. - - _ _ + 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 < < U RE . In Augus De largest un - - - * = a critical mas World ' neutron mehl 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 $40,000 National Defense Research Committee contract Voltaic batte. came through for physical-constant measurements. To help Fermi without . simply used t the fcietion the two men generated when they worked side by side, Szilard Italian laure undertook to apply his special tr. lent for enlightened cajolery to the prob- speech. lem of procuring supplies of purified uranium and giaphite. The record is The exp ' thick with his correspondence with Americat: graphite manufacturers dis- exponent ent , 394 CONTROL NO. 8 7 2 5 3 - ,,,m m. r.7 ._ ;ewry,"F'r A .. ~f G F u.. .di& W . %#sQQW . .g%. : Y 4 ' O~ e F. 4/k * g g Mg The New World 395 y }$ 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.