ORNL: THE FIRST 50 YEARS--CHAPTER 2: HIGH-FLUX YEARS
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High-flux conditions prevailed at Clinton Laboratories after the
war, when surprising decisions affecting the facility's future were
made in St. Louis, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. At the federal
level, management of the national laboratories shifted from General
Leslie Groves and the Army Corps of Engineers to David Lilienthal
and the newly created civilian Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). In
Oak Ridge, the contract with Monsanto Chemical Company, the
industrial operator for Clinton Laboratories, was not renewed. The
University of Chicago, the proposed academic operator, failed to
assemble a management team, resulting in the selection of a new
industrial contractor, Union Carbide Corporation. Clinton
Laboratories became Clinton National Laboratory in 1947 and Oak
Ridge National Laboratory in 1948. Change was the watchword in the
tumultuous postwar period, as one unexpected event followed
another.
Despite management uncertainties and fluctuations, solid
accomplishments in science and technology were achieved. Under the
leadership of Eugene Wigner, Clinton Laboratories designed a
high-flux Materials Testing Reactor, the precursor of all modern
light-water reactors, and experimented with the Daniels Pile, a
forerunner of high-temperature gas-cooled reactors. The first of
thousands of radioisotope shipments left the Graphite Reactor in
1946, initiating a program of immense value to medical, biological,
and industrial science. New organizational units were formed to
study biology, metallurgy, and health physics, and several solid
scientific accomplishments were recorded in these fields before the
departures of Wigner and Monsanto.
Management fluctuations proved a source of anxiety and despair
among Laboratory staff during the 1947 Christmas season. By the
start of the new year in 1948, however, crucial management
decisions ensured the survival of Clinton Laboratories, which was
given a much broader mandate for fundamental science than it had
during the war.
MONSANTO'S MANAGEMENT
During the war, security concerns required officials to refer to
Clinton Laboratories by its code name, X-10. The personnel of
Monsanto Chemical Company, the new operating contractor, continued
this practice in the postwar years. The remote Appalachian location
of Clinton Laboratories, along with unpaved streets and spartan
living conditions, presented an easy target for ridicule.
Metallurgical Laboratory personnel in Chicago called X-10 "Down
Under," while Du Pont personnel labeled it the "Gopher Training
School." In official telegrams, Monsanto's staff referred to Oak
Ridge as "Dogpatch," taking their cue from Li'l Abner, a popular
comic strip lampooning "hillbilly" Appalachian life. Such
ill-concealed scorn did not bode well either for postwar Monsanto
administration or Laboratory research.
The choice of Monsanto as contract operator of Clinton Laboratories
seemed logical because of the Laboratories' focus on chemistry and
chemical technology. Monsanto was also interested in becoming a key
player in nuclear reactor development. Charles Thomas, Monsanto
vice president, was the driving force behind the company's entry
into nuclear science. A famous chemist, Thomas had established a
laboratory at Dayton, Ohio, that Monsanto purchased in 1936, making
it the company's central research laboratory.
In 1943, General Groves gave Thomas and Monsanto responsibility for
fabricating nuclear triggers at the Dayton laboratory. When Thomas
also agreed to supervise the operation of Clinton Laboratories in
1945, he merged both facilities into a single project and appointed
himself project director, although he kept his main office at
Monsanto's corporate headquarters in St. Louis.
When Whitaker and Doan left Oak Ridge, Thomas decided to establish
a dual directorship at Clinton Laboratories with both directors
reporting to him. For executive director in charge of general
administration and operations, he selected James Lum, who had
assisted him in managing the Dayton laboratory. As Lum's assistant,
he brought in Prescott Sandidge, who had managed Monsanto phosphate
and munitions plants.
Transferring 60 staff members to Oak Ridge from other Monsanto
plants, Thomas reorganized the administration of Clinton
Laboratories. Among the new administrators were plant manager
Robert Thumser, shop and instrument superintendent Hart Fisher,
chief accountant Clarence Koenig, and superintendent of support
services Harold Bishop. Because many scientists returned to
universities at the end of the war, Thomas and the Clinton staff
also had to recruit replacements. Among the new staff members were
Walter Jordan, P. R. Bell, and Jack Buck, who came from the radar
laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and
Ellison Taylor, Henry Zeldes, Harold Secoy, and Frank Miles, who
came from the closed wartime laboratory at Columbia University.
In 1947, under Monsanto's management, Clinton Laboratories employed
2141 workers, making building expansion imperative. A moratorium on
new construction during 1946 and 1947, while the facility's future
was debated in Washington, caused personnel and equipment to be
moved into empty buildings at the Y-12 Plant, which was shifting
its focus from the electromagnetic separation of uranium-235 to
precision machining of weapons components.
Expecting Clinton Laboratories to build the nation's first
peacetime research reactor and the first electric power-generating
reactor, Thomas courted Eugene Wigner, bringing him from Princeton
to Oak Ridge several times during late 1945 to conduct seminars and
consult on reactor designs. In early 1946, he lured Wigner into a
year's leave from Princeton University to become Clinton
Laboratories' research and development director by promising to
relieve him of administrative duties, which Thomas assigned to
James Lum. Wigner also acquired an assistant for the administration
of research and development, Edgar Murphy, a scientist who had
served as Army major in the Manhattan Engineer District office
during the war.
When his Princeton colleagues asked Wigner why he was going to
Dogpatch, he told them that, as one of the three major nuclear
research laboratories in the United States, Clinton Laboratories
would become important "in the life of the whole nation."
