(Note: this post is an excerpt from my book, Monuments: One Atheist’s Tour of Time, Culture, and Meaning.)The morning after I viewed Hanford’s B-Reactor, the breeder reactor which produced the plutonium for the first generation of atomic bombs, I checked out the Hanford Reach Interpretive Center. Also called The Reach, that was a brand new […]

(Note: this post is an excerpt from my book, Monuments: One Atheist’s Tour of Time, Culture, and Meaning.) Plutonium is an artificial metal first synthesized in 1940. It’s easily oxidized, silvery gray, a bit like lead but heavier and much harder. A golf-ball size piece of plutonium weighs more than two pounds. If you try […]

(Note: this post is an excerpt from my book, Monuments: One Atheist’s Tour through Time, Culture, and Meaning.) As I was walking back to my car after visiting the Experimental Breeder Reactor-1 Museum, my eyes lit on two immense structures towering over one end of the parking lot. Referring back to my construction worker days, […]

(This is another excerpt from my book, Monuments: One Atheist’s Intimate Religious Reflection.) I was driving across southern Idaho’s Snake River Plain, which is the bleak bosom of American Nuclear Research. More than 50 experimental nuclear facilities have been built there over the last two generations. My destination this day was the EBR-1 National Historic […]