Located adjacent to the B-Plant (which is also known as the 221-B Canyon Building) is the 224-B Facility. The building is in the northwest part of the 200-East Area of Hanford, and was used as part of the B-Plant’s process to extract plutonium from uranium fuel rods which had been irradiated in one of Hanford’s nuclear reactors.
Processing facilities like the B-Plant would take these irradiated fuel rods and put them through a series of chemical “baths”. The chemicals would dissolve away the fuel rods, turning the metal into a liquid form called “slurry”. Included in the slurry was the trace amount of plutonium that had been produced in the fuel rod during the nuclear chain reaction.
![224-B](images.cfm/224-B_large.jpg)
The main function of the 224-B Facility was to purify and concentrate the plutonium recovered from that slurry after it came out of the B-Plant. Plutonium concentration operations were performed in conjunction with B-Plant separation activities from 1945 until 1952. After that, the methods used in the B-Plant to dissolve away the fuel rods were replaced by more efficient processes and 224-B was deactivated.
The facility was permanently deactivated during 1985-1986 and it has been unoccupied in a surveillance and maintenance mode since 1993. Today, the only activity at the 224-B Facility is routine surveillance and maintenance which is done to confine any hazardous materials within the building until the structure can be safely decontaminated and demolished.