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

Museum

[GMontag]

I've been meaning to get out to Oak Ridge to see if their museum's gotten better in the past 20 years.

I took my son there a little over 10 years ago, it seemed to be a bit improved from what it was over 20 yrs ago.

Dr. Johnson(sp?), one of my history instructors at UT wrote a book about OR, "City Behind the Fence" IIRC. Seemed very interesting and he was an excellent teacher. May be worth a browse if you can find it.

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:Tangentially Related Anecdote

[Twirlip of the Mists]

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.

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.

Re:Einstein

[kmellis]

I don't see the conflict between what I wrote and the account in your link. I compressed in my memory and thus my post the two meetings: the first Wigner and Szilard, the second Teller and Szilard; and I emphasized the important detail that Einstein didn't completely write even the first version of the letter that Szilard then translated and edited into two versions: long and short.

If you read the page you linked to carefully, you'll see that this is the sequence:

On July 12, 1939, Szilard and Wigner meet with Einstein in Peconic, Einstein dictates to Wigner (in German) a letter to the Belgian ambassador.

Shortly thereafter, Szilard met with Alexander Sachs, an unofficial adviser to the President. He agreed to carry a letter from Einstein to FDR, if Szilard could get one.

Szilard wrote a four-page draft version of this letter, and mailed it to Einstein.

Einstein asked to meet again with Szilard in person to discuss the letter, and so on July 30, 1939--this time with Edward Teller as chauffeur--Szilard travels out to Peconic a second time.

Einstein felt that Szilard's version was too long and technical for the President, and dictated (again, in German) a shorter version to Szilard.

Szilard spent a few days translating Einstein's letter into English, and even produced an even more shortened version. He took both to Einstein; Einstein signed both but preffered the longer of the two.

Szilard gave the longer letter to Sachs to take to FDR.

Sachs was not able to meet with FDR until October 11, 1939.

Here is one summary account of that meeting (an account which corresponds with my memory of its description in Rhodes's book--probably the source for this one):

" When Sachs met with the president, he spent the better part of an hour going through the physics involved in splitting the atom, then handed Roosevelt the Einstein letter with a cover note from Szilard. Unfortunately, after an hour Roosevelt was losing interest and questioned whether further costly research was appropriate for government funding. The audience was clearly at an end, but FDR invited Sachs to return the next morning for breakfast.

Imagine the night Sachs spent at the Carlton Hotel on Oct. 11! He had that afternoon failed to engage Roosevelt's interest in a project that he and Szilard and Einstein felt was essential if Hitler was not to win the war and conquer the world. He knew he had one more shot to convince FDR that the government should fund the research, or all of Szilard's work and the effect of the Einstein letter would go down the drain. Hitler would have an atomic bomb, and there would be no one with the wherewithal to contest the Nazis. And now it all came down to his breakfast meeting with Roosevelt.

The next morning, Sachs took a different tack, as Roosevelt asked him, "What bright idea do you have this morning?"

Sachs reminded Roosevelt of Napoleon's foolish refusal to underwrite Robert Fulton's experimental submarine, an invention that might have won the battle of Trafalgar for the French if Napoleon had had more faith in it. He also quoted the scientist Francis Aston's concern that a device powered by subatomic energy might allow one nation's leader to blow up his neighbor. "Alex," Roosevelt responded, "what you are after is to see that the Nazis don't blow us up."

"Precisely," Sachs responded.

That turned out to be enough. By 1945 the government was to spend $2 billion building the bomb. After 1945 most of the scientists involved (especially Leo Szilard) were to spend the rest of their lives trying to get the genie back into the bottle.

So, none of this was Einstein's initiative. Szilard wrote the first version of the letter that Einstein was to send to FDR. Einstein rewrote it by dictating a new version of Szilard; then Szilard himself translated that into two versions which he took back to Einstein to sign. Sachs met with the President, but didn't present Einstein's letter until the end of the meeting, by then FDR was bored and not paying attention. Sachs met with FDR again the next day, this time convincing FDR to support an atomic program. There's not much evidence that Einstein's letter was particularly influential in this discussion. All evidence indicates that it was Sachs himself was who was persuasive. And, even then, the initial support was still very tepid.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have posted a simple "Why?" in response to the story, since doing so was a little bit coy and sort of an entrapment. But I partly did it because I was trying to be cautious about assuming why people so strongly associate Einstein with the bomb. Some people, for example, argue that he's in some sense the "father" of the bomb because of "e=mc^2".

But I've always thought that his importance to the development of the bomb was greatly overestimated in popular imagination. I imagine that a lot of people, uninformed about physics, just assume that the greatest physicist they're familiar with must be responsible in some way for the bomb. Others that are more knowledgable probably believe that he was intimately familiar with the work on atomic theory and the possibility of the bomb and took it upon himself to write FDR that letter and thus made the whole thing happen with his enormous influence. But that's not the way that it happened.

There are a few people that really were crucial to getting the ball rolling. The first and foremost is Szilard, who, if anyone, is the appropriate person to have his photo associated with this story. The two civilians are probably Vannevar Bush and James Conant (and possibly Sachs for his one crucial meeting with FDR). The former three worked tirelessly for years trying to get the US involved in atomic research, and then were instrumental after it began.