-orchestrated in the way that they done business, even from the very beginning. And that was one of the reasons that the DuPont Company was chosen, I’m sure, because of their background in chemistry and their dedicated records, or track record I should say, for doing good work and working with explosives and various types of energy that way. Weisskopf: Right. And DuPont was still at Hanford when you came, right? Knight: Yes, indeed. Weisskopf: Until almost the end of ‘46? Knight: That’s correct. They left in well, they made the transition to General Electric Company in September of ‘46. And then they stayed available on an advisory capacity in high echelon positions until General Electric had settled in and had full control. Weisskopf: How quickly after you got there did your job all of a sudden change, or did they shift you around? Knight: It was pretty much on an individual’s abilities and capabilities versus the availability of new jobs, different places. And, of course, we have to bear in mind that a number of things were taking place. There was more demands for not only plutonium, but we started having people in the high forehead area, I’m going to say, that were already looking at possibilities for utilizing some of the other radioisotope materials that we were discovering. There was constant research going on in a number of the colleges around the country that were included in the program, Berkeley being one. And those people were getting actual samples of some of our materials, and they were also doing a lot of research, and development was just coming and going as fast as you could ever want it. So at that stage it was pretty tough to really get totally on board as to what was happening because so much and so many things were happening simultaneously. But it was all going, and it was really exciting because you knew, you could just sense the high intensity of things that were happening. And I’ve often said that I hated to go home from work in the afternoons, and I couldn’t wait till I got there the next morning. Weisskopf: Wow. Knight: It was really great. And, of course, that continued to energize and grow into what I call the Fabulous Fifties, when they radioisotope business became high reality, and separations were actually starting to separate specific isotopes that they found would have a need in the public markets for various things, up to and including the treatment of cancers that we’re still using today. Weisskopf: And I guess the prospects for nuclear energy itself were pretty darn high at that point. Knight: Extremely high. And, Gene, I have to say that we did not get off on the right foot with nuclear energy because it started out as a war born thing and initially was classified to have a 20-year life expectancy. And it was looked upon, every time you say anything about nuclear energy, the first thing they see is the big mushroom cloud, and the aspects of a war developed industry that was strictly to win a war. And that was so true at the time. But after we were into the thing for a while, then it became highly apparent that there was a lot of good things to come out of the system for the benefits of humanity. But it became a very difficult sell, because people had already been I won’t say poisoned in their minds, but had already been predestined to make decisions on the basis of it was a war type material and that’s all it was good for. And it’s a shame, because we know that we had well, I’ll cite the space program, NASA’s programs. In the early stages it was not too difficult for them to shoot a man up in the air and bring him back to earth in a short durational thing. But then they started extending their time in space, and they had to go to highly energized systems because everything was battery operated then, and they were using solar power to regenerate the batteries. And after we got up and starting orbiting, why, they got into some real close problems of not being able to bring personnel back, because when they got on the back side of the planet, the moon, this sort of thing, why, they were in the dark side, and they couldn’t solar energize batteries. And we were very close on a couple of occasions on return trips. And so during that phase, why, some generators were made, and Hanford played a major role in it, the Battelle Industries did, on building what we called snap generators. And they were used in space and still are, to my knowledge. So there were benefits in that light. And, again, from a medicinal standpoint, there were those benefits. And I guess the person that said it the very best in my book was Dixie Lee Ray, the administrator for the Atomic Energy Commission, and she stood before Congress and told them that the things that we were developing and using in the nuclear industry were no different than when things were developed such as electricity and people were injured and killed by misuses of electricity, but then we finally got it to where everybody now can walk into a room and flip a little switch and we have no problems with it. And I thought that that was an outstanding way to present something like that. And she said just think what it’s given the individual, the working class people in this world, when back in the days of the pharaohs with all of their money and magnificence, they did not have that type of control and services. And she felt that the nuclear industry was well on the road to getting us into that same category. And, to me, that just opened a whole new way of life for everybody, and I think that it still has that opportunity, and someday we’ll regret the fact that we’ve been so emphatic and vicious in shutting down our systems in this country. Weisskopf: Yeah, okay. To me, it’s like the discovery was made and it will always be there now. Knight: That’s correct. Weisskopf: How we utilize it and what ways we put it to use. Knight: And we’ve already demonstrated that under proper control and constantly upgraded maintenance programs, why, the systems work well to supply high energy needs. And unless I need to say too much more, Gene, I’m going to say that in my book, from what I know about the wars in history and our current wars and positions, that nations that have had energy and utilized their energies in proper perspective, were always people that were respected and controlled, or had controls, I’ll say. And as we continue to reduce our ability to have energies and be in control positions puts us in jeopardy, and I feel that very strongly. Weisskopf: Interesting. That’s very good. To have a perspective on that whole career that you had really, to me, it makes me realize that you were excited about it. It was something brand new, it was totally undeveloped, and you got to see it start from almost nothing to a thousand different industries branching out of it. It’s really great. Knight: And I think that that was one of the reasons that I enjoyed, even after retirement, of staying and helping whenever I could. And I still feel very strongly that the industry still has its place and someday will probably utilize it a little bit better than we have. Weisskopf: Yeah. You never worked in the private sector? Knight: I never have worked in the private sector. Weisskopf: Was it always within the confines of Hanford? Knight: Yes, indeed. Weisskopf: Okay. You didn’t travel around the country doing Knight: Did not. Weisskopf: what other people did? Knight: Oh, on a couple of occasions I did, Gene. But it was only because we had a specific interest in a given type function, such as and I’ll mention one. We were very interested in reducing waste volumes at Hanford, and the best way to do that would be to size the waste that you were going to put into boxes to be buried into the ground. And we were looking at setting up a sizing operation of our own in the plutonium finishing plant, and one of the other companies in the nation that was at that time at Rocky Flats in Colorado had let us know that they were already doing some sizing type work. And a couple of us were sent down to look at it. I say a couple. There was a number of trips made. And then from a health physics standpoint, because I was in health physics at the time, they sent people like myself and Bernie Sariffic down, and we made an observation as to what they were doing and whether it was compatible with the way we like to do business at Hanford. And it turned out that we had already put our oar in the water, so to speak, and the program that we had outlined for Hanford was going to be superior to the program that they had at Rocky Flats. So it was things like that that were also very interesting. Weisskopf: Have you ever seen any of the fuel processing facilities in Europe, or where they use them for part of their normal commercial stream? Knight: Only from information and documentation that I had looked at here. Now, I did make a trip to Belgium in 1993, strictly a private type thing on the request of one of my sons-in-law to go with him, because he was looking at starting another little business of his own, importing pigeon feeds, because he’s a pigeon racer. Weisskopf: And while you were there... Knight: So we got a chance to look around a little bit. And at that time Belgium had one reactor in service, and was just bringing on the second, and had already started the process of building their third, which would have put them at 100% nuclear utilization. And, of course, then interest in other countries. The French, for example, were getting up into the area of about 70%. Weisskopf: These people have to deal, then, with fuel reprocessing and all the associated chemistry. Knight: Exactly. Weisskopf: And it would be interesting, I guess, to see how they’re doing that. Knight: Well, it certainly would be, because I know that we’re getting and I refer to it as constipated, because we’re not reprocessing any fuels now, and all of our power reactor people are having problems with backup storage of their spent fuel, and that’s going to catch up to us. As a matter of fact, it’s become a very, very real problem at this time. Weisskopf: Yeah. But in your experience, it would have been a really