Innovations

In early 1944, DuPont, the operating contractor at Hanford, foresaw the need for four chemical separation facilities. These facilities, designated the T and U plants at location 200-West and the B and C plants at location 200-East (the C plant was never built), would be located approximately ten miles south of the reactors. The separation […]

The B Reactor at Hanford was built and operated by DuPont and was the world’s first production-scale nuclear reactor. B Reactor was the first of three plutonium reactors constructed in the 100 area during the Manhattan Project. Design of the B Reactor The design was based on the success of Enrico Fermi’s “Chicago Pile I” […]

Joe Dykstra: My name is Joe Dykstra, that’s spelled D-Y-K-S-T-R-A.  Cynthia Kelly: Ok, now you can talk about— Dykstra: I finished school with a degree in chemistry in May of ’43. I was in Iowa. During that year, I’d filled out an application for a defense job with Hooker Electrochemical Company in Niagara Falls. I […]

The “Rad Lab” was the short name for the Radiological Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Its director was Nobel laureate Ernest O. Lawrence. He gained recognition for his 60″ cyclotron,  a type of particle accelerator first invented in the early 1930s. Known as “atom smashers,” cyclotrons accelerate atoms through a vaccuum and use electromagnets […]

The Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge used the electromagnetic separation method, developed by Ernest Lawrence at University of California-Berkeley, to separate uranium isotopes. Electromagnetic Separation The electromagnetic separation method was the most developed of the potential ways to produce fissile material at the start of the Manhattan Project. Ernest O. Lawrence, working at the University […]

Stirling Auchincloss Colgate: I’m Stirling Auchincloss Colgate.  And the first name is spelled with an extra “I,” S-T-I-R-L-I-N-G. My middle name is Auchincloss, A-U-C-H-I-N-C-L-O-S-S. And that last name is Colgate, and when I was around ten or eleven years old or somewheres like that, I changed my name and chose that myself, so I’m happy […]

The K-25 Plant in Oak Ridge used the gaseous diffusion process to enrich uranium. Gaseous Diffusion Process The K-25 plant was an enormously ambitious and risky undertaking. A mile-long, U-shaped building, the K-25 plant was the world’s largest roofed building at the time. British scientists working on the “tube alloy,” code for the atomic bomb […]

One of the most important branches of the Manhattan Project was the Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) in Chicago. Using the name “Metallurgical Laboratory” as cover at the University of Chicago, scientists from the east and west coasts were brought together to this central location to develop chain-reacting “piles” for plutonium production, to devise methods for […]