. - - _ _ + e, _ ; . O bd. O ~ ,I 'i DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL ? , = INDIANA UNIVERSITY ] HEALTH AND. SAFETY j . }' 840 State Road 46 Dypass i . . , . Bhornington, Indiana 47405 j s c , (812) 335-6311 ;

' 3 e e, ,. 1 . thApril 14, 1989 ~#7 Mike McCann . Material Licensing Section 4 2/ / Region III | [r Uni 1;ed States Nuclear Regulatory Commission D |} } jP , en 1 IL 0137 30 ' * Dea:: Mr. McCann ' | ' Re Proposed Amendment to License 13-00108-05 I y Indiana University, Bloomington (Also refer to control no. 87113 for another amendment request in process) b / l' withThisisarequestforalicenseamendmentfollowingthetelephoneconversationMh you and Kevin Null on March 30, 1989. We are requesting an amendment to' permit the storage, t.se, or dis. play of 165 pounds of natural uranium in tao $f j metal cubes. The future disposition of this material is not known at this 1 time. It may be transferred to the. Department of Energy. One suggestion has been made.to place one of the containers on display at our Cyclotron Facility. If this course of actioniis pursued' sufficient barriers will be provided to meet the regulations for control of radioactive material and to limit d s to members of the general public.

One of the units is well scaled and we have no intention of opening it. The other had been damaged with a small hole punched in it. Much less than a microcurie had escapel and the area has been decontaminated. This unit will not be displayed without repairing the container and assuring'that it is . decontaminated. Any use or display of the material will be in accordance with the conditions of our broad license and under an approval of the Radiation Safety Committee.

As discussed with you, the cubes may have come fror Enrico Fermi's first pile at Columbia University and might have some historical significance,

b' The following details the procedure used in verifying that the cubes contained natural uranium. Samples were prepared by using 567 mg of uranyl acetate, as e a standard natural uranium mixture, and 362 mg from the assumed uranium @ dioxide (a black powder) from the cube. The weights were selected to produce o equal weights of uranium within each sample. The samples were each mixed with 0-* epoxy resin'and pressed into 2" diameter disks inside Kapton plastic film. m The resultant disks had low self absorption coefficients based on the 16 mg , M per square em uranium content. Several predominate energies were compared g using a Ge(Li) detector with a multi-channel analyzer. The energy groups cm.m encompass selected energies of U-235 photons and U-238 daughter photons. @@ Although there are a some competing energies that might show up in some of the omJ channels selected, a change in en-ichment or depletion would yield ratios that ;$$3 are different than 1.00. RECEIVED APR 17 Jg'gg CONBOL NO.8725 3 mremrm - a #gg _ _ _ _ .

' , %

- i . O Q .

' [ ng is a summary of the data generated for a total count time of ds: e low High Gross Net Ratio, net counts kev) Channel Channel Counts Counts Acetate /0xide i one strd. dev.

de (From cubes) 3 $58 232 256 1874 815 1.079 i 0.098 ) 92'.75 343 388 12737 8891 0.997 1 0.020 ] 143.80 536 560 2549 1555 0.977 i 0.054 j t163.42 611 635 1655 757 1.007 i 0.094 ' j185.84 697 721 8927 8025 0.978 i 0.017

J1001.02 3798 3824 648 608 0.970 i 0.059 1 i W Acetate t 63.50 231 255 1902 879 92.74 342 390 12738 8864 g 143.86 537 561 2565 1519 JJ 163.42 611 635 1593 762 C 185.84 696 720 8626 7852 1000.95 3796 3822 623 590 :]n !! The ratios of the selected gamma lines, from the acetate ' standard' and the (,' sample from one of the cubes, indicate that the unknown mixture has a U-235 [~ content that is indistinguishable from natural uranium. The standard deviations given are for counting statistics only.

Enclosed, for your inform;t,sn, is a copy of an account from a book by Richard Rhodes entitled, "The making of the Atomic Bomb" (Simon and Shuster, 1986). The description of the cubes we have seems to match the description of the fuel blocks used in Fermi's first pile constructed at Columbia University in September 1941 prior to the Chicago pile which achieved criticality. We have cube numbers 35 and 60.