As its research director, he intended to focus on science education
by (1) developing research reactors suitable for use at
universities, (2) establishing nuclear science training under his
former graduate student Frederick Seitz, and (3) coordinating
scientific research with universities throughout the South. "Only
too much have both Chicago and Oak Ridge lived in the past on
fundamental knowledge that has been acquired either before the war
or at one of the other government research centers," Wigner
observed. "As these wells begin to run dry, this situation becomes
increasingly unhealthy."
Early in his tenure, Wigner outlined his weekly routine. On
Mondays, he would remain in his office with an open door to hear
staff advice and grievances. On "Holy" Tuesdays, he would vanish,
pursuing his own research to "keep my knowledge alive." Although he
avoided committee meetings to the extent possible, the remainder of
the week he would attend to duties, circulating through the
Laboratories to discuss scientific and administrative problems.
"We'll have long arguments just as you are having them now with
each other," he warned the staff, "and I fully expect to be wrong
in most of them--that is, from Wednesday to Friday."
HIGH-FLUX DESIGNS
When Wigner arrived as research director, staff at Clinton
Laboratories had begun designing new types of reactors. Researchers
investigated the possibilities of developing a high-neutron-flux
reactor for testing materials and a gas-cooled Daniels Pile for
demonstrating the use of nuclear energy for electricity production.
The Laboratories' chemists also initiated research aimed at a
high-flux homogeneous reactor.
Wigner devoted most of his attention to the high-flux reactor,
subsequently renamed the Materials Testing Reactor. Its chief
function was to bombard test materials with neutrons to determine
which materials would be best for future reactors. A reactor
designer's reactor, it provided the most intense neutron source at
the time.
Initial designs called for use of enriched uranium fuel, heavy
water in the interior lattice to moderate the neutrons, and
ordinary (light) water to cool the exterior. Wigner and Alvin
Weinberg, appointed by Wigner to be Lothar Nordheim's successor as
chief of physics, concluded that use of heavy water could severely
reduce the flux of very fast neutrons.
Squeezing heavy water out of the reactor design, they selected
ordinary water as both moderator and coolant. Instead of uranium
rods canned in aluminum as in the Graphite Reactor, the fuel
element or core would be uranium sandwiched between aluminum
cladding or plates. To ensure a high thermal neutron flux for
research, the plates were surrounded by a neutron reflector made of
beryllium. In time, this design served as the prototype for many
university research reactors and, in a sense, for all light-water
reactors that later propelled naval craft and generated commercial
power.
Miles Leverett and Marvin Mann headed a team of scientists and
engineers who designed the Materials Testing Reactor at Oak Ridge.
About 60 staff members became involved in the design over nearly
six years.
Wigner's best-known contribution was the curved design of the
aluminum fuel plates in the reactor core. These plates were placed
parallel to one another with narrow spaces between for the cooling
water; the reactor's power was largely set by how much water flowed
past the fuel plates. Concern arose that intense heat might warp
the plates, bringing them in contact and restricting coolant flow.
After pondering this potential problem, Wigner directed that the
plates be warped, or curved, to improve their structural resistance
to stress. Because warped plates could only bow in one direction,
they would not constrict water flow.
Adjacent to the Materials Testing Reactor, Leverett's team planned
to construct a plant to reprocess spent nuclear fuel, using the
precipitation process developed during the war. In reprocessing,
nuclear fuel is extracted from the spent fuel and separated from
the accumulated fission products for reuse in reactors. Chemists
John Swartout and Frank Steahly recommended that the "25
solvent-extraction process" replace the more expensive
precipitation process. Their recommendation was accepted. Solvent
extraction--separating one material from others dissolved in one
liquid by transferring it into another liquid that cannot mix with
the first--eventually became the standard method worldwide for
reprocessing spent nuclear fuel.
Monsanto's principal concern was the Daniels Pile, named for
Farrington Daniels who, at the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory in
1944, had designed a reactor with a bed of enriched uranium pebbles
moderated by beryllium oxide and cooled by helium gas. Some called
it the pebble-bed reactor. In May 1946, the Manhattan Engineer
District directed Monsanto to proceed with the design, leading to
the construction of an experimental Daniels Pile to demonstrate
electric power generation.
To accomplish this task, Monsanto brought Daniels from the
University of Wisconsin as a consultant. The company also recruited
engineers from industry and brought them to Clinton Laboratories,
where they formed a Power Pile Division headed by Rogers
McCullough. This division identified materials suitable for
high-temperature reactors and developed pressure vessels and pumps,
piping, and seals for high-pressure coolants; it also studied heat
exchanger designs.
Because its staff was recruited largely from outside Clinton
Laboratories, the Power Pile Division was never fully integrated
into the organization. The project, moreover, encountered numerous
design problems. Critics of the Daniels Pile contended that it
would never become a practical power-generating reactor and that
building a demonstration project wasted time and resources. After
all, Logan Emlet and operators of the Graphite Reactor had
demonstrated power production with a toy steam engine and generator
that used heat from the air-cooled reactor. Why, critics said,
should we pursue a more complicated and expensive power-production
strategy?
Such criticism caused high-level support for the Daniels Pile to
wane by 1948. It was never constructed, and Daniels, as a professor
at the University of Wisconsin, would gain renown as a national
expert on solar energy.
ATOMS FOR HEALTH
Distribution of the radioisotopes produced at the Graphite Reactor
for biological and industrial research rapidly became the most
publicized activity at Clinton Laboratories in the postwar years.
Orders began arriving soon after the Laboratory published a
radioisotope catalogue in the June 1946 issue of Science, which
listed isotopes Laboratory staff could prepare and ship. On August
2, 1946, Wigner stood in front of the Graphite Reactor to hand the
first peacetime product of atomic energy, a small quantity of
carbon-14, to an official of a cancer research hospital in St.
