Development of ARH-600, a criticality safety handbook

During 1965 or 1966, the last years of General Electric Company`s presence at Hanford, the criticality safety staff of the 200 area decided that there was a need to develop a compilation of data for use in criticality safety analysis. The official reason was that there was a need for a reference for the design engineers so that they would not have to contact us so much during preliminary design preparation. The real reason, or at least 75% of it, was so the staff could have a single point of reference rather than having to look among a rather large number of documents and other references, any one of which could disappear without notice. This was not the only criticality handbook available; Jack Chalmers in England had prepared the AHSB(S) Handbook 1, and there were others that slightly preceded our data compilation. However, these data compilations were too limited for our purposes. The tried and true documents TID-7016 and TID-7028 were also available but did not meet all our needs. Our handbook was finally issued in its original form in 1968 after the Atlantic Richfield Hanford Company had become the general contractor at Hanford, hence the document number, ARH-600.