The origin of our cubes is unknown. Several physicists who worked on the Manhattan project _became faculty members of Indiana University. No one, currently in the Physics Department knows where the cubes came from. Our records go back to the old authorization program of the Atomic Energy Commission prior to establishment of the licensing system. A number of requests for small (pound) quantities of Uranium are in our files but nothing for quantities approaching 160 pounds. ~~

' Very Truly Yours.

' 'lW b | Henry . Briggs Radiation Safety Officer

Enclosures

cc: Paul Neeson, DOE, Chicago operations office Charles Foster

|

CONT 981. NO.8 7 25 3

- _ - _ . .. g. o - - , : o. . -, , . j.[ mayed to disci ;p . in fact hopete .t ' section for ne ,. ment, numbe 3 Tc "Szilard atthe / nize the early Thpv did a marvelo " ganization ths , % ,puf few able-bodi

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8 surface. No o was obviously create a scif-si uranium and 3 all, would test reaction and proposed to a Enrico Fermi's team at Columbir University had been hard at work ries of subcrit ' ties and arran I through 1941 while the government deliberated. Fermi, Leo Szilard, Her- bert Anderson and the young physicists who had joined them may never As alway have known how close they came to orphanhood. The is 1ation of pluto- . had calculate < nium at Berkeley added a potential military application to tleir reasons for fusion of neut pursuing a slow-neutron chain reaction in uranium and graplJte, but given experiments: the necessary resources Fermi at least would certainly have pirsued the stocks ef5 rai chain reaction anyway as a physical experiment of fundamental ud his- sions of urani toric worth. He had missed discovering fission by the thickness of a sheet of grimy, slippen aluminum foil; he would not willingly leave to someone else the detton- fming eight ti stration of atomic energy's first sustained release. Thanks largely to Arthur the standard . Compton his work found contmued support, which may help explain whY Segr4 writes. he admired the pious Woosterite's intelligence so extravagantly. source of nue Szilard had fmally gone on the Columbia payroll on November 1, to denote his .1940, when the $40,000 National Defense Research Committee contract Voltaic batte. came through for physical-constant measurements. To help Fermi without . simply used t the fcietion the two men generated when they worked side by side, Szilard Italian laure undertook to apply his special tr. lent for enlightened cajolery to the prob- speech. lem of procuring supplies of purified uranium and giaphite. The record is The exp ' thick with his correspondence with Americat: graphite manufacturers dis- exponent ent ,

394

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' O~ e F. 4/k * g g Mg The New World 395 y }$ f "$.f&,O mayed to discover that what they thought were the purest of materials were 8 f in fact hopelessly contaminated, usually with traces of boron. The cross y section for neutron absorption of that light, ubiquitous, silicon like ele- *p3y[#p.s ment, number 5 on the periodic table, was tremendous and poisonous. #g "Szilard at that time took extremely decisrve and strong steps to try to orga- ' f nize the early phases of production of pure materials," says Fermi. ". . . He did a marvelousjob which later on was taken over by a more powerful or- I ' ganization than was Szilard himself. Although to match Szilard it takes a ; few able-bodied customers." i :. In August and September the Columbia team prepared to assemble the largest uranium-6raphite lattice yet devised. A slow-neutron chain re- ( , g| , action in natural uranium, like its fast-neutron counterpart U235 requires y , a critical rnass: a voltme of uranium and moderator suZeient to sustain ! neutron multiplication despite tiie inevitable loss of neutrons from its outer y surface. No one yd knew the specifications of that critical volume, but it 7 was obviously vast--on the order of some hundreds of tons. One way to ~

create a self-sustaining chain reaction might be simply to cautinue stacking ., - uranium and graphite together. But so crude an experiment, ifit worked at i all, would teach the experimenter very little about controlling the resulting reaction and might culminate in a disastrous and lethal runaway. Fermi work proposed to approach the problem by the more circumspect route of a se- ,; rics of suberitical experiments designed to determine the necessary quanti- . Her- ties and arrangements and to establish methods of control. . : lever ' ilut* As always, he built directly on previous experience. He and Anderson had calcultted the absorption cross section of carbon by measuring the dif- 3 I"' pven fusion of neutrons from a neutron source up a column ofgraphite. The new Ithe experiments would enlarge that column to take advantage of the increased stocks of graphite available and to make room for regularly spaced inclu- his- 1 sions of uranium oxide: simplicity itself, but in physical form a thick, black, et of ' ~ grimy, slippery mass of some thirty tons of extruded bars of graphite con- S* $ thur - fming eight tons of oxide. Fermi named the structure a " pile." "Much of P