Louis, home of Monsanto Chemical Company. Soon, nearly 50 different
radioisotopes were regularly available for distribution. In 1947,
to handle their production and distribution, Logan Emlet of
Operations established an Isotopes Section headed by Arthur Rupp;
as the program expanded, it later became the Isotopes Division,
which was headed by Rupp and John Gillette, among others.
One of the earliest cases of technology transfer from Clinton
Laboratories came as a spin-off of the radioisotopes program.
Abbott Laboratories located its original radiopharmaceutical
production plant in Oak Ridge near the source of the radioisotopes.
The plant moved to Chicago in the 1960s when the Laboratory ceased
commercial production of most radioisotopes.
HIGH-FLUX ORGANIZATION
Like most new managers, Wigner sought to sharpen the organization's
mission and improve its performance. He made both minor changes,
such as the appointment of Edward Shapiro as chief of the
Laboratories' technical libraries, and major changes, such as
forming and staffing new divisions. Thinking solid-state physics
was a key to reactor design, Wigner established a small group for
solid-state studies in the Physics Division under Sidney Siegel and
Douglas Billington; he formed a new division to investigate the
effects of radiation on metals; and he persuaded Monsanto
executives to consolidate and augment staffing of the machine shops
that supported the research projects.
During the war, small machine shops scattered among several
divisions provided the tooling, finishing, and precision machine
work required for scientific experimentation. In 1946, Wigner urged
that these shops be merged into groups comprising at least 200
craftsmen. After some resistance to the suggestion, Executive
Director James Lum established the central research shops in 1947
and imported Paul Kofmehl, a Swiss craftsman, as superintendent,
with Earl Longendorfer as his assistant.
Skilled crafts people, who machined the hardware for the reactors
and other projects, were put to work in the research shops. They
acquired apprentices in the ancient tradition of the crafts and
supplied scientists and engineers with the unique equipment and
tools they required. As the work load increased, the research shops
evolved into central machine shops and eventually became the
Fabrication Department in the Plant and Equipment Division under
the supervision of Robert Farnham. The shops even included an
old-fashioned Tennessee blacksmith, Miller Lamb, who fabricated
lead bricks for radiation shielding and produced customized nuts,
bolts, and metal parts. Nearly a quarter century after Lamb retired
in 1969, Laboratory personnel still pass his handiwork every day:
he forged the ladder rungs on the smokestacks at the Laboratory.
In 1945, Miles Leverett purchased a secondhand mill to roll, cast,
and forge reactor fuel elements and metal parts. He also recruited
metallurgists for materials research. Declaring that "an integrated
program on the properties and possibilities of materials from the
structural and nuclear point of view is greatly to be desired," in
1946 Wigner hired William Johnson from Westinghouse as a consultant
on the formation of a Metallurgy Division. Johnson recruited a
half-dozen metallurgists to form the division under the leadership
of John Frye, Jr.
Metallurgists faced the challenge of fabricating reactor components
of uranium and aluminum alloys, beryllium, zirconium, and other
exotic metals and conducted intensive research into the functioning
of metallic elements under high temperatures and radiation stress
in reactors. Starting with fewer than a dozen staff members, the
Metallurgy Division increased to as many as 300 people. In 1952,
Frye also organized a group under John Warde as a ceramics
laboratory. In addition to conducting ceramics research, it
fabricated crucibles, insulators, and fuel elements, and customized
parts for reactors. The group also employed a practical potter or
two to make molds. From these modest beginnings, the Laboratory
would become a world center for metallic alloy and ceramics
research.
HIGH-FLUX BIOLOGY
Just as the atom's nucleus captivated physical scientists, the
living cell was the center of attention for life scientists. The
Graphite Reactor supplied a variety of radioisotopes that helped
bring about a revolution in the life and medical sciences by
leading to a new understanding of metabolic processes and genetic
activities. Developments in biological sciences and the need to
better understand the effects of radiation on human health and the
environment led Wigner to expand the biology and health physics
organizations.
When John Wirth, head of the Health Division, returned to the
National Cancer Institute in September 1946, Wigner and Lum split
the Health Division into two new research sections, plus a medical
department, which was headed by physician Jean Felton and later by
Thomas Lincoln and then Seaton Garrett. In October, Wigner
recruited Alexander Hollaender to form and head a Biology Division.
Hollaender had received degrees in physical chemistry from the
University of Wisconsin. At the National Institutes of Health, he
had studied the effects of radiation on cells and the use of
ultraviolet light to control airborne diseases.
Hollaender's initial research plan at Clinton Laboratories called
for studying radiation's effects on living cells, including such
cell constituents as proteins and nucleic acids.
Beginning with a few radiobiologists studying microorganisms and
fruit flies in crowded rooms behind the dispensary, Hollaender
initiated a broad program that would make his division the largest
biological laboratory in the world. Hollaender would successfully
unite fundamental research in the biological sciences with physics,
chemistry, and mathematics and would recruit widely to staff the
initial research units in biochemistry, cytogenetics, physiology,
and radiology. William Arnold, Waldo Cohn, Richard Kimball, Elliot
Volkin, and William and Liane Russell were among the Biology
Division's most respected staff members, a group that included 70
scientists and technicians by 1947. Lacking space at the X-10 site,
the new division moved into vacated buildings at the Y-12 Plant.
