Plutonium 4000$ Per Gram

Hanford Washington. You might be saying “Where the hell is that?”.
Well it’s in the very bottom right of Washington, away from everything.
Why am I talking about Hanford you might ask, well that’s were plutonium was made for 60 000 nuclear weapons.

Currently we are studying WWI and WWII so this was a perfect field trip to enhance our learning.
Our class took a trip to Hanford but we took a few stops along the way. We drove through Washington, to Portland, Oregon, then went back up to Hanford, Washington. This trip was an awesome experience. All the Flight trips give you a great opportunity to learn hands on.

We saw not just one but two nuclear reactors, the Oregon and Washington environment, and the once great Hanford nuclear complex that is nothing more than museum now. This trip was an awesome experience to stand in the foot steps of history.

 

Hanford Washington was one of three major facilities of the Manhattan Project the other two being Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. Hanford was developed to create plutonium. To create plutonium you need a reactor and our class went to that first full scale reactor to produce plutonium. I went and stood at the B Reactor the forefront of science at the time. It was a place that changed the world forever, and I was standing there looking at Enrico Fermi’s and America’s Reactor that created the plutonium for one of the bombs that ended WWII.

I didn’t just go to the B-Reactor and soak in all this information and keep it for myself. My group members and I have created a video on 5 topics that tell the story of the B-Reactor. Our video is on the topics of the science behind the reactor. My section focuses on the physical reactor itself. I talk about the massive magnitude of the reactor and try to explain some the physics behind the reactor. My 4 other group members were Nash, Maria, Cash and Tom you can read about their learning experience on their blogs.

This project was an improvement on previous documentaries I have done, but there could of been a lot more improvements. For this video we were able to get a lot of good footage of the reactor in the limited time and restrictions. All said there was some flaws in the filming. A lot of clips were to specific. What we should of gotten is just more general images that we could use for any scene instead of trying to get the perfect shot. Our project would of been better off if we took big panning shots of the reactor, the cooling system, and the outside of the building. It’s really hard to plan out what exactly you are going to say before the trip, because you don’t know what you are going to see exactly. Some positives of our footage was the interviews of the experts. We got them to answer a lot of questions so we had a lot of footage to choose from. I tried to encourage the guides to say things I already knew the answers to so I could get some specific sound bites, but it didn’t work out as well as I would of liked it. Next time I will develop my question keeping this in mind. Without further a due my groups video.

(Video)

Both the project and field trip were chock-full of learning opportunities. I learned so much about the Manhattan Project, Government Power and the narrative of atomic science that changed life forever.