- the standard nomenclature in nuclear science was developed at this time " why b Segre writes. ". . . I thought for a while that this term was used to refer to a $ T I' source of nuclear energy in analogy with Volta's use of the Italian termpila Q ract to denote his own great invention of a source of electrical energy [i.e., the : ' Voltaic battery). I was disulusioned by Fermi himself, who told me that he ~. . mut . tard simply used the common English wordpile as syronymous with heap " The Italian laureate was continuing to master the plainsong of American iD speech. ^ ** t The exponential pile Fermi proposed to build (so called because an ( , exponent entered into the calculation ofits relationship to a full-scale reac- g ;. n = '' * '~ x- TV * . ' d

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_ '- = -- 4_.,v-g_ m g _ __ - -~ M 11 e u . n 9 gg - -"7"m - q M i h#sh,rg ,/ O O E gc h i g g ( g g g THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB g, k b ng< [*. * be too big for any of the laboratories in Pupin. He sought larger p g, o, o * O dozen or ! 6, d v ' through e j {N * Ands 1 e went to Dun Pegram, who was then the man who could carry out magic around the university, sad we explained to him that we needed a big room. work of t ! .. Packs of $ , And when we any big we mextt a really big room. Perhaps he made a crack ;, handled tl ! ,,,,,#,,,,,,,* * about a church not being the most suited place for a physics laboratory. . . but - I think a churca would have been just precisely what we wanted. Well, he scouted around the campus and we went with him to dark corridors and " Fermi tried t '

under various beating pipes and so on to vtut possible sites for this experiment coat and pitc) ' h '" ##q~ . and eventually a big room, not a church, but something that might have been that he was 01 g. T comp.utd in size with a church was discovered in Schermerhorn [Hal!J. measmmena tional care an. 'there, Fermi goes on, they began to build "this structure that at that time For this looked again in order of magnitude larger than anything t!:at we had seen ments to com " before.... It was a structure of graphite bricks and spread through these sessing the clu graphite bricts in some sort of pattern were big cans, cubic cans, contamingj number ofsee uranium oxide." The cans, 8 by 8 by 8 inches,288 of them in all, were made tice ofinfinite of tinned iron sheet; each could hold about 60 pounds of uranium oxide. in the worldin 'Each cubic " cell"of the uraninm. graphite lattice-a can and its surround. 4 generatmnd}One neytmn ( ing graphito--was 16 inches on a side. Spheres of uranium in an arrange. 5 meut of spherical cells would have been more efScient. In these begin- and so m. If k ning experiments, with materials of doybtful purity, Fermi was purraing | actmn would g order of-magnitude estimates, a first rough mapping of new territory. *^8 Iess than "This structure was chosen because ofits constructional simplicity" the react.en would experimenters wrote afterward, "since'it could be assembled without terials used in | cuttiog our gmphite bricks of 4"by 4" by 12". Although we did not ex. > The cubic.

I pect that the structure would approach too closely the optimum propor- merhorn Halla , ' tions, we thought it desirable to obtain some prelimimuy information 0.87. Nowtha as soon as possib!c." Promising results might also win further NDRC than the immt, support, bad. However, "We were faced with a lot of hard and dirty wo2k," Herbert Andermo - essentially to si recalls. "The black uranium oxide powder had to be . . . heated to drive off little bh more.' < undesired moistare And then packed hot in the containers and soldered "S , cut go the shut. To Eet the requhed density, the Siling was done on a shaking table, next time the C Our little group, which by that time included Bernard Feld, George Weil, - lumps. The ma and Nalter 7."m n, loc.ked at the heavy task before us with little enthusias n. do? -

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s- The New World 397

dozen or so of very husky boys who take jobs by the hour just to carry them $ tiuough college. Why don't you hire them?

' ' And it was a marvelous idea;it was really a pleasure for once to direct the work of these husky boys, canmng uranium--just shoving it in-handling ' packs of 50 or D0 pounds with the same case as another person would have handled three or four pounds.

