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By Root 1672 0

Bonneville Dams—an almost incomprehensible amount at the time—was going to war production, most of it to building planes. One writer, Albert Williams, estimates that “more than half the planes in the American Air Forces were built with Coulee power alone.” After France capitulated, England was left hanging by a thread. It was rescued by a European sky suddenly full of American planes. The Columbia River was a traffic jam of barges carrying bauxite to the smelters in Longview, Washington. By the middle of the war, almost half of the aluminum production in the country was located in the Northwest—nearly all of it going toward the war effort. American planes were being downed almost as fast as they could be produced. German planes, however, were being downed faster than they could be produced. The Nazis had neither the raw materials nor the electricity to produce what they needed fast enough.

In late 1940, when Grand Coulee Dam was being completed, people had been saying that its power would go begging until the twenty-first century. Twenty-two months later, all of its available power was being used and the defense industries were screaming for more. As the first six generators were being installed, the next two units were still being manufactured and wouldn’t be ready for power production for some weeks. The war was at such a critical juncture that some weeks was too long. The Bureau collected every outsize piece of transportation equipment it could find, took the two generators waiting to be installed at Shasta Dam, and laboriously moved them to Grand Coulee instead. Shasta’s generators were thirty thousand kilowatts smaller than Grand Coulee’s, and the turbines revolved in the wrong direction: Grand Coulee’s went clockwise, Shasta’s went counterclockwise. The Bureau solved the problem by installing the Shasta units in the wrong pits and excavating tunnels to the proper ones next door, so the water could surge in from the right side. After the war, the engineers had to invent some mammoth excavation devices to shoehorn them out.

The Westinghouse generators built for Grand Coulee were rated for a maximum output of 105,000 kilowatts each, which was the capacity of a good-sized oil power plant that could run, say, Duluth. For the entire duration of the war, they ran at 125,000 kilowatts, twenty-four hours a day, without a glitch. “We would shut one down only when it was absolutely necessary,” says Phil Nalder. “You’d stand there in the powerhouse and feel that low vibration, that low but incredibly powerful vibration, and you’d feel certain that they were going to burn themselves up. And you’d think that maybe the course of history depended on these damned things. But they never overheated, so we just ran them and ran them. God knows, they were beautifully made. By the end of the war, at Grand Coulee, we were generating 2,138,000 kilowatts of electricity. We were the biggest single source of electricity in the world. The Germans and the Japanese didn’t have anything nearly that big. Imagine what it would have been like without Grand Coulee, Hoover, Shasta, and Bonneville. At the time, they were ranked first, second, third, and fourth in the world. We had so much power at Grand Coulee that we could afford to use two generators just to run Hanford.”

Although few of the people who lived there knew it at the time, the strange squat structures going up in 1943 at the Hanford Reservation, an ultrasecret military installation along the Columbia River near Richland, Washington, were intimately connected to the Manhattan Project. A lot of the history is well-known now: how Niels Bohr was smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Denmark in the wheel well of a British balsa-wood aircraft; how pacifistic Albert Einstein urged Franklin Roosevelt to build the bomb before the Nazis did; how thousands of technicians and scientists descended on the tiny mountain hamlet of Los Alamos, New Mexico, to figure out how to build their catastrophically explosive device. The key material was plutonium-239, an element virtually unknown in nature which has