The biological research that attracted the most public interest was
the genetic experiments conducted under the supervision of William
and Liane Russell, who used mice to identify the long-term genetic
implications of radiation exposure for humans. Among the division's
early scientific accomplishments, however, Hollaender took special
pride in William Arnold's discoveries of the electronic nature of
energy transfer in photosynthesis, Waldo Cohn and Elliott (Ken)
Volkin's discovery of the nucleotide linkage in ribonucleic acid
(RNA), and Volkin and Larry Astrachan's discovery of messenger RNA.
The Biology Division's greatest long-term influence on science,
however, may have come from its cooperation with the University of
Tennessee-Oak Ridge Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and with
universities and research centers throughout the nation and the
world.
The second division separated from the old Health Division in 1946
was Health Physics, directed by K. Z. Morgan. The Health Physics
Division eventually included 70 staff members who monitored
radiation levels in research and production areas and furnished
improved radiation detection devices. Early research included
studies of radioisotopes discharged into river systems, estimates
of thermal neutron tolerances, and development of new methods to
detect radiation.
In 1944, Oak Ridge health physicists trained personnel responsible
for radiation protection at Hanford. They continued this schooling
at Oak Ridge until 1950 when the AEC established fellowships for
graduate study at Vanderbilt and Rochester universities. The Army,
Navy, and Air Force also sent personnel to receive health physics
training at Oak Ridge. In addition to its land-based monitoring
efforts, the Health Physics Division used boats to measure
radioactivity entering the Clinch River from White Oak Creek and
airplanes to monitor radioactivity in the air above Oak Ridge. As
a result, the division was said to have its own "army, air force,
and navy."
HIGH-FLUX EDUCATION
In late 1945, Martin Whitaker met with University of Tennessee
officials to discuss a science education partnership that would
allow young researchers to complete graduate studies at the
university while working at Clinton Laboratories. This program was
the precursor of an extensive cooperative graduate program with the
University of Tennessee that has continued to this day.
In 1946, the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies (ORINS), a
nonprofit corporation of 14 southeastern universities, was
chartered with William Pollard as its director. In 1947, the
institute became an AEC government-owned, contractor-operated
facility. Under its authority, Clinton Laboratories' Biology
Division trained scientists in the use of radioisotopes. Later
ORINS opened a clinical facility where radioisotopes were used for
cancer treatment.
In 1949, the institute obtained support from the AEC to open the
American Museum of Atomic Energy in a wartime cafeteria building.
In 1974, the museum, renamed the American Museum of Science and
Energy, moved into a new building adjacent to the corporate
headquarters of the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies, which
itself had been renamed Oak Ridge Associated Universities and had
nearly 50 sponsoring members.
Universities that joined the institute were invited to use the
Laboratory's scientific facilities. Under the management of Russell
Poor, the institute began a program for faculty research at the
Laboratory in the summer of 1947 with two participants. That number
increased to 70 by 1950, a level maintained for many years.
Supplementing this research program were traveling lectures and
seminars conducted by Laboratory scientists at the participating
universities. The resulting interaction between Laboratory
scientists and university faculty, along with faculty and student
use of research equipment available at the Laboratory, contributed
significantly to the spectacular growth in graduate science
education throughout the Southeast during the postwar years.
HIGH-FLUX TRAINING
In August 1946, Eugene Wigner opened the Laboratories' Clinton
Training School with Frederick Seitz as its director. Although
Wigner envisioned it as a small postdoctoral seminar in nuclear
technology, more than 50 people from the military, industry, and
academia enrolled. Among the first participants were Herbert
MacPherson, Sidney Siegel, John Simpson, Everitt Blizard, Douglas
Billington, and Donald Stevens, all of whom subsequently became
renowned for their activities in science. The most famous graduate,
however, was Captain Hyman Rickover of the U.S. Navy.
The Navy had first provided Wigner and Szilard funding for nuclear
experiments in 1939. During the war, Navy scientists developed a
thermal diffusion process for separating uranium isotopes; the S-50
plant in Oak Ridge was built during World War II for this purpose.
Navy interest in using nuclear energy for ship propulsion
continued, and in early 1946 Philip Abelson of the Navy research
team spent several months at the Laboratory studying Wigner's
approach to reactor design. In May 1946, Admiral Chester Nimitz
assigned five Navy officers and three civilians to Oak Ridge. The
officers were Hyman Rickover, Louis Roddis, James Dunford, Raymond
Dick, and Miles Libbey. Rickover later recalled his Oak Ridge
experience:
When I started at Oak Ridge in 1946, there were 4 other naval
officers along with me and 3 civilians. Each was sent to Oak Ridge
individually, and each started working on his own. . .As soon as I
got to Oak Ridge, I realized that if we ever were going to have
atomic power plants in the Navy, I would have to assemble these
people and train them as a group. And I used a very simple
expedient; I arranged to write their fitness reports, so once they
knew I was writing their fitness reports, they started paying
attention to me. So once I did that, then I was able to weld them
into a team and teach them specialized duties in order to get ready
for building a submarine plant. Well, the first attempt at building
a power plant at Oak Ridge was a civilian one, and it failed. Then
unofficially I persuaded the people, the engineers, and the
scientists, who were engaged in that enterprise, without any formal
permission, to start working on a submarine plant, and they did
this for a while. Meanwhile, I advised the Chief of the Bureau of
Ships to retain this group of trained people together, and as soon
as we came back to Washington, to have us start working on a
submarine plant.
