On October 3rd-6th, I went with our PLP 11 class, Ms.Willemse and Mr. Hughes and travelled down through Washington state and down through Oregon until we reached a little town called Portland, Oregon. From there we travelled to Hanford, Washington which is the famous site of the nuclear reactors used to help create the plutonium for the world’s first nuclear bomb. This is the story of how it all went down.

Here is a live map of where we went

My chosen book

On October 3rd at 6:45am our PLP 11 cohort gathered in the Seycove roundabout, ready to start our four day trip. We departed at 7, give or take 5 minutes and were off to Portland.  Before long we had to get off the bus and bring everything with us so the US boarder security guards could check our bags. Thankfully everyone was let into the country and we were all good to go. Next stop was Powell’s book store down in the heart of Portland.

Powell’s book store just happens to be the largest book store in the entire world. It was quite amazing how many books there are in that store. I was curious about the true number of books so I decided to ask at the information desk. The lady at the desk stated that the number of books is aways fluctuating but there are around 1 million books and around 32,000 categories in the store. While we were there we were given two assignments. One was to find a book and, as a group, act out the title to the best of our ability and the second one was to find a book with a cool title that was related to some of our hobbies or interests. For the individual challenge I decided to go with a sailing book because sailing / boating is one of my favourite activities to do in the summer and I thought that this book looked very interesting.  I think the North Sea would be a little rougher than our sheltered North Vancouver waters

PLP 11 cohort at Powell’s books

The next stop on the trip was a restaurant called Fire on the Mountain which is a wing place in Portland. They have a very cool theme as well as some very hot wings. I thought it was fun how they served every plate of wings on a frisbee instead of a plate.

Fire on the Mountain

The last stop of the night before the hotel was the Mcmenamins Kennedy school. This was an old elementary school that was turned into a hotel with an old fashioned movie theatre. To the delight of all of the males in PLP we watched  Mamma Mia 2. After that it was time to hit the hotel.

The next day is where the real hard work was about to begin. The first stop that day was the Reed College Nuclear reactor. This was actually quite an amazing experience. To see a real life nuclear reactor is quite interesting because while we were in the same room as the reactor they were powering it up to show us how it works but the reactor operator fed too much power to the reactor so he had to scram it. The interesting thing about this is that a scram occurs when there is too much power at once and they have to shut it down. This only happens ten times a year so we were actually even more lucky to see something like that.

PLP11 at Reed Collage

After lunch it was time to hit the road again to the Vista House at Crown Point which is essentially a lookout tower that looks out on the Columbia River. It was a very nice view and helped to put into perspective how big the Columbia River actually is. At this time we also stopped at Multnomah Falls. This a super awesome viewpoint and if you are around that area I definitely recommend it.

Vista House at Crown Point

Next was the Maryhill Museum of Art and we were back in Washington. This was a very interesting museum because it mixed new with the old. It has lots of famous paintings, sculptures and photos by artists from around the world and by indigenous people of North America.  It also had the world’s largest chess collection which was cool and I really enjoyed seeing how the museum was built partly in an old structure and partly in a new structure. While we were there we were told to find a sculptor or painting that we could make a video about. The video had to tell the name of the sculpture, what it is stating and what I thought about it.  Here it is:

https://youtu.be/57nWxffKJ0I

After that we moved on to a real life sized replica of Stonehenge that also sat on the same property as the museum. This was quite amazing and put into perspective how big the real rocks at Stonehenge actually are. The monument is a tribute to World War I soldiers and it is built on the former site of the town of Maryhill that burnt down. It is beside the Columbia Gorge. After Stonehenge we set off to the city of Hanford which was the main destination for this trip. After we arrived we had dinner and then it was time to hit the hay and get some sleep.

Here is a slideshow of a few more trip photos:

The next two days there were some great learning opportunities. On the third day it was time to get a full visit of the Hanford nuclear compound. As I mentioned earlier it is a decommissioned nuclear production complex.  This was the site of the B reactor which was the first full-scale plutonium reactor in the world and its plutonium was used in the first nuclear bomb. This was all part of a project called the Manhattan project. Visiting the site where the nuclear reactor sat was so helpful from my perspective because it opened my eyes to the size of the site. It is the size of Staten Island. Another takeaway from visiting the site is all the great people we got to talk too. If you want to read more about the project surrounding this trip where I go more in-depth about these amazing conversations and all of my learning please click HERE. So throughout that day we visited one of the old homes on the site as well as a bank and a pump house. Our tour guides were amazing and had so much knowledge.

Our tour guide Larry

After the tour of the Hanford site we were able to visit the Reach museum in Richland Washington which was a great place for us to do some reading and research on our project. The museum has two sections.  One focuses on the history of the Hanford Reach area.  The second displays the history of the Hanford site and the part it played in the Manhattan Project.

The dinner we had that night was not an ordinary dinner. As a team, we set out to give Red Lobster a run for their money. Red lobster is having their ‘all you can eat’ shrimp buffet. Our teacher Mr. Bryan Hughes had a game plan before we went into the restaurant and he gave us a pep talk to get our heads in the game. After about  2 1/2 hours of a hard fought mental battle the winner of the ‘all you can eat’ shrimp buffet was Ethan Dennis with 143 shrimp eaten.

The next day was the last day of our trip and probably the most interesting part of the trip for me. That morning we visited the Hanford site again but this time we went and got a tour of the inside of the B reactor. This was amazing to see what the reactor looked like in real life and see all of the different moving parts of it in person. The sheer magnitude of the reactors is amazing. After the uranium has run its course it was put into a pool that was huge. The reactor was cooled with water pumped from Hanford Reach of the Columbia River.  It was the length and width of a high school gym. The picture below shows this.   Underneath these floor boards is a pool filled with uranium rods that had just come out of the reactor. This was the place that they would sit and cool off before being disposed of.

Swimming pool where the uranium is

After we had finished at the B reactor it was time to make the trek home. This trip was super amazing as every PLP trip is but because I was personally very interested in the topic of this trip it made it even better. I would like to thank Ms.Willemse and Mr. Hughes for taking us on the trip as well as putting up with us for four full days.