The business trip that Akley and his wife allude to in their conversation when she brings up the Columbia River and he responds it was "no fishing trip" went to the Hanford site in Washington state, code-named "Site W" of the Manhattan Project, with the first full-scale plutonium production reactors in the world. (The X-1 reactor facility in Tennessee that Helen and Charlie visited earlier was just a 'semi-works', basically half a step up from a prototype plant.)