Under Rickover's exuberant direction, navy officers enrolled in the
Training School attended every seminar, interviewed every scientist
willing to talk, and wrote numerous reports that became the paper
foundation of the nuclear navy. Rickover later chose the
pressurized-water reactor proposed by Alvin Weinberg to propel the
nuclear ships built by the Navy. Legends about Rickover's
activities at Clinton Laboratories still abound. For example, he
sometimes elicited information from scientists by introducing
himself: "I'm Captain Rickover; I'm stupid."
With the end of Monsanto management and the return of Wigner and
Seitz to their universities in 1947, the Clinton Training School
ceased to exist. Despite its brief tenure, the school was
responsible for launching a long and fruitful relationship between
the Navy and the Laboratory. Rickover entered into several nuclear
design contracts with the Laboratory, and he often employed
Laboratory scientists, such as Theodore Rockwell, Frank Kerze, and
Jack Kyger, on Navy projects. Everitt Blizard, a civilian who had
accompanied Rickover to Oak Ridge, remained at the Laboratory,
where he supervised investigations of reactor shielding. Rickover
sometimes advised Alvin Weinberg on Laboratory management. He also
strongly supported the formation and subsequent educational work of
the Oak Ridge School of Reactor Technology (locally dubbed the
Klinch Kollege of Knuclear Knowledge) housed at the Laboratory
between 1950 and 1965.
RESEARCH AND REGULATIONS
By his own account, Wigner's most troublesome problems as research
director emanated from the Army bureaucracy. In the postwar years,
the Army continued its wartime security policies. This meddlesome
oversight made the exchange of scientific data with Hanford and Los
Alamos difficult for Wigner and his research staff. This and
similar problems caused Wigner to have several confrontations with
Army authorities, notably Colonel Walter Leber.
Colonel Leber had replaced Captain James Grafton as the Army
representative for Clinton Laboratories in May 1946, and he hired
a large number of people to monitor its activities. His office
staff included 22 people to inspect construction and
administration, 3 to investigate security breaches, and 29 to
examine research and development. This large group audited even
minor details, down to the book titles ordered by the library.
Their actions soon alienated both scientists and Monsanto
executives, and James Lum strenuously objected to Leber's efforts
to "interfere and assume responsibilities which are reserved only
for Monsanto under the present contract." To reduce confusion and
improve communications, Lum and Wigner asked Edgar Murphy, formerly
an Army major, to serve as a liaison with Leber's staff.
Tensions continued, however, notably in the case of experiments
Wigner wished to conduct to test the use of beryllium as a neutron
trap or reflector. He encountered a "Catch 22" situation created by
Leber's interpretation of a regulation the Army had imposed after
Louis Slotin lost his life during a critical experiment at Los
Alamos. Wigner insisted the tests were completely safe, but Leber
required that the debilitating regulations, which brought the tests
to a virtual standstill, be meticulously observed. Only after
review at the highest level were the experiments allowed to
continue. Such delays discouraged Wigner and in time caused him to
return to university life.
HIGH-FLUX SCIENCE
"Speaking as individuals who have been interested in radiation
effects on solids since the conception of the first large
reactors," Wigner and Frederick Seitz wrote, "we find it gratifying
that a phenomenon which originated as a pure nuisance promises to
provide us with useful information about the solid state in general
and about many of the materials we use every day."
By "nuisance," they meant the swelling and distortion of graphite
under the bombardment of neutrons from nuclear fission, an effect
predicted by Wigner and thus called the Wigner disease. Concern
about the effects of this "disease" on the Graphite Reactor at Oak
Ridge and similar reactors at Hanford stimulated intense interest
in solid-state physics at Clinton Laboratories and elsewhere in the
postwar years. This fascination played a role in Wigner's formation
of the Metallurgy Division and in his personal attention to neutron
scattering experiments and zirconium investigations.
Although aluminum had served as cladding for uranium in the
Graphite Reactor and other early reactors, it was not suitable for
use in the high-temperature reactors designed in the late 1940s.
Metallurgists considered substituting zirconium, a metal that
resists corrosion in water at high temperatures. Zirconium,
however, seemed to have a strong tendency to absorb neutrons,
ultimately "poisoning" or slowing nuclear reactions.
In 1947, Wigner authorized a group of Laboratory researchers to
study this problem. Wigner devised a "pile oscillator" to move
materials regularly in and out of a reactor. Using a washing
machine gearbox to power the oscillator, Herbert Pomerance later
that year discovered that zirconium's capability for neutron
absorption had been vastly overstated because of its contamination
by the element hafnium, which had a much greater poisoning effect.
Zirconium minerals have traces of hafnium, whose chemical
characteristics are nearly identical to zirconium's, making
economical separation of the two difficult. With funding from
Captain Rickover and the Navy, laboratory researchers across the
country investigated ways to separate the two elements. In 1949,
chemical technologists at the Y-12 Plant, under the direction of
Warren Grimes, developed a successful separation technique and
scaled it to production level under the direction of Clarence
Larson, then superintendent of the Y-12 Plant.
Zirconium alloys became essential first to the Navy's reactors and
later to commercial power reactors. Zirconium rods filled with
uranium pellets made up the fuel cores of nearly all light-water
reactors, and hafnium was used in the control rods to regulate
nuclear reactions.
As authorities on solid-state physics, Wigner and Seitz were
intrigued by the interaction of radiation with materials, and
especially by the neutron scattering experiments of the
Laboratory's Ernest Wollan and Clifford Shull. With a modified
X-ray diffractometer that Wollan installed at a beam hole of the
Graphite Reactor in late 1945, Wollan and Shull systematically
studied the fundamentals of thermal neutron scattering. Having
difficulty making sense of the diffuse scattering from various
forms of carbon--diamond dust, graphite powder, and charcoal--they
called on Wigner for advice. Shull later recalled:
I well remember a discussion that Ernie and I had with Eugene
Wigner, then the research director of the laboratory and a
physicist of infinite wisdom and physical intuition, about this
puzzling feature. After listening to our tale of woe and reflecting
on the problem, he surprised us very much by calmly suggesting
"maybe there is something new here, and maybe we have to relax our
notions about conservation of particles." I can only say that I
came away from that meeting with the feeling that Wigner had more
faith in our experiments than perhaps Ernie and I had!