" Fermi tried to do his share of the work," Anderson adds;"he donned a lab coat and pitched in to do his stint with the football men, but it was clear that he was out of his class. The rest of us found a lot to keep us busy with measurements and calibrations that suddenly seemed to n, quire excep- tional em and precision." . For this fust exponential experiment and the many similar experi- ments to come, Fermi dermed a single fundamental magnitude for as- sessing the chain reaction, "the reproduction factor k." k was the average number of secondary neutrons produced by one original neutron in a lat- tice ofinfmite size-in other words, if the original neutron had all the room in the world in which to drift on its way to encountering a uranium nucleus. 3 One neutron in the zero generation would produce k neutrons in the first generation, k2 neutrons in the second generation, k3 in the third generation and so on. If k was greater than 1.0, the s'e des would diverge, the chain re- ' action would go, "in which case the production of neutrons is in finite." If k

was less than 1.0, the series would eventually converge to zero: the chain . < teaction would die out. k would depend on the quantity and quality of ma- terials used in the pile and the efficiency of their arrangement. The cubicallattice that the Columbia football sqtud stacked in Scher- merhorn Hallin September 1941 extrapolated to a disappointing first k of 0.87. "Now that is by 0.13 less than one," Fermi conunents-13 percent less than the minimuns necessary to make a chain reaction go-"and it was i { bad. However, at the mcment we had a firm point to start from, and we had i essentially to see whethen we could squeeze the extra 0.13 or preferably a E little bit more." The cans were made of iron, and iron absorbs neutrons. ~ I ' '" % "So, out go the cans." Cubes of uranium were less effielent than spheres- - W9 ' s next time the Columbia group would press the oxide into small rounded d Q. lumps. The materials were impure. ''So, now, what do these impurities t ' 4_ | do?--clearly they can do only harm, Maybe they make harm to the tune of W W Va%@ | 13 percent." Szilard would continue his quest for materials of higher pu- ~ ' -91;- { rity. "There was some considerable gain to be made . . . there." "Well," concludes Fermi, "this brings us to Pearl Harbor." ! |i | Arthur Compton had less than two weeks to throw together a program be- [g * | tween his discussion with Vannevar Bush and James Bryant Conant at the

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- ; =:n.. , ..:. O E .M . _ _ . , - f _ -9 _ ,b - ~ ~ ~ ~ ' - ' .f . - " . - :.mawwwmaw-aw --srxxanswwsrawarmurersr na,,, RC Form 374 A - U.S. N EAR RE!ULATCRY COMMISSION y {~ g (5 et) - License tumter I * 13-00108-05 f MATERIALS LICENSE * * * * ' * " " " " 4 SUPPLEMENTARY SHEET 030-00692

Amendment No. 48 4 4 Indiana University 13 4 Enviornmental Health & Safety Dept. i ' 840 State Road 46 Bypass >< Bloomington, IN 47405 y |; 2 i In accordance with letter dated April 14, 1989, License Number 13-00108-05 is amended as < follows: 4 | Items 6., 7., 8. and 9. are amended to add: . $ g 6. Byproduct, source, 7. .ha .caRqhd/or 8. Maximum amount that # and/or special nuclear g s caTforh2 ff f licensee may possess y material at any one time ' A under this license ! Y. Uranium (natural) Y. Solid cubes > 75 kilograms

~ ~ i 9. Authorized Use %/ ^ * , i b % . C Y. Tobeusedfordiglayands a in o a letter ged April 14, 1989. j Condition 23. is amendee to pj g % /* g 23. Except as specifi ly p 1 fla4 o - f e ! O k Ys 1, s,e,thklicenseeshall | conduct its progra na [hte ]ih h y1 men epreggtations,and j procedures contain' nt .t c sS 'nclosugs,listedbelow. y The Nuclear Regulath Con s s 'l govergtinless the statements, d representations and pedures i t plicatQn and correspondence are 4 more restrictive than pegulation Q A. Application dated Feb ar 5, 1985; and

B. Letters dated November 20 98 M h 1 7, December 4,1987, May 25,1988 (with attached map), January 27, 1989 and April 14, 1989. i s ! - . k $ i i e i % For the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission 4 4 e Original Signed i| Date: May 5, 1989 By William J. Adam 9 Materials Licensing Section, Region III ,

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