straightforward step up from what you were doing with separations to dealing with the commercial power plants around the country to reprocess their fuel? Knight: That’s correct. But we had already made the studies, Gene, and had that information available. As a matter of fact, we had already started making some equipment conversions in the PUREX plant to accommodate commercial fuel reprocessing. Weisskopf: Okay. Knight: And that’s all on record. Weisskopf: And I guess some of the down sides of that are you have to transport it around the country. Knight: That’s true. But we’re still transporting wastes around the country. Weisskopf: Right. Knight: And I think that will continue. As a matter of fact, I sat in on a very interesting discussion in Yakima here probably eight or nine years ago now, where they had people convinced here in Yakima that we should just absolutely refuse to let them truck any wastes through Yakima or any that fly over in Yakima. And during the course of the discussion, from inputs from people like myself and others, why, it became highly apparent that, hey, if you do that, you have to remember that you’re going to shut your hospitals down, you’re not going to be able to have the x-ray equipment calibrated from time to time like we have to do to make sure that it’s within bounds. And all of a sudden they said uh-oh, okay, maybe we’re trying to get the cart before the horse. And I think all too frequently we do that. Weisskopf: Yeah. Knight: And it’s an understandable thing, especially when we’ve had such a tremendous training program where everything nuclear was war oriented. Weisskopf: Right. Knight: It’s going to take a long time to phase out of that, and I think we’re eventually getting there. People are a little bit more friendly towards nuclear industry, and they’re seeing that we’re still building new cancer clinics everywhere and using isotopes to treat those people in dire need. And I think that we’ve got to really look at everything with a good strong sense of realism, that hey, go back with what I originally said about Dixie Lee Ray saying that we injured people when we first introduced electricity, and she also made mention of the fact that we’ve done the same thing with gasoline, another form of energy that we all use today. Weisskopf: Right. Knight: We use very carelessly at this stage in our lives, in many cases. Weisskopf: Oh, yeah. There was a time when we were running out of gasoline. Somehow or other we’re not running out of it anymore. Knight: It’s very strange. Weisskopf: Yeah. Knight: Well, we’re buying now a lot of our oils and products from other countries, too, and this is another one of those areas that gives me concern is that we’re putting ourselves on the table and being dependent on everybody else rather than depending on ourselves again. Weisskopf: Yeah. Knight: Especially in the forms of energies. Weisskopf: Hey, it’s been about an hour, and I maybe want to let you go before we drain you completely for this period of time. Knight: I really appreciated the opportunity, Gene, and it’s a real pleasure. Weisskopf: Me very much so also. It’s great that you feel comfortable about remembering it. That in itself is a feat, I think, for all the experiences that you had over many years. It’s just great to have you laying it out like cards on a table. Would it be okay if I come up with specific questions for you that we do it again? Knight: Absolutely. Absolutely. Anytime, Gene. Weisskopf: All right. Well, thank you very much, Russ. [End of Interview] Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 58 minutes, 47 seconds Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Russ Night Description An account of the resource An oral history interview with Russ Night conducted by the B Reactor Museum Association. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fe055fd0ab530129db6fe7c9f3ab59b55.MP3 54c7855ab5c96e0861e4cb60c0b500a9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource B Reactor Museum Association Oral Histories Description An account of the resource Oral History Interviews conducted by the B Reactor Museum Association. The collection is split between a series of audio oral histories taken in the late 1990s and early 2000s by Gene Weisskopf that focuses on the T-Plant, and a series of video oral histories done in the early 1990s by Bill Putman that focus on the B Reactor and Hanford construction. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3, DOCX Language A language of the resource English Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Warren H. Sevier Location The location of the interview Home of Sevier Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [Start of Interview] Weisskopf: Today is July 13th and we are with Warren Sevier in Richland, that is S-E-V-I-E-R, right? Sevier: Right. Weisskopf: Okay and I guess where I’d like to start is maybe a little background about like what you were starting with what brought you to Hanford. Sevier: Okay, I worked for an instrument company back east and started looking around for a job and this was advertised in the Cleveland papers, so I submitted an application and here I am. Weisskopf: Was the job highly tuned to what you were doing or…? Sevier: I was working for an instrument company and the job was instrument technicians. Weisskopf: Okay. Why were they advertising in Cleveland do you think? Sevier: I don’t know. Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: At that time, the previous fall, they’d had a lay off here. They laid off a lot of people and then with the new plants coming on like the reactors and REDOX and uranium plant they needed more people, so they went across country looking for people. Weisskopf: So what time of year do you think it was that you saw the ad? Sevier: It had to be during the summer. Weisskopf: Of 1950? Sevier: 1950, right. Weisskopf: Somewhere in ’50. Sevier: And I came here in October of 1950. Weisskopf: Were you married then or have kids or anything? Sevier: No, I was single then. Weisskopf: So it was pretty easy to pick up and move. Sevier: It was yes, mm-hmm. Weisskopf: Was the pay better than what you were getting or what was the reason? Sevier: Oh yeah, it was a factory job where I was working. Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: And I wanted to work in a field as a field engineer. At that time, they had a Cadet Engineering course and I was scheduled to take it. Every once in awhile somebody from the shop would be qualified enough to take it but management decision came down that no one else would be taking the course in the future without a degree and I didn’t have that. Weisskopf: Okay, right. Sevier: And so that’s when I started looking for another job. Weisskopf: And did they pay your way to come out for an interview or how did that work? Sevier: No, I submitted an application and I guess they gave me the job. There was some correspondence back and forth of course. Weisskopf: Yeah, okay. Any negotiation about salary or did they just tell you what it was going to pay? Sevier: No, they told me what it was. Weisskopf: Was it a step up? Sevier: Oh yeah, from factory work? Weisskopf: Uh-huh. Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: Great. Sevier: What I was doing in the factory was assembling instruments and calibrating ‘em. Weisskopf: Mm-hmm. What kind of instruments were they? Sevier: They were for powerhouse type, temperature, pressure… Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: …flow. Weisskopf: All of which they had out here right? Sevier: Oh yeah. Weisskopf: Somewhere or another, okay. So you picked up and moved out. Did you know where Pasco and Richland were? Were you familiar with the territory? Sevier: I had been on the West Coast when I was sailing in the merchant marine but I had never been. I worked for an Alaska steam ship one time but never in Seattle and I didn’t realize that there was deserts and dunes like everybody else. Weisskopf: Did you drive out here? Sevier: Yes, mm-hmm. Weisskopf: Okay. So it must have been a little bit of a surprise when you found that you had arrived when you still didn’t look like you were in Washington. Sevier: Yeah. Weisskopf: Where did you stay when you got here? Sevier: They had dormitories. Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: In Richland and I stayed in the men’s dorm. Weisskopf: About how long did that last? Sevier: Let’s see…. Weisskopf: You got here in October. Sevier: Yeah, I think it lasted till, well I stayed till ’52 till I got married. Weisskopf: Okay, so you stayed in the dorms for two years? Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: And that was a normal thing to do? It wasn’t just for transient temporaries? Sevier: Yeah there was 13, I think 13, and men’s dorms and I don’t know how many women’s dorms. Weisskopf: Okay. And did you start work immediately upon getting here? Sevier: Oh yeah. Weisskopf: Okay. So, where was your first assignment? Sevier: Well, in 700 Area Powerhouse. It still had some clearance, I think, to go through but anyway they had equipment from the company that I worked for and… Weisskopf: So you…yeah. Sevier: …they wanted somebody to calibrate it. Weisskopf: I wonder if that’s why they were advertising in Cleveland. Sevier: No, I don’t think so… Weisskopf: No? Okay. Sevier: …I think their ad probably appeared all around the country, I think. Weisskopf: Right, right. Refresh my memory in the 700 Area Powerhouse, where was that? Sevier: It was back of the 703 building, part of it is still there. It was in that open space where the bus terminal is now. Weisskopf: Okay. Where did that power go to, do you think? Steam or? Sevier: It was steam and it took care of the office buildings, also I lived in those little apartments on George Washington Way and they were steam heated at the time. Weisskopf: Okay. So that was a pretty standard non-nuclear job then? Sevier: Right, that was just until the clearance came though. Weisskopf: And for that job required no clearance…. Sevier: No. Weisskopf: …and so how long were you there, do you think? A matter of weeks or months? Sevier: Oh, just a few weeks. Weisskopf: Okay. Any problems getting clearance? Sevier: No. Weisskopf: Yeah. So where did you go after that? Sevier: Went to the 200 Areas. Weisskopf: Okay, in power or? Sevier: In instruments. See they had a separate instrument division. Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: They were set up with different kinds of divisions, there was separation division and so forth. Reactor had one division and separation, 200 Area separation and metal prep was 300. Weisskopf: Mm-hmm, all had their own separate instrument people? Sevier: Yeah. Weisskopf: Mm-hmm. Sevier: Mm-hmm, but as a group we, most of us, belonged to the Instrument Society. Weisskopf: Right. Did you ever have meetings on campus amongst all of you or did you go to classes that would have mixed people from all areas? Sevier: Yeah I went to classes, right. They had classes for the people that came in here were either electronic or pneumatic technicians. I was classified as pneumatic so we had a school in White Bluff’s, in a warehouse in White Bluff’s, and we had both pneumatic and electronic people in there and they were from all the areas. So I think the school lasted probably about…oh six months if I remember correctly. Weisskopf: Cause an awful lot of your instruments would have overlapped with everybody elses. Sevier: Oh yeah. Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: And I presume that…were there standards that were used throughout the site? Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: Okay. Was there competition among you guys and the 100 Area instrument people or…. Sevier: No. Weisskopf: …didn’t really know what they were doing? Sevier: No, no problem there. Weisskopf: Yeah. But you did share information? Sevier: Oh yes, mm-hmm. Weisskopf: Yeah, okay. So when you were in instruments in the 200 Areas were you more narrow than the entire both 200 Areas or for some aspect of them? Sevier: Oh yeah both. I worked in T plant… Weisskopf: Were you assigned to T plant, or that was just one of the buildings you took care of? Sevier: No, I was assigned to T Plant and also the tank farms one period. Then I was in a group that had the powerhouse and the remote weather instruments. Weisskopf: Right, did you ever have to climb the weather tower? Sevier: Yeah. Weisskopf: Okay. Was there an elevator or walk up? Sevier: They put an elevator in there later I think. Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: Yeah I did. There was no elevator at first. Weisskopf: You had to climb up? Sevier: Yeah, one time we changed all the thermocouples or ___ (sounds like thermones) I’m sorry…on the various stages where they measured temperature and uh…. Weisskopf: You had to work on the outside of the tower or how secure was it? Sevier: Oh you could reach from the tower. Weisskopf: Okay. Huh. So Sevier: Yeah. Weisskopf: And over, so what was your span of time dealing in the 200 Areas do you think? For the various jobs you had there. Sevier: Oh, for my whole career, just about. Weisskopf: Was it? Okay. Sevier: I think so. Weisskopf: Which went until when? Sevier: ’88. Weisskopf: Okay. 38 years. Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: I even got a 35-year watch. Weisskopf: A watch? Sevier: Yeah. Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: Rockwell. It is kind of funny, you know, you work for all these various contractors at the same job essentially, essentially like I was a Project Engineer for General Electric Arco. Weisskopf: Mm-hmm. Sevier: Rockwell, and then of course I retired from Westinghouse. Weisskopf: Yeah. Did retirement work out okay after all those transitions? Sevier: Oh yeah, fine. Weisskopf: Yeah, okay. Cause I know that was always something that it depended on who you were working for. Sevier: I worked a little longer. I was going to retire when I was 65 and I worked into the next year because I was upgrading the railroad as a Project Engineer. That was one of the projects they had and they wanted to finish that before I retired, so I did. Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: I worked maybe in to January or February or something like that. Weisskopf: I guess the part I am interested in the most right now is T Plant specific work…. Sevier: Okay. Weisskopf: …and I guess what kind of clearance did you need for that versus other places? Sevier: I think, you didn’t, you just needed just secret clearance, I’m not sure. Weisskopf: Was it? Sevier: I’m not sure. Weisskopf: Yeah, okay. Sevier: I had TS clearance because I worked sometimes once and awhile in the 2, 3, 4, 5. Weisskopf: TS, was that higher… Sevier: Top secret. Weisskopf: What was Q level? Sevier: Q was normal I think. Weisskopf: That was just the basic. Sevier: Yeah, Q. Weisskopf: Okay, okay but you had a higher one. Sevier: Well later I did for working in the metal prep building. Weisskopf: Right, right. So when do you think you went to T Plant? Was that early on? Sevier: Yeah I think so. That would be…. Weisskopf: In ’51 or? Sevier: It had to be in ’51. Weisskopf: Okay, okay. Was that your first assignment in the separations area, actually working on the separations process? Sevier: Working in one of the process buildings? Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: Yeah, mm-hmm. Weisskopf: Okay, okay. Sevier: Because before that we had the powerhouse and the tank farms, well the tank farms I worked in and powerhouse, tank farms, and the weather instruments. Yeah. Weisskopf: Followed that, or… Sevier: Well that was before I went into T Plant I think. Weisskopf: that quickly? Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: You went into T Plant within the year of getting here… Sevier: Oh yeah. Weisskopf: …but you worked in all those other places too? Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: One group had it all, had the three assignments. One group took care of the powerhouses, the tank farms, and the remote instrument groups, operative. Weisskopf: And so you weren’t stuck in one building all day obviously…. Sevier: No, no. Weisskopf: …the assignments came up and they would move you around. Sevier: Right. Weisskopf: So what were you doing at T Plant when you first got there? Sevier: I worked as an instrument technician. Weisskopf: Which meant you could go anywhere in the building to work on instruments? Sevier: Oh yeah, mm-hmm. Weisskopf: How many of you were there? Sevier: Gee I don’t know, maybe counting the shift people, probably 10 in a group. Weisskopf: 10 instrument people? Sevier: Instrument people yeah. Weisskopf: On any one shift or through the entire, all shifts. Sevier: For the entire thing. Weisskopf: So there might be two or three. Sevier: One man on a shift. See we were working six days a week. So short change was a matter of a few hours. Weisskopf: Mm-hmm. Sevier: But I didn’t work shift there I worked days but I worked shift later at REDOX. Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: When they started up REDOX. Weisskopf: Everything they did at T Plant was remote controlled, so I presume that instruments were as critical as instruments can ever get. Sevier: Oh yeah. Weisskopf: Were you sort of on emergency call and when things came up you had to get to ‘em right away. Sevier: Yeah, of course as I say they had shift coverage so they had to have a man there all the time. Weisskopf: But, was it frequently, would the process stop until you guys fixed it? Sevier: No, because it was batch. Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: They get in to the process, I mean start and stop. I’m not to sure… Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: But it was a batch process. Weisskopf: People weren’t yelling at you continually about holding up the process. Sevier: Oh no. Weisskopf: Did you know much about the process while you were working there? Sevier: Not too much because it was a no no to read run books and things like that. Weisskopf: The logs. Sevier: Right. Weisskopf: Yeah, okay. Sevier: You get caught reading those and you get a little lecture but nobody read ‘em because really…if you were a chemist or something it might be fine but… Weisskopf: Right, right otherwise it would be boring reading. Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: Did you ever have to dress up and go in the canyon to do instruments? Sevier: Oh yeah. Weisskopf: How often was that? Weekly or every now and then? Sevier: No it wasn’t very often. Weisskopf: Mm-hmm. Sevier: We had one project I remember, when they sent the slugs over from the 100 Areas they were in water and it was always a problem sending the cask cars back empty because they wouldn’t have the heat anymore and they would freeze up. Weisskopf: Oh in the winter time? Sevier: Yeah. Weisskopf: Really? Sevier: So what they were trying to do was establish a point where they did not need the water to cool the slugs. Weisskopf: Oh. Sevier: So what they did is there was a swimming pool, what they call a swimming pool, a big pool in T Plant and they would bring a basket of slugs in and put it down in there and then we would put thermocouples in amongst the slugs and then we get out of there and they would pull it out and put it up on deck and watch the temperature. If it got to hot they would put it back in. They wanted to see how long it would take for the green slugs to cool down enough so that they wouldn’t need the water coming over. Weisskopf: They wanted to find out if they needed it coming over from the reactors. Sevier: From the reactor with the slugs. See the slugs… Weisskopf: Okay… Sevier: …provided heat. Weisskopf: They weren’t set up at the reactor to do these kinds of measurements. Sevier: Apparently not. Weisskopf: It was easier to do it at your place. Sevier: It was easier to do with the swimming pool there… Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: Or the pool rather. Weisskopf: Okay, so they’d measure the temperature in the water and out of the water and… Sevier: Mostly out of the water, pull it out and let it heat up and then established a point where it safe to ship it without water so they wouldn’t freeze up in the winter. I mean that’s just one… Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: …one little thing. Weisskopf: Why didn’t they just empty the water out after taking the fuel out of the cask car? Sevier: I’m not sure. Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: I was thinking about that. Weisskopf: Yeah. So what they wanted to do was ship it over without water in the cask car. Sevier: Right. Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: And that was one of the times you had to suit up… Sevier: Yep. Weisskopf: …then be out there. Where the heck were you when they were lifting fresh fuel out of the swimming pool? Sevier: Oh no you don’t get it. Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: You get out of it. You don’t stay in the canyon. Weisskopf: Yeah. And were they, so you put the thermocouple down in the water while it was safe to do so? Sevier: In the basket, Yeah. Weisskopf: Mm-hmm. Sevier: Slugs were in a basket and you put the thermocouple down in there with tongs. Weisskopf: Mm-hmm. Sevier: And then… Weisskopf: You’d leave at that point. Sevier: …leave right. Weisskopf: And the crane operator… Sevier: Of course the wire is hooked up and so forth. Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: The crane operator would then pull it out and put it up on deck and then they would watch the temperature if it got too hot to go back in the pool. Weisskopf: Okay. So you were looking down in the cell then. You were working down in, or you know looking over the edge. Sevier: _____ (unclear) the pool. Weisskopf: Mm-hmm. Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: Was it big? Sevier: Oh yeah, it was a big pool Weisskopf: Yeah, yeah. How many buckets were down there when you were doing this? Sevier: Oh, this was just the one bucket. Weisskopf: Just for the test? Sevier: Yeah. Weisskopf: Yeah, okay. Sevier: I think it would have been too hot with others. Weisskopf: And they tended to have redundancy in instruments so if something did go out they could continue the process? Sevier: I think so in a way. Weisskopf: Mm-hmm. Sevier: But with the batch process of course you could always stop. Weisskopf: At any given point. Sevier: Right. Weisskopf: Where did you tend to, did you spend, where did you spend most of your time dealing with instruments, what part of the building? Sevier: In the gallery, the operating gallery… Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: …that’s where your readout instruments are. Weisskopf: Mm-hmm. Sevier: And it would be a matter of routine calibration. Sevier: Preventative… Weisskopf: According to a schedule? Sevier: …yeah maintenance… Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: Preventative maintenance. Weisskopf: Did that include like the big scales they had. Sevier: Yeah we had a scale man. Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: I worked with him sometimes, everybody, he took care of the scales there and also the railroad scales. Riverland, which is where the rails used to come in. They had scales there. I remember going over there one day with him. Then, let’s see…. Weisskopf: So, there was always, everyday if there were no problems you still had work to do everyday… Sevier: Yeah, routine, oh yeah. Weisskopf: …calibrating routine work. How often were there problems where you had to stop what you were doing and go fix something? Was it frequent or infrequent? Sevier: I would say infrequent. Weisskopf: Just every now and then? Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: Did you ever go up in the crane operator’s cabin? Sevier: Oh yeah. Weisskopf: Yeah? While it was running or? Sevier: The periscopes belonged to the instrument groups. Weisskopf: Oh, okay. Sevier: But we had, there was a specialist in the 300 Area that took care of the periscopes but we might go with him you know and help out. Weisskopf: While they were working? Or just during off hours, would you be up there? Sevier: Oh off hours, Weisskopf: Uh-huh. Sevier: Cause you couldn’t have any cells open or anything. Even though you were behind a concrete wall. Weisskopf: Right. Cause, oh you were working on the outside on the periscopes themselves. Sevier: Periscopes, right. Weisskopf: Right, okay. Was there TV installed at that point? Sevier: No, that was too early. They put TV on at PUREX, the first ones, and that didn’t work too well at first, the first TV’s. But the PUREX were the first application. Weisskopf: Okay. You don’t remember any TV screens inside the crane at the T Plant. Sevier: No, not at T, not then no. Weisskopf: So suiting up was sort of a normal thing to do? Not frequent maybe. Sevier: No, it wasn’t frequent, no. Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: Usually it was pretty well organized. Weisskopf: But weren’t the instruments, the other ends of the instruments were all in the cells right? Sevier: The sensing elements? Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: Oh yeah. Weisskopf: And what would you do if something went out in one of the dissolvers? Or you know… Sevier: Oh they probably, they were on jumpers so the crane operator would take them out. Weisskopf: You would take the whole thing out? Sevier: And conceivably it would be hot so they would bury it and you’d have a replacement one in which… Weisskopf: And were you the one who would install you know a thermocouple or something in a jumper? Sevier: In a jumper, yeah, you wouldn’t build a jumper but you would put the thermocouple in. Weisskopf: Where would you go to do that? Sevier: Up at the maintenance shop where they…. Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: ...built the jumpers. Weisskopf: So they would simply have an order for that and you’d go in and they’d tell you put it in there. Sevier: No, sometimes they had spares depending on the instrument. Weisskopf: Was it all pretty well set up and easy to do or was there still lots of jury-rigging or making fit or something like that? Sevier: No, I thought it was pretty well thought out, planned before. Weisskopf: You guys weren’t changing things, improving, upgrading all time, where you had to constantly fine tune it? Sevier: No I don’t think so, not in that sense. Weisskopf: And the instruments in the gallery was like hundreds of yards of instruments… Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weiskopf: Did you understand, I guess most of them were repeated instruments though right? There was a finite number of types of instruments. Sevier: Yeah, they could have weight factors, BG, and temperatures… Weisskopf: Mm-hmm. Sevier: …pressures. Weisskopf: Microphones. Sevier: They had microphones yeah. Weisskopf: Yeah, yeah. Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: I thought that was a pretty real black and white way of finding out if something was working. Sevier: Yeah, you could hear it. Weisskopf: Yeah, yeah, real basic. So if you had training or experience on any one of those you could go down the aisle and find them all up…. Sevier: Oh yeah. Weisskopf: …and down the operating gallery. Sevier: And then the radiation instrumentation. They were at usually Beckman’s. Weiskopf: Mm-hmm. Sevier: They’re pretty standard. The weight factor and that was usually a ring balance and temperature was usually oh, Honeywell or somebody like that, Brown. Weisskopf: Mm-hmm. All standard equipment kind. Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: Uh-huh. Did radiation ever interfere with some of the instruments? I know when they first were building Hanford that was an issue with any materials, is how would, heavy radiation effect the materials. Did it have any effect on instruments, where you guys had to take that into account? Sevier: No, I don’t think so. It did on, I remember, on periscopes in the tank farm. Weisskopf: For looking into tanks? Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: So it effected the glass or? Sevier: No the light, we’d have to change out the light bulb, and that was _____ (unclear) Weisskopf: Oh yeah. Do you know a guy named Bill Painter? Sevier: Oh yeah. Weisskopf: He told me a long story once about being involved in a crew where they had to pull the light thing out. Sevier: Yep, everybody gets a few seconds. Weisskopf: And they all got dosed and they…yeah, yeah. Sevier: Quick turn on the light thing and then get out of there. Weisskopf: So were you involved in that from an instrumentation perspective? Sevier: Yeah, that’s when I was in the tank farm group, he was probably in the same group at the same time. Weisskopf: Okay, and that was just one sort of, not odd, but you know something that came up that you had to deal with. Sevier: Right. Weisskopf: And that was just the light bulbs? Sevier: Mm-hmm in that case, yeah. Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: Sometimes when they were sluicing and they’d hit the periscope with the sluice uh, you know… Weisskopf: Right. Sevier: …and then the bulb would just burn out I guess. Weisskopf: Mm-hmm. Wow. So, but back at T plant the radiation, you never found yourself having to add a shield or something…. Sevier: No, uh-uh. Weisskopf: …in order to deal with that, there were all already had been proven…I guess…in the previous few years. Did you work, who took care of the instruments in the lab? Sevier: We did. Weisskopf: Oh you did? Sevier: Same groups. We had one man assigned to the lab at T plant and then when he needed help, you know, he would get others from the group. But he worked all the time, especially in the counting room. You know where they were counting samples all the time… Weisskopf: Mm-hmm. Sevier: …that took a lot of time as far as one man, keeping one man busy, so… Weisskopf: Were there any unique instruments in the lab that you wouldn’t have found elsewhere in the building? Sevier: I’m not sure. Weisskopf: Was there like chemistry instruments, like gastromatographs or? Sevier: No, mostly, for the most part they were counting samples, you know. Let’s see, I was trying to think of what, no I can’t think of any… Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: …that would be special. Weisskopf: Mm-hmm. What was the deal with the padlocks on the panels? Sevier: You know the jet, so you couldn’t jet from one tank to another without, yeah they had padlocks on the jet controls. They were a wheel-type of thing that… Weisskopf: Simply before you could move from to one tank to another. Sevier: Yeah we didn’t do that, of course the operators did that. Weisskopf: Right. And was that for every tank, was there like dozens of locks all the way down? Sevier: Mm-hmm. Every panel board had three or four. Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: Depending on, you know that’s how they moved the material was they jetted it from one to another. Weisskopf: Jet being a substitute for a pump right? Sevier: Right. Weisskopf: And that is what you would see in the log book I guess? Is they’d get to a certain point and then they would check something and then say it’s okay to… Sevier: I suppose, again I say we didn’t have, I didn’t have, I wasn’t privy to it… Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: …looking at the log book so… Weisskopf: But it seems like if the only way they knew that things were working right and it was okay to jet it to the next tank was that the instruments were working right. Sevier: That’s right. Weisskopf: Didn’t that kind of put a lot of pressure on the instrument people or was it just so well running that it wasn’t an issue. Sevier: No, I think because of their experience they would know if something was a little off standard you know. For instance, if you started to jet from one to another and the weight factor didn’t increase in the tank you were jetting into…. Weisskopf: Right. Sevier: ...or say it didn’t decrease in one, they would know right away. Weisskopf: Cause as soon as they had done a few runs they would have a… Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: …routine that they would know what it should be. Sevier: Right. Weisskopf: Okay. What about in the electrical or the pipe gallery, did you ever go down there for instruments too? Sevier: Oh yeah, Mm-hmm. There were thermocouples there. Weisskopf: Thermocouples down where? Sevier: The wires came through the galleries. Weisskopf: Oh-oh-oh, right. Sevier: For the cell temperatures and stuff. Weisskopf: So you might have to tap into those. Sevier: Mm-hmm. Later on, I was Electrical Inspector and Instrument Inspector for 200 Areas for about 10 years so…of course that’s where I would get a little fuzzy as to what I did when, far as you know… Weisskopf: Right. Sevier: ...cause I would have projects where we’d put in electric things but that was at a later period. Weisskopf: How about adding new instruments? Was there much of that going on? Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: I said earlier improvements, but did they just find new ways to measure things or new instruments to use? Sevier: Well no, because the new plants were coming up. Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: Okay. Here comes REDOX, see, which has automatic control. Weisskopf: So they never had to worry about making huge improvements at T plant because it did what it was supposed to do? Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: Okay. So you weren’t working with people to design new instruments to make it work better. Sevier: Not then, later on. Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: Of course in the, most of the instrument projects later on I had. Where they’d upgraded. But uh…hey did you want, excuse me did you want some coffee? Weisskopf: I don’t think I want any coffee thank you, once sec, I’m going to turn the tape over. SIDE TWO Weisskopf: Okay it’s working again. How about just generalized things like what was the most interesting part of the job when you’re dealing with instruments? Sevier: Well I don’t know, probably getting your calibration to come out, I don’t know. Weisskopf: That was the most satisfying part of the job? Sevier: I think so, right. Weisskopf: Cause you were calibrating all the time? Sevier: Um, part, yeah part of the time you were doing that right. I don’t think all of the time. Weisskopf: And if it didn’t calibrate, that’s where your skill came in? Sevier: Start over and fix it. Weisskopf: Yeah, was that the most difficult part of the job too? Sevier: Um let’s see, the most difficult part of the job was working shift I guess. Weisskopf: Oh, you mean like graveyard? Sevier: Well, on a six day week I think you had, what 12 hours off between one of the shifts. When they had what they call a short change and a long change. Everybody in the plant was working these hours six days a week. Weisskopf: So what was the routine, what was the schedule? Give or take. Sevier: Well, let’s see, as I say between…I’ve forgotten now which one…but between one of the changes maybe when you went from days to the short change or long change, anyway you had only eight hours I think it is on one. Maybe it was more than that. Weisskopf: And you would move up a shift? Sevier: No, no. You rotated. Yeah right, you did rotate. You change shifts which was difficult cause of sleeping problems. Weisskopf: Yep. I think since then they’ve learned to keep people on a shift longer right? Sevier: Right. You can imagine going to sleep say at 8 o’clock in the morning one time, the next time maybe 4 o’clock and 5 o’clock or worse, normally in the evening and this gets to be a little confusing after awhile. Weisskopf: Yeah, right right. How many tools did you carry around with you? Would you do your calibration at the site of the instrument? Sevier: Yes. Weisskopf: You wouldn’t take it out? Okay. Sevier: Well you might, in some cases you might take it back to the shop and work on it. Weisskopf: Well how do you calibrate like a pH meter if its sensor is out in the canyon somewhere? Sevier: Well you do some substitute voltage, or whatever it was. Weisskopf: With a separate wire going to the instrument? Sevier: Mm-hmm. In the case of weight factors and things like that you’d have manometers and in the case of temperature you’d have resistance boxes or voltage, things to measure voltage for the thermocouples. Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: Or substitute. You might want to substitute the voltages to calibrate. Weisskopf: And on any given day would you go down the line and do only one type of instrument? What was the schedule for the calibrating? Sevier: I’m not sure on routine. You had a routine, preventative maintenance. Weisskopf: But was it based on type of instrument where you’d go down and do all the thermometers this week… Sevier: No. Weisskopf: …or by panel board? Sevier: By panel boards probably. Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: Course it had to correlate with the operation of the process. Weisskopf: Oh, so it wouldn’t interfere. Sevier: You couldn’t very well take an instrument out of service to calibrate it when you’re operating… Weisskopf: Right. Sevier: …so it had to be coordinated. Weisskopf: And you then had a finite amount of time to get it done. Sevier: Yeah, Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: But it sounded like time pressure wasn’t a big part of the job. Sevier: I don’t think so. Weisskopf: Yeah, you weren’t under the gun… Sevier: No. Weisskopf: …to keep the instruments going. Sevier: No, you didn’t have time study per se, which I never did like with, when I worked in the factory that’s what you had was time study. You’d have, you know, so much time to do a certain operation. Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: Of course, you get energetic and work hard and get a little ahead then you could coast a little. Weisskopf: Right. How about at the tank farm, when you shifted to that aspect did the job change drastically or just the environment in which you worked? Sevier: Well, when I was in the tank farm we had three things we could powerhouse, tank farms, and weather instruments. So we might depending on the need, we might work on any one of those three phases. Weisskopf: And where were you based? What was your home office? Sevier: Oh we had an office in a, like oh in the change, end of the change…trying to remember…I don’t know, corner of the machine shop we had an office in the 200 Areas, 200 West Area. Weisskopf: And were you doing tank farms for both areas? Sevier: Let’s see, did we do both? I don’t think so. I think we just did the west areas. Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: Later on we did both though, seems to me. Weisskopf: And were the tanks filling up at that point? How were they dealing with the amount of room they had left? Was that part of your job? Sevier: No. Weisskopf: Was that part of somebody’s job as far as… Sevier: That would be process operation. Weisskopf: Yeah, so how they were using or anything else didn’t really effect what you did. Sevier: No, not, uh-uh. Weisskopf: Was there looking for leaks? Was that part of the instrumentation? Sevier: As far as… Weisskopf: What you guys were maintaining. Sevier: …tanks and that? Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: Yeah, well we had projects where we drilled wells around the tank farm. Weisskopf: Uh-uh. Sevier: Monitoring wells. Weisskopf: And put instruments down them? Sevier: Oh yeah. Weisskopf: Or would they take samples out? Sevier: Well, if you went to the water table they would take samples out but I think the monitoring wells were later on. Weisskopf: And did they have array of instruments down inside the tanks then? Sevier: Let’s see what was in the tanks? I guess there were dip tubes for level and BG and I’d imagine temperature… Weisskopf: Mm-hmm. Sevier: …and let’s see, how did they measure radiation? Probably at a chamber. Weisskopf: Inside? Sevier: Not in a tank itself but maybe in the well down alongside the tank. Weisskopf: Oh, okay. And how often would you have to suit up and be on top of the thanks? Sevier: Not too often. Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: They had a control house where the read out instrumentation was and a lot of your work was in the control house or instrument house. Weisskopf: Did you ever have tasks where there was a real short amount of time they allowed you to work on it. Sevier: Well changing light bulbs was the shortest. Weisskopf: And that was because the lights and the camera had been put down inside the tank and were contaminated, not wet with it probably they weren’t in the liquid they were just above it. Sevier: They were above it, but they might be, sometimes they got hit by sluicing cause at that time they were sluicing the tanks for uranium recovery so… Weisskopf: So the sluicing they were doing wasn’t anything unknown, it was just the normal routine for getting the liquids out. Sevier: Right. Weisskopf: Changing a light bulb, not real romantic if you ask me, not too exotic. So what was your job while they were doing that? How were you involved with changing light bulbs or how were you involved with the camera and everything? Sevier: Well not… Weisskopf: You went there anyway, did they call you in for it? Sevier: Yeah, it took a number of people to do this. You know, someone to start it and then the next one would maybe do it, take three or four people to change the bulb. Weisskopf: And was it just a normal bulb or a spot, or? Sevier: It was probably a spot bulb. Weisskopf: But it screwed in light a regular light bulb? Sevier: Right, Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: And one person couldn’t take 15-20 seconds to unscrew it? Sevier: No, it would take too long. Weisskopf: Wow. Sevier: So it was really short. Weisskopf: And they called you in simply to help change the light bulbs. Sevier: Well I was part of that group. Weisskopf: Okay. And did you use up that week’s allotment of dose? Sevier: Probably. Weisskopf: Cause Bill was mentioning something about sitting around not being able to do anything for awhile after some job like that. Sevier: Well we always could work out on a cold side though. Weisskopf: Well evidently he didn’t that time. Sevier: Oh. Weisskopf: That was one aspect, one time in his job where they had to sit around for a day waiting for something else to come along but changing light bulbs does not sound real exciting. Sevier: He came along a little bit later then, I think, if I remember right. So maybe they changed their method of operating or something. Weisskopf: Well what he was talking about was exactly the same thing you were… Sevier: Or maybe they gave him more exposure then they gave… Weisskopf: Yeah, yeah. Sevier: …in that case they would probably want to keep him from… Weisskopf: Do you remember what your retirement dosage was? Your lifetime dosage? Sevier: No. Weisskopf: Not too high. Sevier: I don’t think it was too high. Weisskopf: Being exposed was not a normal part of your job. Sevier: No, because later, see later on I did a lot of…oh what would you call it…office type work. Weisskopf: Right. Sevier: Cause I wrote instruction manuals and I remember I taught a class to the operators, instrument class at PUREX and a fella named Bill _____ (sounds like Schillnik) and I set up a preventative maintenance file for PUREX and then I worked as Project Engineering, so you see…and then being, I was an electrical and instrument inspector, you know, as I say for 10 years and most of that was not hot stuff that was new. You know, new buildings, new so... Weisskopf: Was the instrumentation at REDOX much more exciting than it was at T plant? Sevier: Oh yeah, it was, had automatic control there instead of batch. Weisskopf: So the continuous process was not just monitored by instruments but controlled by it. Sevier: Controlled by it, mm-hmm. Weisskopf: Where at T plant it was all padlocks basically. Sevier: Mm-hmm, yeah batch. Weisskopf: And switch on a centrifuge, switch it off, entirely manually controlled. Sevier: That centrifuge reminds me you know, my daughter was about yeh high, they had an open house and they had set a cell up at U plant with a centrifuge and we went in there. You know we could go in and look down in there and the next day no more kids. So that was, I think we must have went in on a Saturday and then Sunday morning there was no more children, because it was kinda unusual. She had been in plants where, seen inside of a canyon building where a lot of people couldn’t go. Weisskopf: Yeah, you can’t now. Sevier: Yeah. Weisskopf: Yeah, they don’t like hardly anybody in there. That’s funny. What about, the job wasn’t all that hazardous because you weren’t normally going into the canyon or places like that. Sevier: Not for me because a lot of portion of my career out there was kind of office work type thing, clean…clean work, new work. Weisskopf: Were you at T plant when they stopped using it? Sevier: No. Weiskopf: You had left already. Sevier: I went down to REDOX before the building was finished because we were in a Quonset hut between REDOX and U plant or a temporary building anyway and working on the instrument instruction manuals till we went into the building. Weisskopf: Manuals for people to use them or to use ‘em. Sevier: Use them to maintain the instrumentation. Weisskopf: Okay. To maintain them, not for the operators? Sevier: No… Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: …in that case it was for maintenance. Weisskopf: Yeah, Okay. Sevier: Later on I worked on operating manuals for the operators but that was for PUREX. Weisskopf: And were you doing it from your instrumentation background or just because you understood the process? How did you get involved in writing operator’s manuals? Sevier: Not operator’s manuals, these were instrument manuals to educate the operators. Weisskopf: Oh-oh-oh right. Sevier: Say that you were a new operator and you’d say “well what’s weight factor?” See…. Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: Well you go right up in the manual with diagrams showing what weight factor is, what it does and so forth or what’s, you know, anything? What’s BG? What’s, anyhow, that’s what the manual is. Weisskopf: And it might be a paragraph or it might be five pages, but it was just to explain the instrument and how it worked. Sevier: You know, like a loose leaf book about that thick. But anyway, just educate the operators to how the instrumentation did work. Weisskopf: Because again instrumentation was the whole thing. It’s like flying an airplane blind. I mean they had to rely on instruments for virtually everything. Sevier: Yeah, because there was no other way. Yeah, right. Weisskopf: Because the only visible part of it was when the crane operator lifted out a bucket, put it in the dissolver… Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: … after that everything else was via instruments. Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: And in the operating gallery with all those gage ports down there, how many people would be standing operating them? How many operators would be in there? Sevier: I don’t know, maybe one or two a panel, I don’t know. Weisskopf: Oh, at a panel? Sevier: Or a section. Weisskopf: So there would be quite a few people all the way down at least? Sevier: Yeah, there may be, depending on the process of course. We’re talking about T plant? Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: Okay. We might have one or two panels, sections, then again depending on where they were in the process too I guess. Weisskopf: Okay. Did you ever do any instrumentation for the stack gases going out? Any of the monitoring? Sevier: Yeah. I was, was it 291 building? Weisskopf: Right, I think so. Sevier: Yeah. Yeah we had instruments in that building, stack. Weisskopf: And that was, was that a room where you had to suit up and spend a little time? Sevier: No, oh yes you did, to get in there? I think you did, yeah. Right. Going way back. Weisskopf: And they had filters in at that point right? By the time you got there… Sevier: Yeah, prior to my coming here was when they had a problem with the…and then they put in sand filters. But I guess they started, I’m not sure but I think they operated before without sand filters. Weisskopf: Right. I think when they started it up it had no filters at all. Sevier: Right. And then just before I got here they put in the sand filters. Weisskopf: And then later on they went to the silver, I forget what it was called. Sevier: Silver nitrate? Weisskopf: Yeah, was a step up. Sevier: Yeah, that was in the building wasn’t it? Yeah. Weisskopf: Did they have instruments in the filter? Sevier: In the filter? Weisskopf: Yeah, down in the sand? Sevier: I don’t think so. I think what they do is measure differential across the various parts. Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: Yeah. Get the drop across the filters. Weisskopf: Coming in and going out? Sevier: Um-hum. Weisskopf: Okay. I haven’t read yet but what did they do after a period time of using that sand? Would they start a new one or? Sevier: I don’t think so. Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: They were big. I don’t think they did anything about it. Weisskopf: And a lot of the stuff that went through it was fairly short-lived right? The iodine. Sevier: Iodine…yeah… Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: …short half-life. Weisskopf: Did you do instrumentation…what am I thinking of? The rough instrumentation that would just be checking motors and heat on bearings and things like that? Was that part of the instrumentation? Sevier: Sometimes. We…usually…most that went to the electricians. Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: But we might measure bearings and fan bearings and stuff like that. We had thermocouples on the fans…I remember on the bearings. Weisskopf: Oh, to see if they were getting hot or not. Sevier: Mm-hmm. Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: Maybe I had, I don’t know if they had an inner lock to shut ‘em down, I don’t remember now, on the old ones. Weisskopf: Did you ever get called up in the middle of the night to come out? Sevier: No. Weisskopf: Oh, okay. Sevier: And that, again, was because they had shift coverage. I worked shift, but that was during the startup of REDOX. Weisskopf: Okay. Sevier: I didn’t like it. Weisskopf: What did you mean working shift, versus what? What do you call it otherwise? Sevier: Working days. Weisskopf: Oh, shift meaning off or normal hours. Sevier: Yeah right. And again, because it was six to eight weeks…and then let’s see how did…I forget exactly how they work but anyway you work more than a week before you had time off. They had what they call long change and people liked that. I think you had about five days off and people take off on trips. Weisskopf: Mm-hmm. Sevier: And like everybody here they came from some other place at that time. We’re not born here. Weisskopf: Nobody was born here, yeah. Sevier: So they often liked it so they could go home or whatever they were going to do. Weisskopf: Yeah. What was the most troublesome instrument to work on do you think? The one that was either the hardest to work on or needed your attention the most. Sevier: I don’t know. Weisskopf: Yeah? Nothing jumps out? Sevier: Might be Ledoux Bells and powerhouse, steam flow meters and that, cause they had mercury in ‘em. Weisskopf: Mm-hmm. Sevier: And you had piping on them where you had to hook your instruments to them. Weisskopf: The mercury is in the pump or in the meter? Sevier: Mercury was a seal in the meter between the two pressures and the Ladoux Bell had a pravulet inside of it which gave you a linear flow instead of a square root output. Weisskopf: Hmm. Sevier: Because you know flow is related to square root, so in a way it extracts square root for you… Weisskopf: Yeah. Sevier: …gives you linear. Weisskopf: Interesting. Sevier: But they were sitting in…because of the big difference in pressure they were in mercury for a seal. Weisskopf: Why would, hmmm. Sevier: The ring balances were…it was actually a ring that had mercury in it, but it moved, rotated on pivots. Weisskopf: Huh. And you said you liked to dabble with trinkets, were you a clock maker or a radio builder at home? Sevier: No. Well I built radios yeah. Weisskopf: Yeah? Yeah, like from scratch? Or from Heathkit or? Sevier: Yeah, Heath kit and junk like that. Weisskopf: Uh-huh. Are they still around by the way? Sevier: I don’t know. The last thing I bought from them was an electric filter for the furnace…. Weisskopf: Hmmm… Sevier: …but that was quite awhile ago. Weisskopf: One thing I bought from them was in 1974 probably, was a windshield wiper variable speed edition. Sevier: Yeah? Weisskopf: I was way ahead of my time. That was the only thing I ever built from them. I think one problem today is they probably cost more, so much more than just buying it off the shelf. Sevier: Yeah, because of foreign inputs these things are real cheap. Weisskopf: Yeah, yeah. I can just see…. Sevier: I have that little digital camera there real cheap… Weisskopf: Mm-hmm, yeah…yeah. Sevier: …and all kinds of things like that. Weisskopf: Let me turn this off for a minute. [End of Interview] Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 51 minutes, 4 seconds. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Warren Sevier Description An account of the resource An oral history interview with Warren Sevier conducted by the B Reactor Museum Association. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F313acd72b10348c84948082cc70ff331.jpg acc60b25e9fb5409e7c3d7f5f3e83ce5 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Z Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9a28d6a7a612fd66e0c1d3c6ddb1a428.jpg a3d7ef0931c9c5a572caf394ae5be870 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Y Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F63d8c64b35155add311dc59af0923ca6.jpg 8b48f03787aa2314e8c453ecf4fb5bea https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fda6d188288512235774ad939ab5bf070.jpg 8d2116ceff9758753ec933561269ce56 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House V Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fe5d8898e136df2b60d3ef004a10121c5.jpg b363084c0fede0392e350c407e6a77f2 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd3a534941314e88cea1dd23f6dfde25b.jpg 305e02289cd6b36648d39d9ebe3656f1 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F74c4d55409d8d1a3cd7522778a0f2c97.jpg 12db3fa173f3c0558bd7de098bdc44df Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House U Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fedd5a925d05c9f4b37bca1c64a4f5c26.jpg 00fbb45657aa8e86fd1c93315dfe302d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House T Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ff111f1997d0f278e9ade0bc5df710dfb.jpg 00542360a06986aa906223750ed558d9 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F46b894bccf815b223fc7d7106b09c0f2.jpg 3ae9696e297b84f13ebe3acf7c1798fc https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd3ab76f3694115cc79c630cba2eefca6.jpg e2eb505f671491f85159eb2c4fde0eff Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House S Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F14fb303a07ede214b3df628d578f9fe5.jpg 1fe8209851c55bd4e04566e7e91e57f1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House R Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F3456ac141676b19681e8973d4860bb6f.jpg 6b46e1fac54adedcf5009e407001de6b https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F967a5b63866ab00e52b32cbfedd3fbbb.jpg cd59fa64a359257ac6a111d7bf19d14b Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Q Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9e03411958f6652bdee80050eaad5b7d.jpg b7ee1fe2ed62aea265518939cbc638ce Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Prefab 9 Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fc54a66dfaa6d80bfa7886253d185161a.jpg ede49e59749c18e86c3737baace67dae Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Prefab 8 Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F8c0560388d914cf1740234cf568660bb.jpg d3651c23e7ff0e8b154baa1c5a8f70ef Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Prefab 7 Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F8fd1707a9c2a659cb9f071b732d79715.jpg ae3da0a6b2cf1983544a3c74d412017e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Prefab 6 Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F2adc0cb050406df7c981b81ad974d457.jpg d1de18630263eda0cf48f3aa575baf55 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Prefab 5 Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fa1011fac7f6d9329071a14be89e8d533.jpg ba0f95ba02bc7a70ddc73fe042638c49 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Prefab 4 Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ff7f89b410f4a1293c9bcd6c0d317acc4.jpg 3b0def34808a12e684c9510bdc1140b7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Prefab 3 Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9e8f3166978417bd2df1a5e7c63b1a59.jpg 95d67a1f90b3ec4487f32f26b6b634c5 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Prefab 2 Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9b09755b5a5490cc334f6ead2df4cf81.jpg bd25b64f82f12c57e26b7ae2f1051d9c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Prefab 1 Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7b9e5fac1f321a988a91d4907f00ccf0.jpg 39923847ae4d5e1ed985a6a577da3c82 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4ba30c82b8464bdf9a8e151f6159faea.jpg 07b4ebe865678689bccbca356a824041 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House M Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fc0f672ef2c7778ae13e85354f5459294.jpg 35e7521125a95847c397ee1637269a8b https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ff82da573ebb68fd8352cc6599729cf73.jpg be5643b7df6cb70403e7b90b384e487c https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fcad0becbd1303b21960a3d5b2c6c9ab0.jpg 01b18b91bbf8e76d53ccc895da41664b Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House L Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F45a1b92cb2f03803c23857080c03fac6.jpg c85250682e6bee9f785870cb0dc88294 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House K Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ff3e3ef5555f9a26a58227e6ba5f00566.jpg 6c172c01c9ef86892a0c90c38e9c5e38 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House K Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fcdb03b2a5b177d6c3ec47200f8414150.jpg 6c172c01c9ef86892a0c90c38e9c5e38 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House H Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4f5ad9f5363d61cf896d9f686838e2ee.jpg aa2c1e0c17e27a77893cc478686a601c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House G Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd9ad595a0f9823e02b3793a3a2694164.jpg b30e77f3b77c6f8091cee6bf6ad98701 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House F Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fc30e4e274692a9bef9dc34bb9b10cd9c.jpg 775dfaec64802c0f5d07922698a51c14 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House E Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F585159eb657ebafc9cdc45bf06795f72.jpg b0b99a79c4f04fb91f1a35dd3abedd8d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House D Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fa9488fee06d33efb2d020f4d8dc78b07.jpg 538d1debc95cd087a7edc71d929b385c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House C Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F76d1823730b8eb05e369a72396adc37d.jpg a338b362eaf44913fa162766678e36f2 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House B Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fdff3e2fb341109e301c6b2caba738e4e.jpg cacf994b04b8dea44c56313df3f501a2 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7b904dacc54fb60a14920402f83fea82.jpg ac9d39121926aabd9db676944f5da496 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Apartments Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd10444a8cbdc4dce8d31f35212d8aa65.jpg 212ef3ade25a8fe8b476e60196655ef4 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House Floor Plans Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alphabet House A Subject The topic of the resource Floor plans, Construction, Prefabricated houses, Buildings, Houses, History Description An account of the resource Alphabet house floor plans that were available to build, in the Richland Village. