By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN RICHLAND, Wash. — B Reactor rises above the desolate plain here, a windowless, dilapidated and ominous landmark of the nuclear age. The Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which surrounds the reactor, has the country's greatest concentration of radioactive wastes, in underground tanks that have been leaking for decades. Because of the contamination, the byproduct of 50 years of nuclear- weapons production, the government allows only occasional visitors here, and nobody younger than 18. Yet this unlikely structure, a crucible of the Manhattan Project, may become a national landmark. The Energy Department, at the behest of Congress, is studying the feasibility of decontaminating and preserving B Reactor, and perhaps one day opening it to the public. The effort reflects the growing realization among government officials and preservationists that the remnants of the earliest days of the atomic age and the cold war are in danger of disappearing. The concern has intensified in recent years as the Energy Department has dismantled deteriorating buildings at Hanford, in southeastern Washington; Los Alamos, N.M.; Oak Ridge, Tenn.; and other sites around the country where scientists and engineers once raced to plan, build and detonate the atomic bomb. Many of the buildings are contaminated, and most have been off-limits for decades. "The department realized that if no one stepped in, we would essentially eliminate the physical property of the Manhattan Project," said Dr. F. G. Gosling, the Energy Department's chief historian. Nations traditionally make monuments of their grandest and most glorious places. The campaign for B Reactor, which opened in 1944 under the supervision of the physicist Enrico Fermi, reflects a growing willingness to also protect historic sites that evoke unpleasant and painful memories, and in some cases are actually hazardous. "The atomic bomb was one of the most significant events of the 20th century, and these are the historic sites associated with it," said John M. Fowler, executive director of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, a federal agency that monitors government properties. "People don't think about these places in the kind of historical terms they think about Gettysburg. But we have to make decisions now that will determine whether these buildings continue to exist." In a report for the Energy Department, the council recently recommended designating eight Manhattan Project sites, including B Reactor, as national landmarks. They also include the site in Los Alamos where components for the first atomic bombs were assembled; a fragment of the building in Oak Ridge that provided uranium isotopes for the Hiroshima bomb, and the Trinity site, south of Albuquerque, where on July 16, 1945, the atomic age began in a blast so bright it was said to have reflected off the moon. Several potential landmarks are still contaminated. Of those, only the B Reactor, which made plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb, is being proposed for eventual year-round tourism. A few sites have already been preserved and made public, including the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge, which was built as a smaller pilot plant for Hanford, and the Trinity site in Alamogordo, N.M., which allows visitors twice a year, on the first Saturday in April and October. But not until now has the Energy Department taken a coordinated approach to preserving atomic sites. "I don't want the country to forget what it took to win a war and what this community gave up to win it," said Senator Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat who secured $950,000 from Congress last year for the department to make B Reactor safe enough for cleanup workers, and to study the feasibility of converting it to a museum. She envisions a place "kind of like the Holocaust Museum," she said. "It's not a place to enjoy a day, but where you learn what can happen." Keith A. Klein, manager of the Energy Department's Richland office, which oversees Hanford, said he thought it would be possible to eliminate airborne contamination at B Reactor, one step in making it safe for tourism. Doug Sherwood, Hanford project manager for the Environmental Protection Agency, said the reactor could be made safe for strictly controlled public access, but noted that some might find the cost prohibitive. "There's quite an interest in preserving this facility," he said, but added, "It's a big job and possibly one we should not undertake." He estimated that it could cost $10 million to make B Reactor museum- ready, beyond the costs of the current cleanup of the Hanford reservation, which are expected to total many billions of dollars in the next few decades. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, cautioned that talk about a B Reactor museum was premature until the cleanup was finished. "I don't see how you can justify spending federal funds to preserve a facility at Hanford and elsewhere, where close communities are still at risk," he said. Hanford is about 25 miles from the Oregon border, upstream on the Columbia River. Joe Davis, a spokesman for the Energy Department, said, "We know that sites and workers played an important part of history that should endure," but that no decision had been made on which sites to save. Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," supports maintaining at least some of what he calls "the physical reality of that time." "Many people think that the Manhattan Project was 30 people building a bomb at Los Alamos," he added, "but it was 150,000 — an effort comparable at the time to the race to the moon. It's our past. Not to preserve it is to censor it." Behind the push for preservation is a growing interest in atomic tourism. On the Web, atomictourist.com directs atom-age buffs to places like the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, which contains the Trinity site, and EBR1, an experimental breeder reactor outside Arco, Idaho. At the Greenbrier Resort in Warm Springs, W.Va., nearly 200,000 visitors have paid up to $25 to tour the ultimate Strangelovian relic: the cavernous cold war bunker built to shelter members of Congress from a nuclear attack. This summer, the Smithsonian Institution is offering a tour of Manhattan Project landmarks in New Mexico, including the High Bay building, a ramshackle structure where key components for the Trinity device and the Nagasaki bomb were assembled. Ellen Bradbury, who is leading the Smithsonian tour, calls High Bay "the Manhattan Project equivalent of the Silicon Valley garage." The most compelling landmarks may be the Manhattan Project towns themselves. Like Richland and Los Alamos, Oak Ridge was a once top-secret creation of the government, omitted from maps until 1949. Today, visitors can take "atomic train" trips that start at the old guard station and offer scenic views of the K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Building, an engineering marvel that sprawls over 44 acres. The advisory council suggests saving a fragment of K-25, the Roosevelt Cell, which was intended as a viewing platform for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. But Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, a watchdog group, noted that K-25 still contains hazardous waste and 23 miles of contaminated pipeline. A wiser commemoration, he said, would be "a green field and a marker." Obstacles to preservation are even more formidable at Hanford. Sixty- eight of its 177 underground tanks are assumed to have leaked. Experts say that much of the Hanford Reservation's 560 square miles can never be made clean enough for unrestricted access, but some say parts of it could be. The move to save B Reactor, which has been idle since 1968, has been spearheaded by the local B Reactor Museum Association, many of whose members worked at Hanford. They are hoping for regular tours of the reactor's face, a looming panel of antique nozzles and tubes, as well as the brass-knobbed control room, whose "you are there" quality is intact, as if Fermi had just gotten up from his chair. For now, Hanford is something of a nuclear cemetery. The Army Corps of Engineers was drawn to this high desert land because of its remoteness and its proximity to the Columbia River, with water for cooling reactors, and sand and gravel banks for making concrete. In February 1943, the government gave residents of the towns of White Bluff and Hanford 28 days to move out. The towns' remnants are still here, including the shell of the old Hanford High School, reachable only with security clearance down crumbling four-lane roads — some now leading nowhere — built for the Manhattan Project. Members of the B Reactor Museum Association recall its shroud of secrecy in the 1940's. "We didn't talk about reactors, we talked about `the unit,' " said Roger Rohrbacher, 80, who was an engineer at B Reactor. "We didn't talk about plutonium, we talked about `the product.' " Many of them want to honor the technological achievements of Hanford as well as the suffering it brought. "When you're standing in front of the reactor you realize this is what humans can do if pushed to the limit," said Gene Weisskopf, president of the association. "It's a great place to contemplate war." Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company