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Reviewed by:
  • Hanford Site Historic District: History of the Plutonium Production Facilities, 1943–1990, and: Hanford: A Conversation about Nuclear Waste and Cleanup
  • Robert S. Norris
Hanford Site Historic District: History of the Plutonium Production Facilities, 1943–1990. Columbus, OH: Battelle Press, 2003. 624 pp. $47.50.
Roy E. Gephart , Hanford: A Conversation about Nuclear Waste and Cleanup. Columbus, OH: Battelle Press, 2003. 388 pp. $34.95.

The two books under review are unusual in several ways. Weighing in at almost six pounds, they are not for the faint of heart, and they deal with a subject that will not put them on the bestseller lists. Nevertheless they deserve our attention, for they help document a central activity of the Cold War arms race—plutonium production—and the troubling legacy it has left. The nine reactors at Hanford, Washington, produced 55 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium, sixty percent of the U.S. total. This plutonium went into tens of thousands of nuclear weapons of every conceivable variety from the first bomb tested at Trinity in July 1945, to the one that was dropped on Nagasaki three weeks later, to the modern MX and Trident missiles of recent years. The books graphically demonstrate that producing plutonium is a messy business. Approximately 245 million gallons of high-level waste was generated after 1945, and some 55 million gallons remains in Hanford's 177 storage tanks. Although a few of the newer tanks are less than twenty years old, some date to the Manhattan Project, and sixty-seven of the older ones are known or suspected to have leaked. Thus the question of what to do with this high-level waste (an amount that would cover a football field to a depth of 150 feet) is a controversial one with no easy solutions.

Hanford Site Historic District covers all aspects of plutonium production, not just the waste that resulted. The book provides informative chapters on how the reactors and the massive chemical separation plants were constructed and how the reactor fuel was manufactured, and it then follows in great detail the operating histories of the reactors and reprocessing plants. Other chapters are devoted to site security, military operations, worker health and safety, and waste management. Each chapter traces its topic chronologically from the Manhattan Project to the mid-1990s and concludes with suggested areas for further research.

The project to document Hanford's plutonium production was a collaborative effort by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the Washington State Historic Preservation Agency, and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. It took five years and involved eleven authors. The impressive list of references and bibliography is fifty pages long and cites an extensive array of official and contractor documents. The handsome, oversize book has a large number of maps, photographs, graphics, and tables that help tell the story. The Hanford authors have done a superlative job, providing a wealth of information that will be used by historians, physicists, chemists, engineers, and environmental policy analysts as well as the interested public. Earlier drafts were put on the Hanford website with opportunities for experts and the public to comment and criticize. The final version is available for download at: (http://www.hanford.gov/doe/history/docs/rl-97–1047/index.pdf). It would be commendable [End Page 164] if Oak Ridge were to undertake a similar effort to document, in a like manner, its equally important history of uranium enrichment.

Roy Gephart's Hanford: A Conversation about Nuclear Waste and Cleanup is quite a different book because it is one man's observations about what to do with Hanford's terrible legacy. Gephart calls the cleanup of Hanford's nuclear waste perhaps the largest environmental restoration project ever undertaken, and he is aware of the highly charged emotions that surround discussions about it. Can Hanford be cleaned up? Given the toxicity of the accumulated waste, Gephart cautions that the word cleanup should be qualified and that "stabilize" and "contain" are conceptually more accurate. A great deal of uncertainty exists about how much it will cost and how long it will take. A decade has passed since the effort began, and billions of dollars have...

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