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For permission to publish please contact Washington State University Tri-Cities' Hanford History Project (509) 372-7447 Type The nature or genre of the resource Floor plans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dianne Brownlee https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F32c1c758a699efa176ecace89b93c2ca.pdf 4128e58bca27736f9425f7fcde422f81 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richland Weekly Bulletin Subject The topic of the resource Newspapers, Clippings, Swimming, Swimming pools, Refrigerators, Recreation, Religious services, Telegraph, Theaters, History, Religious communities, Hospitals, Picnics, Safety, Summer, Canning & preserving, Baseball, Coal, Bicycles & tricycles, Cleaning, Engineers, Dogs, Tennis, Geology, Grocery stores, Clinics, Drugstores, Trees, Transportation, Agriculture, Farming, Schools, Churches, Nuclear power, Farm produce, Softball, Banks, Fires, Gardens, Holidays Description An account of the resource Scanned images of the Richland Weekly Bulletin; a newspaper distributed throughout the Richland village, during World War II. (Volume 1) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1944/01/28-1944/08/11 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspaper Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1A_001-RG3D_1A_025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Safety in Richland Subject The topic of the resource Newspaper, Clippings, Transportation, Safety, History Description An account of the resource Scanned images of the Richland Weekly Bulletin; a newspaper distributed throughout the Richland village, during World War II. (Volume 1) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource ca. 1944 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspaper Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1A_025 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4674c860e2250c760dbefe29d1e06b73.pdf df3d1d73f36a739c1d787a73d86e6b54 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richland Weekly Bulletin Subject The topic of the resource Newspapers, Clippings, Swimming, Swimming pools, Refrigerators, Recreation, Religious services, Telegraph, Theaters, History, Religious communities, Hospitals, Picnics, Safety, Summer, Canning & preserving, Baseball, Coal, Bicycles & tricycles, Cleaning, Engineers, Dogs, Tennis, Geology, Grocery stores, Clinics, Drugstores, Trees, Transportation, Agriculture, Farming, Schools, Churches, Nuclear power, Farm produce, Softball, Banks, Fires, Gardens, Holidays Description An account of the resource Scanned images of the Richland Weekly Bulletin; a newspaper distributed throughout the Richland village, during World War II. (Volume 1) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1944/01/28-1944/08/11 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspaper Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1A_001-RG3D_1A_025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Richland Housing Department Bulletin #8 Subject The topic of the resource Newspapers, Clippings, Electricity, History, Horses, Safety Description An account of the resource Scanned images from the Richland Weekly Bulletin; a newspaper distributed throughout the Richland village, during World War II. (Volume 1) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1944/01/28 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspaper Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1A_024 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd1085809943f6166d4c7e3875a4fcd9c.pdf 0041b217cd47653101ba18f52b4da0a6 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richland Weekly Bulletin Subject The topic of the resource Newspapers, Clippings, Swimming, Swimming pools, Refrigerators, Recreation, Religious services, Telegraph, Theaters, History, Religious communities, Hospitals, Picnics, Safety, Summer, Canning & preserving, Baseball, Coal, Bicycles & tricycles, Cleaning, Engineers, Dogs, Tennis, Geology, Grocery stores, Clinics, Drugstores, Trees, Transportation, Agriculture, Farming, Schools, Churches, Nuclear power, Farm produce, Softball, Banks, Fires, Gardens, Holidays Description An account of the resource Scanned images of the Richland Weekly Bulletin; a newspaper distributed throughout the Richland village, during World War II. (Volume 1) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1944/01/28-1944/08/11 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspaper Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1A_001-RG3D_1A_025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Richland Housing Department Bulletin #9 Subject The topic of the resource Newspaper, Clippings, Electricity, Safety, History, Cooperation Description An account of the resource Scanned images from the Richland Weekly Bulletin; a newspaper distributed throughout the Richland village, during World War II. (Volume 1) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1944/02/05 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspaper Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1A_023 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fbdcbccd83f432516b7060f1d652539f5.pdf a174a61a307de9de1d28add58659ddf9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richland Weekly Bulletin Subject The topic of the resource Newspapers, Clippings, Swimming, Swimming pools, Refrigerators, Recreation, Religious services, Telegraph, Theaters, History, Religious communities, Hospitals, Picnics, Safety, Summer, Canning & preserving, Baseball, Coal, Bicycles & tricycles, Cleaning, Engineers, Dogs, Tennis, Geology, Grocery stores, Clinics, Drugstores, Trees, Transportation, Agriculture, Farming, Schools, Churches, Nuclear power, Farm produce, Softball, Banks, Fires, Gardens, Holidays Description An account of the resource Scanned images of the Richland Weekly Bulletin; a newspaper distributed throughout the Richland village, during World War II. (Volume 1) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1944/01/28-1944/08/11 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspaper Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1A_001-RG3D_1A_025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Richland Housing Department Bulletin #12 Subject The topic of the resource Newspapers, Clippings, Medical education, Clinics, Hospitals, History, Safety, Theaters Description An account of the resource Scanned images from the Richland Weekly Bulletin; a newspaper distributed throughout the Richland village, during World War II. (Volume 1) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1944/02/25 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspaper Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1A_022 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7f64a14691555565fb0cefc950e2f729.pdf faebe1fdfc40b73f398c31554b0d48e6 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F5039d0030c971b12c1cb1f49018a5a9d.pdf 75848cc29f692359f2cdd9b7c7b002f8 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richland Weekly Bulletin Subject The topic of the resource Newspapers, Clippings, Swimming, Swimming pools, Refrigerators, Recreation, Religious services, Telegraph, Theaters, History, Religious communities, Hospitals, Picnics, Safety, Summer, Canning & preserving, Baseball, Coal, Bicycles & tricycles, Cleaning, Engineers, Dogs, Tennis, Geology, Grocery stores, Clinics, Drugstores, Trees, Transportation, Agriculture, Farming, Schools, Churches, Nuclear power, Farm produce, Softball, Banks, Fires, Gardens, Holidays Description An account of the resource Scanned images of the Richland Weekly Bulletin; a newspaper distributed throughout the Richland village, during World War II. (Volume 1) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1944/01/28-1944/08/11 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspaper Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1A_001-RG3D_1A_025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Victory Gardens Subject The topic of the resource Newspapers, Clippings, Gardens, Agriculture, Farming, Farm produce, Trees Description An account of the resource Scanned images of the Richland Weekly Bulletin; a newspaper distributed throughout the Richland village, during World War II. (Volume 1) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1944/03/01 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspaper Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1A_021a, RG3D_1A_021b https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F2364ba09551c9cb0b216af5608cd0c1c.pdf 5675b9fe27070a1eabf714f892c6bfed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richland Weekly Bulletin Subject The topic of the resource Newspapers, Clippings, Swimming, Swimming pools, Refrigerators, Recreation, Religious services, Telegraph, Theaters, History, Religious communities, Hospitals, Picnics, Safety, Summer, Canning & preserving, Baseball, Coal, Bicycles & tricycles, Cleaning, Engineers, Dogs, Tennis, Geology, Grocery stores, Clinics, Drugstores, Trees, Transportation, Agriculture, Farming, Schools, Churches, Nuclear power, Farm produce, Softball, Banks, Fires, Gardens, Holidays Description An account of the resource Scanned images of the Richland Weekly Bulletin; a newspaper distributed throughout the Richland village, during World War II. (Volume 1) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1944/01/28-1944/08/11 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspaper Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1A_001-RG3D_1A_025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Laundry Service Subject The topic of the resource Newspapers, Clippings, Laundry, History, Cleaning Description An account of the resource Scanned images from the Richland Weekly Bulletin; a newspaper distributed throughout the Richland village, during World War II. (Volume 1) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Engineer Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project, Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource ca. 1944 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Type The nature or genre of the resource Newspaper Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG3D_1A_020