Oak Ridge (Tennessee)

See also: Oak Ridge

The site of Oak Ridge is located at 41 kilometers in the west of Knoxville and at 30 kilometers in the south-west of the small town of Clinton, in the Tennessee.

“This place, chosen by Colonel James C. Marshall and Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols in June, rained much with Groves. It corresponded to all the requirements with the future atomic power plants: situation isolated with electrical energy, water in abundance, an almost non-existent population, an easy access by the road and the rail, a very soft climate allowing to work with the outside all the année. ”

Oak Ridge was the first site chosen among those which were going to become the bodies " vitaux" Project Manhattan. Apart from Oak Ridge, where the Cyclotron as well as the largest electromagnets was built which one ever saw at that time: weighing 3 000 with 10 000 tons, each hundred of pure silver reels contained between 12 and 21 tons of this noble metal, we can also quote Hanford (close to Richland), " the city of the Plutonium " where worked of many Nobel Prize of which the scientist Enrico Fermi, and Los Alamos with the New Mexico, site of assembly of the atomic bomb that the doctor Oppenheimer directed.

The site of Oak Ridge was to accommodate the factory of gas diffusion - baptized K-25 codes some - where took place the separation of the two isotopes of the uranium : U238 and U235 (that used in the process of fission). The proportion of U235 in the natural Uranium, established by Alfred Nier, is of 1/139.

“In spring of 1944, in spite of some sensational technological successes, the situation remained critical in Oak Ridge, because one had not produced yet there of Uranium 235. The electromagnetic factories, extremely expensive, did not seem to provide enough matter at the appropriate time. (…) The separation of Uranium 235, the only usable one, remained the main issue of the Manhattan.

Project

See too

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)

References

Random links: