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The Role of Oak Ridge in the Manhattan Project

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The Role of Oak Ridge in the Manhattan Project 1 THE ROLE OF OAK RIDGE IN THE MANHATTAN PROJECT- (FOR A TECHNICAL AUDIENCE) William J. (Bill) Wilcox Jr., Oak Ridge City Historian Retired Technical Director for the Oak Ridge Y-12 & K-25 Plants [During the Manhattan Project (from May 25, 1943) a Jr. Chemist, Tennessee Eastman Corp., Y-12 Plant] A Lecture for the UT Nuclear Engineering Colloquium, November 9, 2005 I’m honored to have been asked to tell you something of the story of Oak Ridge in WWII, Knoxville’s then secret neighbor. As one of the thousands of who was privileged to work at Oak Ridge during those eventful years, I’m always happy to tell that story but I am honored today to tell it for my first time to a group from “my” university! Our history starts back in the midst of WWII, in 1942. Back then, 62 years ago, here in Knoxville, like all other cities in the U.S., people were working hard to support the war that we were dragged into by Pearl Harbor six months before. TVA was hard at work building more than a dozen dams to supply power for the nearby Alcoa plants that was producing the aluminum metal crucially needed for our bombers and fighter planes. Rohm and Haas was manufacturing plastic nose bubbles and gun turrets for the big bombers. The Coster railroad shops were building rolling stock and servicing the country’s railroads. Knoxville knitting mills were turning out thousands of uniforms and other gear. Engineering students here at UT were hard at work studying civil, mechanical, and electrical, but of course not nuclear engineering. Then in the fall of 1942, Knoxvillians began to be aware that something new was brewing, with advertisements appearing in the morning Knoxville Journal and evening News Sentinel wanting construction workers for some important war work in the farmland out in nearby Anderson County. And what for was all hush-hush, no one could find out what was going on – the answer to even the top UT and city officials, was just, “vital war work.” Army engineers had quietly scoped out an area of 60,000 acres in the farmland of Anderson and adjoining Roane County, about 12 miles long, 8 to 9 miles wide. It met all 6 of their site criteria. It was sparsely settled with fewer than 1,000 families that had to be moved out, it had good power supply from the TVA and good water from the clinch river; it was close to a good labor supply in Knoxville, was served by two railroads, and the unique ridge and valley typography meant they could put the several plants and the town in each in their own valley which was good for both security and safety. The first name Knoxvillians saw it called in the ads was the “Kingston Demolition Range.” That started lots of rumors so the army quickly changed that to “Clinton Engineer Works,” and that is what it was called until after the war when it began to be called simply Oak Ridge – taken from the long time name of the Black Oak Ridge on which the city is built. The construction workers came as a flood and the roads out to “the site” were jammed. Then the next spring, in April 1943, armed guards showed up at all seven gates into the area, and that stopped any weekend sightseeing. For the next 3½ years, we were a “Secret City.” So what was going on out there? It had its roots of course back at the beginning of 1939 when the German chemists Hahn and Strassman reported in Naturwissenschaften the news that bombardment of uranium by neutrons produced barium, about half its weight, and soon the explanation came that the uranium nucleus had been split with release of tremendous energy. Physicists around the world rushed to their laboratories to repeat and confirm this startling news and by mid year 1939 the 1 2 media was speculating about this great new source of energy. One pound of U could drive an ocean liner across the Atlantic, and so on. Sometimes you hear peace wishers say that if our country had not developed the bomb, the world would be a better place. No way! Physicists in many countries like Britain, France, Japan, Russia, as well as the U.S. went to work, and their scientists and engineers were just as capable as ours in working through the many problems. History has shown that. The difference in the WWII U.S. was that Albert Einstein and others convinced our President that if any country might figure out how to do it, we should be the first. Germany had a head start. We had great respect for German science and technology, and Roosevelt knew if Hitler got an atomic weapon he would not hesitate to use it. So with the governments’ support, work started in a half dozen universities to see if a bomb could be made. Two years later, in the summer of 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor brought us into WWII, President Roosevelt was told it might be done, but would take a huge effort. He then acted to combine all the research efforts that had been going on, and ordered the army engineers to head up the job of building the bomb on a top priority, very secret, all-out effort. Secret so as not to have others increase their efforts too. The effort was given the code name “Manhattan Project”, simply because the office of the first District Engineer was in New York City in downtown Manhattan! So what was Oak Ridge’s mission? It was the extraordinarily difficult challenge of producing more than a hundred pounds of nearly pure U-235, separating this lighter of the two forms of uranium that occur in nature from the heavier U-238 that is 139 times more abundant. Difficult because isotopes behave identically in all chemical reactions so one has to develop a process taking advantage of their little 1% difference in weight. And, if that isn’t hard enough, U-235 is, as we hillbillies say, “scarce as hen’s teeth.” In every thousand kilos of uranium you dig out of the ground, there are only 7 of U-235, all intimately mixed up with 993 of U-238! By the fall of 1942 the new Commander in chief, the hard-driving and brilliant General Leslie Groves, had to listen to the university scientists lobby for their favorite candidate process and then make hard decisions as to what kind of plants to build to produce U-235. The trouble was that none of the scientists could promise success. Not one had produced more than fractions of a gram of U- 235. Columbia University researchers championed a process called gaseous diffusion, the University Of Virginia researchers favored using gas centrifuges, a US Navy team recommended liquid thermal diffusion, and the University of California urged using the electromagnetic approach. Listen and debate with his advisors the General did, but meantime he knew he would have to have a city and plants of some kind so he got his engineers started on the infrastructure. The very first building they started on was the Administration building in November 1942. Soon after, they started to build the city. Soon after that, the decisions were made and building sizes guessed at –even without knowing the size of the operating equipment. Construction contractors were swarming over this valley, turning farmland into a new city that in two years grew to 75,000 people, the 5th largest in the state, with the 9th largest bus system in the US, bringing in at the peak some 20,000 commuters every day from as far away as Chattanooga! But it was secret, not yet shown on any maps! 2 3 This then was what Oak Ridge was built to do in secret -- build these two, huge, never-before designed or operated plants in the midst of a world war with shortages not just of all materials but of the thousands of technical people who would be needed. It was driven always by the need to beat the Germans to the bomb. In 1942 the German U-Boats were in command of the Atlantic Ocean, devastating our merchant freighters, so billboards that warned “Loose Lips Sink Ships” were effective in reminding folks not to discuss anything going on at CEW. Ground breaking for Oak Ridge’s, and the worlds, first U-235 separation plant code named Y-12, took place in February 1943. Some 20,000 construction workers worked that summer to build the infrastructure and buildings, and install equipment. It seems incredible today that in just 11 months the first production unit was in operation in January 1944! The process used for this first isotope separation plant was developed by professor Ernest O. Lawrence at the University of California. The process used devices they named calutrons, from “cal” for California, “u” for university, and “tron” from cyclotron. They operated on the same principle as a mass spectrometer. Y- 12 eventually had 1,152 calutrons; with 864 big alpha units that produced about 15% U-235 followed by 288 smaller beta calutrons that finished the enrichment. This is a photograph of a group of 96 of the big alpha calutrons, arranged in an ellipse to conserve the magnetic field, and quickly code named by the construction folks a “racetrack.” In the left foreground, notice the d-shaped units that hold the sources and the receivers. The next slide shows one being inserted in the Calutron tank.
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