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.

Comments

Y12 60 years later

[idommp]

Come on down. The museum has gotten a lot better but you better hurry. The Dept. of Energy has cut off funding after all these years and it's likely to be the Oak Ridge Museum of History rather than the American Museum of Science and Energy before too long.

But don't expect to see much of the y-12 complex. That's where they store all the enriched uranium that has been removed from all the decommissioned bombs. They're a bit touchy about uninvited guests there these days.

But you can go look at the Graphite Reactor. This was the first production reactor ever built. 1 kilowatt total output and air cooled. It was shut down in the 60's but, unlike the west coast where they cart the things off and bury them when they are too old to use anymore, we made ours into a National Historic Landmark. It's not like we're going to be able to use that spot for anything else for the next couple of hundred thousand years.

True Oak Ridge Story

[poena.dare]

When my father's job relocated him from Indiana to Tennessee in 1966, he took me to Oak Ridge to tour the museum. At that time they had an exhibit that allowed you to drop a dime down a slot and it would be exposed to a radioactive source. To prove that the dime picked up some of the radiation you could hold it up to a detector and the detector would dutifully click a little bit more. I thought it was "groovy" and processed several dimes. I must have carried those dimes around in my pocket for months.

Fast forward 12 years later to 1978, where my father and I are taking a long road trip together. As we pass by Knoxville we decide to take a small detour and visit the museum again. Of course, by this time they had moved to a new building and all the old exhibits had been removed (I think the van der graaf generator was about the only thing that made the transition). We looked around but couldn't find the dime irradiator, so we grabbed the tour guide and asked where it was. The tour guide shuffled his feet nervously and said, "we don't do that anymore - it became unsafe when they changed to composition of the dimes." He then hurried off.

While I am sure that whatever radiation those dimes picked up was low energy, short lived, and short range - I sometimes wonder why I haven't had kids yet...

Tangentially Related Anecdote

[HorsePunchKid]

There's a great anecdote in Richard Feynman's "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out". He tells how the theoreticians working on the physics of the fission bomb were kept strictly separate from the technical workers actually trying to implement the ideas. This was done for security purposes, so that no one person could have access to all of the knowledge needed to build a bomb.

Howerver, Feynman was able to work it out so that he got to tour one of the uranium refinement facilities once. On this tour, he noticed that the processed uranium was being stacked up in warehouse. It eventually dawned on him that this was a horrible idea, as a tight configuration of enriched uranium like that could easily start a sustained reaction!

Of course, since the groups were kept separate and not allowed to freely communicate, this had never occurred to the people producing the stockpiles of enriched uranium.

Anyway, just a sort of funny story. That could have been a disaster and could easily have changed history.

Re:Einstein

[kmellis]

Well, he wrote a short letter that was essentially dictated to him by Szilard and Wigner the day that they visited him and asked him to write one. After being presented with the state of the current research, Einstein was convinced that an atomic weapon was possible and that a German program would be a grave threat. He asked them what they would like his letter to say. Wigner and Szilard took the letter with them, and it eventually found its way to FDR. Even then, FDR only released about $6,000 for initial research.

Prior to this time, Einstein was on record as being very skeptical that any sort of nuclear power or weapon was possible. He did not write this letter on his own initiative, and he did not actually present it to FDR.

When the Manhatten Project got underway, he made it known that he was willing to work on it in some capacity, but he was blackballed by many people in the security establishment because of his outspoken pacifist views. I think, in fact, that FDR didn't trust him completely for this reason.

Einstein's letter was influential, but it was not even close to being as important as popular imagination has it as being. Einstein's work did show the equivalence between matter and energy, but that is the extent of his professional influence on this matter.

The person that is absolutely critical in the history of the nuclear program is Leo Szilard.