At Oak Ridge

[Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984]

Calutron Operators In Oak Ridge, Tennessee During World War II.

These women spent 8 hours a day in front of the panel of a "Calutron". They turned knobs and flipped switches, keeping the panel's needle in a narrow range in the centre of the beam. They were forbidden from talking about their work at the "Y-12" plant and only knew that their task was part of the war effort.

Their workplace was in fact a uranium electromagnetic separation plant.

Source:
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration; National Archives Identifier 241166506

[Duffield, SASS #23454]

My mother was one of those ladies.

[PowderRiverCowboy]

Must have watched what was on when I went to work this morning lol.
 Sucks they ordered the people that lived and farmed there Leave you have xx days 

[Blackwater 53393]

My grandfather, my mother’s dad, helped to build the Oak Ridge facility.  My grandmother had military issue silverware that came from Oak Ridge.  Those who lived and worked there had nearly every facet of their lives managed by those who ran the program.

[Red Gauntlet , SASS 60619]

1 hour ago, PowderRiverCowboy said:

Must have watched what was on when I went to work this morning lol.
 Sucks they ordered the people that lived and farmed there Leave you have xx days 

 

It was total war. Same thing happened at Hanford/Tri-cities Washington.

[Wallaby Damned]

I worked cleanup at the Savannah River Site for two years. Built in 1950, DOE relocated three whole towns offsite! Still in operation today. They are the nation’s only source of tritium and they once again are producing plutonium pits for warheads. 

[Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984]

After some years of operation, the urgencies of war were over and producing weapons grade material was down to a science, almost. The physicists were able to determine X amount of material in, should mean Y amount out. We are short Δ, what happened? Where is it?  A small amount of high grade U235 was found coating the air ducts of the plant. A small amount times about 25 years of processing.

[Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984]

In the early 1940s, chemists in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, worked feverishly to separate a form of uranium, known as uranium-235, from the main naturally occurring form of uranium, uranium-238. This was a defining moment in the war effort because scientists knew that uranium-235, when bombarded by neutrons, underwent nuclear fission, releasing enormous amounts of energy. In other words, this was the key to the production of the atomic bomb. However, uranium-235 is found in natural uranium only to the extent of 0.72% and the only way to separate the two isotopes was to first convert the uranium into uranium hexafluoride: a reaction that required the use of fluorine gas. This element is so corrosive that no material known at that time was able to offer adequate resistance to it. When the military turned to the chemical company DuPont, asking for a material that was up to that task, they didn't expect the problem to be solved overnight, as it actually happened. The fact is that DuPont already owned that material, and it was a material for which there was no potential use yet, discovered accidentally by the company's young chemist, Roy Plunkett, while he was experimenting with liquid refrigerant gases, of the type used in refrigerators and air conditioners. On the morning of April 6, 1938, in the DuPont laboratory in New Jersey, Plunkett examined a container that had been delivered the previous evening. He should have contained a very cold gas, but instead he discovered that the new gas had frozen and transformed into a solid, malleable substance, which had spread over the walls of the container. He was amazed at how slippery and totally waterproof it was, after having subjected it to corrosive chemicals of all kinds. That substance possessed a whole series of truly fascinating properties: it didn't burn, it was perfectly resistant to corrosive materials, it was impenetrable to bacteria and mold, and it was more slippery than wet ice on wet ice. Plunkett called the compound "Teflon", to shorten its chemical name: tetrafluoroethylene. The world, however, would not know anything about it for another 8 years because Teflon would be classified "top secret" by the American government. For what reason? Simple: that substance turned out to be exactly what they were looking for at Oak Ridge, the substance that could resist the corrosive gases used in the production of U-235, the form of uranium that the military so urgently and desperately needed. It could be argued that, in a sense, the Manhattan Project was "lubricated" with Teflon. The latter made his first public appearance after the war, in the early 1950s, in France. More precisely in a factory, outside Paris, directed by Marc Gregoire, where the American "plastic" was called "Tefal". Being a fishing enthusiast, Gregoire began coating his tackle with the substance, to minimize sticking and tangles. The idea of coating the pots came to his wife, who was tired of pans that burned horribly, causing food to char. At her request, Gregoire coated one of her pans, then another. The rest is history.

The next time you make perfectly fried eggs that don't stick to the pan, remember that the same non-stick material that now lines your pan contributed to the end of the War in the Pacific.