B Reactor History Room: End of WWII

The End of World War II exhibit panel in the History Room.

See exhibit panel for specific image credits.

Main Text
Text at the top right reads: “The bomb dropped on Nagasaki destroyed the innermost portion of the city and was more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.”

Text at the bottom continues: “End of WWII - The Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, produced the highly enriched uranium used in the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. Hanford’s facilities produced the plutonium used in the first successful test of a nuclear device at Trinity Site and also in the Fat Man plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. Although these efforts contributed to the end of World War II, the two atomic weapons dropped on Japan killed more than 200,000 people by the end of 1945.”

Exhibit Panel Description
The poster shows an August 1945 black-and-white photograph of religious statues in an otherwise undistinguishable pile of rubble. A decimated and smoldering landscape behind stretches for miles to a mountain rising in the distance.

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