Perhaps it's the phenomenon of forbidden fruit -- because the reactor rarely is open to visitors -- but for whatever reason, people have demonstrated a keen interest in touring the historic plant.
The all-too-few tours fill up all too quickly -- usually within minutes or even seconds after DOE starts accepting online registrations.
No doubt the difficulty of getting inside makes tours of B Reactor that much more attractive, but there's more going on.
People want to tour B Reactor because it's a key piece of history, and because it's fascinating.
To stand inside the reactor is to stand at the dawn of the atomic age. It's where plutonium was first produced in quantities suitable for nuclear weapons. The world never has been the same since.
With new museum-quality displays, visiting B Reactor is now a twofold experience, and it's all the more powerful as a tool for understanding the Mid-Columbia's heritage.
It's impressive to stand in front of the 75,000 graphite blocks, which hosue the 2,004 process tubes that held more than 64,000 uranium slugs when fully loaded -- all to produce a hockey puck-sized chunk of plutonium.
But the history really comes alive with the new video vignettes featuring inter- esting, personal stories -- sometimes from the mem- ories of key figures in the Manhattan Project.
The video segments, along with a new automated miniature featuring cutaways that reveal fascinating construction details, could be moved to another location. And they will have to be if the reactor ends up being cocooned.
But it's so much more enlightening to watch the video of the cooling pond while standing in the cooling system's valve room.
Then your guide can say, "See right there, underneath the slatted wooden floor?" And, yes, you do see.
The model of the reactor, painstakingly built by Lockheed Martin, allows you to view it from all sides -- complete with moving control rods -- but it's five feet tall. If you weren't standing in front of the real thing, which is almost six times as tall, you'd never really get the full story.
Congratulations are in order to the Atomic Heritage Foundation for spearheading these improvements.
If you've been to the B Reactor in the past, you'll want to go again just for the new displays. But how to get there?
If you're not one of the lucky few to get on an open tour, you'll just have to take our word for it -- for now.
But that's got to change.
The Hanford Reach Interpretive Center is trying to make bus tours available to the general public.
And there is a whole host of B Reactor advocates who would like to see National Park System take this piece of history under its wing as a National Historic Landmark.
DOE is not in the museum business. Fine, but let's find someone who is.
Whatever it takes, let's find a way to make the B Reactor Museum a reality.
