The Manhattan Project is one of the most transformative events of the 20th century. It ushered in the nuclear age with the development of the world’s first atomic bombs. The building of atomic weapons began in 1942 in three secret communities across the nation: Hanford, WA, Los Alamos, NM, and Oak Ridge, TN.
The Hanford Engineer Works produced plutonium at a roughly 600 square mile (1554 sq km) site along the Columbia River in Washington state. The Hanford Site was selected because of an abundant supply of cold Columbia River water needed to cool nuclear reactors, ample available hydroelectric power, mild climate, excellent transportation facilities, and distance from major population centers.
Workers at the Hanford Site constructed and operated the world’s first nuclear production reactors that produced the plutonium used in the Trinity Test and in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945.
We wrote Audio Description narratives for 16 rooms of the B reactor in Hanford, WA, helping to make the story of our nation’s first foray into atomic weapons production accessible to people who are blind or have low vision.
Contact us to explore Museum Audio Description for your next project.
Here are some samples of our narratives on this project:
B-Reactor Front Face
The B Reactor was the first full-scale nuclear production reactor in the world. Two thousand four precisely aligned rows and columns of aluminum tubes appear as a massive, metallic, square grid wall. Attached to the end of each tube is a thin, curling aluminum tube nozzle assembly that looks like a pigtail, with a numbered tag. The tubes, housed inside a lattice of graphite blocks, run nearly 40 feet (12 meters) to the rear face of the reactor, above the Fuel Storage Basin.
Control Room
A rolling, wooden chair sits in front of the desk, surrounded on three sides by racks of instruments, dials, displays, switches, and indicators. The wall above the desk is similarly filled with a series of nine circular dials indicating the position of the regulating rods. Just below the dials, two dark rectangles indicated the power level. To the left of these dials, a panel of lights, arranged in rows and columns, signaled conditions that would require operator intervention or automatically shut down the reactor.
Valve Pit
A metal grate walkway with metal railings runs around the periphery of this large, roughly 40 foot (12 meter) square concrete room. Several short stairways lead down to a second lower level maze of metal grates, suspended over a massive network of pipes and valves that completely fill the bottom of the 20 foot (six meter) deep pit. Other stairways lead down to the bottom of the pit itself. Large, 18 inch (45 centimeter) circular, black metal valve handles perforate or run alongside the metal grating. They appear either singly or in lines of three or four together, both vertical and horizontal, depending on the location and orientation of the pipes, alongside banks of water pressure dials.
Contact us to explore Museum Audio Description for your next project.