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Y-12 Plant Turns Sixty
GMontag writes "The Einstein icon seems quite appropriate for this story: The Y-12 Electromagnetic Separation Plant, in Oak Ridge, TN, turns 60 today." The linked Knoxville News Sentinel story begins "On a cold February morning 60 years ago (Feb. 18, 1943), ground was broken in rural East Tennessee for the first production building at the Y-12 Electromagnetic Separation Plant. The plant's job was to make enough enriched uranium for a new kind of bomb, an atomic bomb. In a short time Bear Creek Valley, where the plant is located, was filled with machinery and round-the-clock bustle of people on a mission. At its peak in 1945 more than 22,000 workers were employed at the site in Oak Ridge." I've been meaning to get out to Oak Ridge to see if their museum's gotten better in the past 20 years.
There's a related anecdote in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. He talks about being shown the blueprints for a uranium processing facility and asked to evaluate them for safety. They had to make sure that the system could be run safely, that there was no possibility that too much uranium could collect in one place to achieve criticality and explode. It was a big job.
Now, in those days Feynman was just a kid, in his 20's or early 30's or something, and he had no idea how to read a blueprint. So he's looking at this thing and it's just making no sense at all, and right in the middle of the sheet there's a thing that kinda looks like a window. So, figuring what the hell, he puts his finger right on it and says, "What happens if this valve gets stuck?" He's expecting somebody to say, "That's not a valve, sir, that's a window," but instead everybody gets quiet and thinks for a minute. Finally, one of the guys says, "My God, sir, you're absolutely right! We'll have that fixed immediately!"
From reading his books, you kinda get the impression that Feynman lived his whole life that way, just pretending he knew what was going on and plunging ahead.
I write in my journal