in the reactor, stop the flow of cooling water, and force a complete shutdown of the reactor, so the canning process had to be precise. Irradiated fuel slugs were transported by rail to huge remotely-operated chemical separation plants about away on a special railroad car operated by remote control. The separation buildings were massive windowless concrete structures, long, high and wide, with concrete walls thick. Inside the buildings were canyons and galleries where a series of chemical processing steps separated the small amount of plutonium from the remaining uranium and fission products. Items were moved about with a long overhead crane. Once they began processing irradiated slugs, the machinery became so radioactive that it would be unsafe for humans ever to come in contact with it, so the engineers devised methods to allow for the replacement of components via remote control. Periscopes and closed-circuit television gave the operator a view of the process. They assembled the equipment by remote control as if the area was already radioactive. To receive the radioactive wastes from the chemical separations process, there were "tank farms" consisting of 64 single-shell underground waste tanks. The first batch of plutonium was refined in the 221T plant from December 26, 1944, to February 2, 1945, and delivered to the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico on February 5, 1945. Two identical reactors, DReactor and FReactor, came online on December 5, 1944, and February 15, 1945, respectively, and all three reactors were running at full power (250 megawatts) by March 8, 1945. By April kilogram-quantity shipments of plutonium were headed to Los Alamos. Road convoys replaced the trains in May, and in late July shipments began being dispatched by air from the airport at Hanford. Production activities Although the reactors could be shut down in two-and-a-half seconds, they would still generate heat due to the decay of fission products. It was therefore vital that the flow of water should not cease. If the power failed, the steam pumps would automatically cut in and continue to deliver water at full capacity for long enough to allow an orderly shutdown. This occurred on March 10, 1945, when a Japanese balloon bomb struck a high-tension line between Grand Coulee and Bonneville. This caused an electrical surge in the lines to the reactors. A scram was automatically initiated and the safety devices shut the reactors down. The bomb failed to explode and the