The Hanford Engineer Works (HEW) was a nuclear production complex in Benton County in the US state of Washington, established in early 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II. Plutonium manufactured at the HEW was used in the atomic bomb detonated in the Trinity test on 16 July 1945, and the Fat Man bomb used in the bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. DuPont was the prime contractor for its design, construction and operation. The land acquisition was one of the largest in US history. The construction workforce reached a peak of nearly 45,000 in June 1944. B Reactor, the world's first full-scale plutonium production nuclear reactor, went critical in September 1944, followed by D and F Reactors in December 1944 and February 1945, respectively. The HEW suffered an outage on 10 March 1945 due to a Japanese balloon bomb. The total cost of the HEW up to December 1946 was more than $348 million (equivalent to $4.1 billion in 2023).
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Engineer_Works> _______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries: 1782: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail premiered in Vienna, after which Emperor Joseph II anecdotally remarked that it had "too many notes". <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Entf%C3%BChrung_aus_dem_Serail> 1950: Korean War: A Korean People's Army unit massacred 31 prisoners of war of the U.S. Army on a mountain near the village of Tuman. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaplain%E2%80%93Medic_massacre> 1994: Fragments of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 began colliding with the planet Jupiter (impact site pictured), with the first impact causing a fireball that reached a peak temperature of 24,000 kelvin. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker%E2%80%93Levy_9> 2004: Millennium Park, a public park in Chicago, Illinois, and one of the world's largest rooftop gardens, opened to the public. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Park> _____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day: Zeligesque: Of a person: appearing at a surprisingly wide variety of historic events and/or with a diverse group of historic figures. <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Zeligesque> ___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day: We are to be needed, but I'm not sure for what. --Sheri S. Tepper <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sheri_S._Tepper> _______________________________________________ Wikipedia Daily Article mailing list. To unsubscribe write to: [email protected] Questions or comments? Contact [email protected]