After a few months of additional experimentation, Wollan and Shull
recognized that the consistency of their data had been distorted by
spurious multiple scatterings in the specimens being investigated,
an effect unfamiliar to them. This finding allowed them to pursue
their studies, which established neutron diffraction as a
quantitative research tool fostering scientific knowledge of
crystallography and magnetism. Their work built the foundation on
which neutron scattering research developed throughout the world,
including a neutron crystallography program under Henri Levy in the
Chemistry Division at the Laboratory. Although a half-century has
passed since the initial experiments, neutron scattering remains a
fertile field of research.
HIGH-FLUX MANAGEMENT
In late 1945, the War Department drafted a bill to continue
military control of atomic research and energy. Atomic scientists
at Chicago and Oak Ridge vigorously opposed the measure and formed
associations to lobby for civilian control. After a protracted
political battle, the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 established
civilian control under a five-member commission. With David
Lilienthal, formerly chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, as
its first chairman, the AEC assumed control from the Manhattan
District in January 1947. While this high-level political struggle
was in progress, the disposition of the facilities built by the
Manhattan District, including Clinton Laboratories, was at issue as
well.
In early 1946, General Groves had appointed a committee of
prominent scientists to plan the Manhattan District's nuclear
activities and budget for 1947. Overall, the committee urged
expansion of research and development for both production of
fissionable materials and advancement of nuclear power. On the one
hand, it suggested awarding contracts to university and private
laboratories for unclassified basic research. On the other hand, it
urged that national laboratories conduct classified research
requiring equipment too expensive or products too hazardous for
universities to handle.
As the committee viewed it, each national laboratory should have a
board of directors from universities in its region that would form
associations to sponsor research and perhaps become the contracting
operators. The committee initially recommended only two national
laboratories, one at Argonne near Chicago and another serving the
northeastern states. It expected the eventual formation of a
national laboratory in California, but it ignored the Southeast and
other regions.
Led by George Peagram and Isidor Rabi of Columbia University,
universities in the northeast campaigned to acquire a national
laboratory. The Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology had closed at the war's end, and the Substitute Alloy
Materials Laboratory at Columbia University had been moved to the
K-25 Plant in Oak Ridge. Columbia and other northeastern
universities urged the relocation of Clinton Laboratories to the
Northeast, and some scientists at Clinton Laboratories liked the
idea. More importantly, General Groves was amenable to it, and he
selected an old Army post on Long Island as the future site of
Brookhaven National Laboratory.
In April 1946, the University of Chicago agreed to operate Argonne
National Laboratory, with an association of midwestern universities
offering to sponsor the research. Argonne thereby became the first
"national" laboratory. It did not, however, remain at its original
location in the Argonne forest. In 1947, it moved farther west from
the "Windy City" to a new site on Illinois farmland. When Alvin
Weinberg visited Argonne's director, Walter Zinn, in 1947, he asked
him what kind of reactor was to be built at the new site. When Zinn
described a heavy-water reactor operating at one-tenth the power of
the Materials Testing Reactor under design at Oak Ridge, Weinberg
joked it would be simpler if Zinn took the Oak Ridge design and
operated the Materials Testing Reactor at one-tenth capacity. The
joke proved unintentionally prophetic.
Clinton Laboratories' rural ambiance did not please Robert
Oppenheimer, Isidor Rabi, and James Conant, all influential members
of the AEC's scientific advisory committee. Early in 1947,
Oppenheimer declared that "Clinton will not live even if it is
built up." Perturbed by this attitude, Charles Thomas of Monsanto
demanded changes in Monsanto's operating contract at the
Laboratories, in part as a sign that East Tennessee would be
included in the federal government's postwar plans. On a no-profit,
no-loss basis, the contract's chief attractions for Monsanto were
the inside knowledge it provided of nuclear reactor advances and
the public relations benefits it accrued for the company as a
result of its patriotic efforts to protect the nation's security
and advance the nation's technological capabilities.
Such virtues had their limits, especially when the war's outcome
was no longer at stake. During negotiations to renew the contract
in 1947, Thomas requested that Monsanto be allowed to increase its
maximum fee for services from $65,000 a month to $100,000 a month.
This request was not warmly received at the AEC; moreover, Thomas's
request to build the Materials Testing Reactor near Monsanto's
Dayton laboratory or near its corporate headquarters in St. Louis
rather than Oak Ridge was also unacceptable. In May 1947, Thomas
and Monsanto decided not to seek to renew the contract for
operating Clinton Laboratories when it expired in June. The
company, however, agreed to serve on a month-to-month basis until
the AEC secured another contract operator.
Loss of the contract at Clinton Laboratories did not mar Charles
Thomas's career. In early 1948, he signed a contract to operate the
new AEC plant at Miamisburg near Dayton, later named Mound
Laboratory. That same year, he was elected president of the
American Chemical Society, and in 1951 he became president of
Monsanto. His director at Clinton Laboratories, James Lum, left for
Australia in August 1947 to build an aspirin factory. Thomas made
Lum's assistant, Prescott Sandidge, the Laboratories' executive
director, pending final contract closure. Colonel Walter Leber,
temporary director for the Army, left in the summer of 1947 as
well, later becoming Ohio River Division commander for the Corps of
Engineers and governor of the Panama Canal Zone.
