B Reactor Health Physics Exhibit: Laundry Day

The Laundry Day panel in the Health Physics Exhibit.

See exhibit panel for specific image credits.

Main Text
Text at the top right reads: “Hanford laundry workers washed thousands of pieces of clothing a day.”

Text at the top left continues: “Workers at Hanford produced mountains of laundry daily including radiologically contaminated clothing. How do you clean mountains of contaminated clothing? In the beginning, there was no guide for doing so on such a scale. Health physicists came up with a solution for the laundry problem.

“Instead of sorting by color, launders sorted the clothing by contamination type and severity. They discarded any severely contaminated items as radioactive waste. The launders put the rest of the clothing in washing machines designated for cleaning contaminated clothing and ran them through multiple wash cycles with acetic acid to remove fission products. This system ensured that protective clothing used by the workers posed no health risk and was safe to reuse.”

Text reads: “Work in the laundry was grueling and paid little despite the risk of contamination. Five days per week, two shifts per day, a crew of laundry workers sorted, laundered, dried, bagged, and distributed approximately 3,000 pairs of coveralls.”

Exhibit Panel Description
Across the bottom, four black-and-white photographs document the mountains of laundry bags, large rolling baskets, employees in protective suits adding detergent, and workers seemingly buried in a room where everything was dried, sorted, and folded.

Visit This Exhibit Panel
In-person visitation of the B Reactor is only authorized on guided tours offered by the Department of Energy.