Hundreds gather at Hanfords B Reactor to mark creation of Manhattan Project

Scientists began work on the Manhattan Project in 1939 after German scientists developed nuclear fission – both as a means to end World War II and beat the Nazis in producing an atomic weapon.

The park comes into existence Tuesday at a Washington, D.C., ceremony as U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz put their names to a “Memorandum of Agreement”.

Jewell and Moniz say the park will not glorify war or nuclear weapons.

Over the past year, NPS and officials from the Department of Energy have traveled to the three Manhattan Project locations to consult with local elected officials, community members, and area tribes on management of the new park. But he had one question: “Just where in Tennessee will the project be located?” The new park includes Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hanford, Washington.

The B Reactor, the first full-scale nuclear reactor, is best known for producing plutonium that was used in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.

“It’s important for students and educators to be able to come here and to be able to see this place where fundamentally, human history was changed”, said Chip Jenkins, the regional director for the National Parks Service.

The National Park Service has set up temporary headquarters for the Oak Ridge location in the American Museum of Science and Energy, 300 S. Tulane Avenue. The park also will tell the story of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who were recruited to work in secret – often far away from home – on a project they were told was vital to the war effort, but was never clearly defined. “It was a powerful experience for her”, Jewell said. Alexander said the Manhattan Project paved the way for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Oak Ridge Corridor, which now attracts “good-paying jobs to the area”. “Your story needs to be told as well”, she said, addressing Japanese citizens in the audience.

For him it sends a story of a nuclear-free world, which he believed the United States and Japan shared.

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