When Wigner returned to "monastic" life at Princeton University,
also in the summer of 1947, Clinton Laboratories was left without
a research director. Thomas decided to leave selection of Wigner's
successor to the new contract operator. He asked Edgar Murphy,
Wigner's assistant, to coordinate research pending selection of a
new contractor and director.
Of his work at the Laboratory in 1946 and 1947, Wigner later
lamented: "Oak Ridge at that time was so terribly bureaucratized
that I am sorry to say I could not stand it. The person who took
over was Alvin Weinberg, and he slowly, slowly improved things. I
would not have had the patience."
BLACK CHRISTMAS
Because the Argonne and Brookhaven laboratories would be operated
by associations of universities, William Pollard and the Oak Ridge
Institute of Nuclear Studies considered assuming Monsanto's
contract. The AEC, however, preferred that the University of
Chicago resume its operation of Clinton Laboratories, and it
announced in September 1947 that a contract would be negotiated
with Chicago. The university thereby would become contract operator
of both the Argonne National Laboratory and Clinton Laboratories,
which was renamed Clinton National Laboratory in late 1947 while
negotiations with Chicago were under way.
The AEC was willing to enter a four-year contract with the
university. Negotiations floundered, however, over the division of
responsibilities between the university and the AEC for personnel
policies, salaries, auditing, and oversight. Moreover, the
university decided to recruit a new director and management team
for the Laboratory, despite pleas for the return of Wigner. William
Harrell, the university business manager, paraded prominent
scientists to the Laboratory for orientation; but when offered the
director's position, all demurred. Near the end of 1947, Warren
Johnson, wartime chief of the Laboratory's Chemistry Division,
agreed to serve as the interim director.
Concerned that the AEC's research program might become too
academic, Lilienthal established a committee of industrial
advisers, and during a November visit to Oak Ridge, he discussed
with Clark Center, manager of Carbide & Carbon, a subsidiary of
Union Carbide Corporation at Oak Ridge, the possibility of the
company assuming management of the Laboratory. Union Carbide
managed the nearby Y-12 and K-25 plants, and it already had a staff
and offices in Oak Ridge that could easily add the Laboratory to
their responsibilities. In addition, Union Carbide wanted to
simplify its labor union relations. Workers at K-25 had joined the
Congress of Industrial Organizations union, and craftsmen at the
Laboratory had joined the American Federation of Labor union. A
December 1947 strike over wages and benefits at K-25, which were
lower there than at the Laboratory, threatened the company's
tranquility and productivity. By assuming the Laboratory's
management, Union Carbide possibly could abate labor tension.
With Lilienthal ill and bedridden and other AEC commissioners on
holiday excursions, Carroll Wilson, the AEC's general manager, made
the decision on Christmas Eve in 1947 to replace the University of
Chicago with Union Carbide. At the same time, he decided to
centralize all reactor development at Chicago's Argonne National
Laboratory, transferring responsibility for Oak Ridge's high-flux
Materials Testing Reactor there.
The day after Christmas, the AEC concurred with these decisions.
Wilson went to St. Louis to persuade Monsanto to hang on at Oak
Ridge an additional two months until Union Carbide could become
sufficiently organized for the task. The job of carrying the
message to Oak Ridge fell to James Fisk, director of research, and
he received the welcome one would expect for a bearer of ill
tidings.
Remembered in the Laboratory long afterward as "Black Christmas,"
the shock came during the round of holiday parties. Reaction to the
surprise was caustic. "Deck the Pile with Garlands Dreary,"
followed by several bawdy verses, reverberated through the halls.
"It was rapid-fire and rough," admitted Lilienthal. He went on to
say, "The people at Clinton Lab engaged in fundamental research
felt they had been double-crossed, for we proposed to have Carbide
& Carbon operate the lab (what was left of it, that is, minus the
high-flux reactor), and this caused great anguish, not only among
the chronic complainers but quite generally."
Laboratory staff declared the decisions represented a demotion from
national laboratory status to a radioisotopes and
chemical-processing factory. Leaders of the Oak Ridge Institute for
Nuclear Studies fired messages to President Truman and the AEC
protesting the decisions as a blow to Southern scientific
aspirations. This thinking ignored the AEC's promise to continue
fundamental research at Clinton Laboratories, specifically in
physics, chemistry, biology, health physics, and metallurgy. Rather
than reducing the facility's status, in January 1948 the AEC
changed its official name to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ending
the use of Clinton, which had been the nearest town during project
construction.
The first impact of the decisions on the Laboratory was the
transfer of the Power Pile Division, formed to study the Daniels
pebble-bed reactor, to Argonne National Laboratory. Before leaving
Oak Ridge, the division had begun studying Rickover's naval
reactor. Harold Etherington, Samuel Untermeyer, and others in the
group subsequently gained recognition for their designs of reactor
prototypes for the atomiry. Before leaving Oak Ridge, the division
had begun studying Rickover's naval reactor. Harold Etherington,
Samuel Untermeyer, and others in the group subsequently gained
recognition for their designs of reactor prototypes for the
atomic-powered Nautilus submarine and an early breeder reactor.
aboratories, and cooperated with regional universities in extensive
science education efforts.
Oak Ridge clearly qualified for national laboratory rank, becoming
one of three original national laboratories. Argonne and Brookhaven
laboratories were built in 1948 on new sites, making Oak Ridge the
oldest national laboratory on its original site.
