Last updated: January 17, 2023
Place
B Reactor Overlook
NPS/BURGHART
Quick Facts
Location:
Mattawa, WA
MANAGED BY:
Amenities
2 listed
Historical/Interpretive Information/Exhibits, Scenic View/Photo Spot
The view from this overlook provides a sense of how the Manhattan Project transformed this region by displacing tribes and farmers with the construction of massive plutonium production facilities such as the B Reactor and T Plant on former cropland. Closer you will find Bruggemann’s Ranch, part of a large farm displaced by the Manhattan Project.
Ranchers Paul and Mary Bruggemann were some of White Bluffs’s most successful farmers before the Manhattan Project. Their 550 acre (222 hectare) agricultural operation employed numerous people who harvested and packed a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. Water pumped from the Columbia River allowed them to grow crops in this arid environment.
Further away you can see the Manhattan Project facilities built shortly after the Bruggemanns’ removal. The B Reactor is the world’s first full-scale nuclear reactor. Uranium fuel slugs were irradiated in one of Hanford’s nuclear reactors. Irradiated uranium fuel slugs were transported via railcar to the T Plant to chemically separate the plutonium from the uranium and other radioactive byproducts.
Hanford’s plutonium powered the first human-made nuclear explosion at the Trinity Site and the Fat Man atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945.
Continue Your Journey
The Department of Energy offers tours of the B Reactor and the Pre-War Historic Sites Tour that visit sites such as the Bruggemann Ranch, the White Bluffs Bank, Hanford High School, and the Allard Pumphouse where local people lived, worked, and came together as a tight-knit community prior to the arrival of the Manhattan Project.
If you are unable to attend one of these tours you, can see the former White Bluffs community from the White Bluffs Overlook, and the Hanford High School Overlook from the White Bluffs trail on the Hanford Reach National Monument.