Fascinating Look into Washington State’s Role in World War II

What Was The Hanford Nuclear Site's #1 Contribution To World War II?

Oppenheimer, the movie is getting set to open next week and it has people interested again in the atomic bomb and its devastating usage during World War II.

How Did Washington State Contribute To World War II Back In The 1940s?

I've always been fascinated by World War II even though I wasn't born at the time but as a history buff, it's fascinating especially if you live in Washington State.

I've been fortunate to take the Hanford Nuclear site tour and I've been inside the legendary Reactor B --- it's quite an amazing feat of engineering.

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I thought I'd deep dive a bit in this article. We know that the Hanford Nuclear site in Richland Washington played a part in the Manhattan Project but what exactly did the plant provide to the Allies during World War II?

Some might think the actual atom bomb was built and assembled on-site at Hanford and then shipped off. That wasn't the case and here is the #1 contribution that the Hanford Nuclear site made during World War II:

The primary mission of the Hanford Site during World War II was to produce plutonium-239 for the "Fat Man" atomic bomb, which was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945. The production of plutonium required large-scale nuclear reactors to create the necessary conditions for fission, which would produce the desired material.

Once the plutonium was produced, it was chemically separated from the other reactor byproducts through various extraction and purification processes. The purified plutonium was then sent to the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, where it was used in the assembly of nuclear weapons.

So the bombs were never assembled in Washington State but "Fat Man's" plutonium was produced at the Hanford Nuclear site.

If you do go see Oppenheimer, I wonder if Washington State will get an honorable mention as being one important contributor to the building of the first nuclear weapons.