B-Reactor

The panel sets a newspaper beside its text, and the newspaper is the story. On the afternoon of August 6, 1945, after Truman named Hanford in announcing Hiroshima, Richland's weekly Villager put out a one-sheet extra headed IT'S ATOMIC BOMBS. For most of the people who had built and run the plant it was the first official word of what they had been making; until then they knew only that it mattered to the war. B Reactor stands about four miles downriver on this bank, inside the site, reached only on public tours.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• B Reactor — 3.8 mi
  The first full-scale nuclear reactor started in September 1944 and died within a day, and was saved by spare fuel channels DuPont's engineers had insisted on.
• Wanapum Heritage Center — 8.4 mi
  The River People's own center beside Priest Rapids, where Smohalla taught the Dreamer faith and a band with no treaty and no reservation still lives at its ancestral village.
• White Bluffs and the Hanford Reach — 14 mi
  Fifty-one miles of the Columbia still running free below pale cliffs, kept undammed by the same secrecy that emptied its farm towns in 1943.
• Ginkgo Petrified Forest — 25 mi
  A forest of stone logs that never grew together, found by a music teacher and his students in 1932 and left where it lay under cages the CCC built.