The story of the B Plant and seven other reactors (known as piles in the 1940s) that followed between 1943 and 1955 is one of constant learning, experimentation and change, Hanford historian Michelle Gerber wrote.

Tied in umbilical fashion to the Columbia River, those plants drew cooling water from the river and pumped it through a series of filtration, chemical treatment and storage buildings and tanks.

The water then was passed directly through the process tubes of the reactors, where aluminum-jacketed uranium fuel rods were undergoing neutron bombardment. From there, the water was pumped out the back of the piles, left for anywhere from 30 minutes to six hours in retention basins while the short-lived radioactive elements decayed, then returned to the Columbia River.

BReactor likely would not have been built without pressure from Albert Einstein. Eugene Wigner and fellow Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard went to Einstein in 1939 and convinced him of the need for the United States to develop an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany. Einstein's concerns eventually reached President Franklin Roosevelt and helped spark government interest and research. That work evolved into the Manhattan Project, named for the Manhattan Engineering Dis trict offices in New York that initially oversaw the continentwide effort.

It took 11 months of furious effort to build the B Reactor, into which workers welded 390 tons of steel, poured 17,400 cubic yards of concrete and stacked 121,000 concrete blocks and bricks to complete the monolith and its 35 auxiliary buildings.

Bill McCue of Richland, now 85, was part of that effort.

DuPont had pulled him from its Oklahoma Ordinance Works near Tulsa in July 1943 to be part of a core group that would run the reactors. "They told me to go pack up and go to Wilmington," McCue remembered.

At DuPont's headquarters in Wilmington, Del., the basic physics were explained to McCue and an elite few selected from DuPont plants around the nation. Despite his tech nical background, the possibility of creating an atomic bomb from plutonium was news to McCue.

"When I was in school, there wasn't anything in the books about nuclear physics," he said.

DuPont officials told McCue and others in the little group the entire project had a 60 percent chance of success. Later that evening, McCue discussed the situation with another DuPont engineer selected for the project.

"We asked ourselves, 'What business do we have in this kind of thing?' Basically, we came to the conclusion that the Germans were already in it and if the bomb was going to be made, then we had better get there first," McCue recalled recently.

He was sent to the Argonne Laboratory outside Chicago to train on the Argonne Pile, the experimental reactor that replaced Enrico Fermi's original. Fermi was the Italian physicist instrumental in the development of nuclear technology.

DuPont regularly dropped off bundles of blueprints and the Argonne scientists would pore over them, ordering changes during B Reactor's construction based on the latest research.

"We were designing and building at the same time," McCue said. "Even so, they couldn't keep up with construction.

"When the first batch of concrete was poured for the reactor building, they didn't even have blueprints," he said.

The fuel situation was more drastic; DuPont started operations before a process was developed for producing the uranium fuel slugs. None of the so-called "cans" encasing the uranium could withstand the intense radiation inside the reactor's core.

McCue estimated 6,000 fuel elements were produced before engineers finally came up with a successful process.

When B Reactor started up, barely enough fuel was available for the initial load.

Construction on the B Reactor began in August 1943. Eleven months later, during the late afternoon of Sept. 13, 1944, Fermi inserted the first uranium fuel slug into the face of the B Reactor to begin the plutonium-making cycle. On Sept. 26, the reactor was started.

By the summer of 1945, enough plutonium had been produced for three bombs, including the one used over Nagasaki.

McCue and his wife were on a fishing trip, staying at a little inn in British Columbia when he learned of the Nagasaki bombing.

A woman from Spokane had noticed McCue's hometown in the hotel's register. She passed a folded newspaper to the Richland couple.

McCue, who retired from Hanford in 1972, still can recite the headline verbatim: "USA drops atomic bomb on Japan," The banner was followed by a headline: "Richlanders celebrating their part in the effort."