As these postwar manueverings suggest, Oak Ridge, located in the
Appalachian Mountains far from the bright lights of any metropolis,
has had to prove from its earliest days that its location was
appropriate for its purpose. Surviving in an environment of
political and administrative intrigue has required institutional
perseverance and ingenuity--qualities that would serve the
Laboratory's science and management well in the years ahead.
SIDEBARS
SAMUEL LIND: TENNESSEE'S OWN
Samuel Colville Lind, called the father of radiation chemistry in
America, came to the Laboratory in 1948 as a consultant after a
long and distinguished career that was far from over. Author of 160
scientific articles, the first published in 1903 and the last in
1964, Lind's career began in Tennessee, took him to Europe at the
turn of the century, and ended at the Laboratory in 1965.
A son of a Swedish immigrant, Lind received his early education in
McMinnville, Tennessee. In 1895, he enrolled in the humanities
program at Washington and Lee College, where he avoided science
until senior requirements forced him to take chemistry. Lind's
chemistry professor inspired him to return to the college after
receiving his humanities degree to spend a fifth year studying
chemistry. He then pursued the study of chemistry at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of
Leipzig. Lind received his doctorate in 1905.
During Lind's 10 years as a college student, the study of
radioactivity was beginning in Europe. In 1895, Wilhelm Roentgen
discovered X rays; in 1896, Henri Becquerel discovered the
radioactivity of uranium; in 1897, J. J. Thomson discovered the
electron; and in 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie discovered the
radioactive elements radium and polonium.
Earning a university sabbatical, Lind went to France in 1910 to
study the new phenomenon of radioactivity at the laboratory of
Madame Curie, who received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1911.
The Curie laboratory, he wrote:
consisted of about a dozen research rooms scattered over the
ground floor, including a small shop and library. Only workers
already having the Ph.D. degree were accepted. Madame Curie
interviewed me in the little library and advised me to take a
course of laboratory training in radioactivity from her first
assistant, Dr. Debierne. This I did and at the same time
attended Madame Curie's lectures on radioactivity at the
Sorbonne. Her lectures were most interesting in tracing the
history of the discovery of radium and polonium by herself and
her late husband, Pierre Curie, and their subsequent studies
of them. As was the custom for lectures by one of great
distinction, her first few lectures were attended in her honor
by many other scientists of high, established rank.
At the Curie laboratory, Lind collected radon from solutions of
radium salts and used it to study alpha particles. In 1911, he
departed for a radium institute in Vienna as a visiting scientist
and worked there with Victor Hess, who later received the Nobel
Prize for physics for his discovery of cosmic rays.
Returning to the United States in 1912, Lind could find no radium
with which to continue his experiments with alpha particles. At the
time, radium was so rare that it cost $120,000 per gram. Learning
that the U.S. Bureau of Mines in Denver was recovering radium from
Colorado ore for use in cancer therapy, Lind took a job there as a
chemist in 1913, adopting Curie's fractional crystallization method
to extract about 8.9 grams of radium worth nearly $1 million.
The Bureau of Mines placed a half gram of radium in Lind's custody
for research, and he carried it with him throughout his career,
using it for many radiation studies with graduate students and
other collaborators. He also carried some radium in his body as a
result of an accident in Denver; his presence in a laboratory would
sometimes set off radiation alarms.
After finishing his work for the Bureau of Mines in 1923, Lind went
to Washington, D.C. as chief chemist of the Bureau of Mines and
then as associate director of the Fixed Nitrogen Laboratory of the
Department of Agriculture. In 1926 he moved to the University of
Minnesota as director of the School of Chemistry and later as dean
of the Institute of Technology. He retired in 1948 and came to Oak
Ridge as a consultant to Clark Center, head of Carbide operations
in Oak Ridge.
Most of his work naturally was concerned with research operations
in Oak Ridge, and he spent most of his time at ORNL, particularly
in the Chemistry Division. He even served as acting director of
the division from 1951 to 1954. He continued his research and
scientific publications, and at the age of 82 published, with
Clarence Hochanadel and John Ghormley, a revision of his classic
monograph, The Radiation Chemistry of Gases. Having been elected to
the National Academy of Sciences in 1930, he was the sole
Laboratory staff member with that honor until the 1957 election of
biologist Alexander Hollaender.
An active outdoorsman, Lind avidly fished for trout in streams near
Oak Ridge. In 1965 at age 86, Lind drowned when caught by the
rapidly rising water of the Clinch River below Norris Dam while
fishing for trout. A colleague at the Laboratory remarked that,
although his death was a great loss to his friends and associates:
"We do, however, have the consolation that, both literally and
figuratively, Samuel Colville Lind died with his boots on."
RADIOISOTOPES AND HEALTH: TRACE OF HEALTH
The peacetime production of radioisotopes at the Graphite Reactor
for industrial, agricultural, and research applications began in
1946 under the management of Waldo Cohn of Clinton Laboratories and
Paul Aebersold of the AEC. In August 1946, the Laboratory's
research director, Eugene Wigner, handed the first shipment of
reactor-produced radioisotopes, a container of carbon-14, to the
director of the Barnard Free Skin and Cancer Hospital of St. Louis,
Missouri.
During its first year of production, the Laboratory made more than
1000 shipments of 60 different radioisotopes, chiefly iodine-131,
phosphorus-32, and carbon-14. These were used for cancer treatment
in the developing field of nuclear medicine and as tracers for
academic, industrial, and agricultural research. Many thousands of
shipments of radioisotopes produced at the Graphite Reactor were
made before production was shut down permanently in 1963.
Following the closing of the Graphite Reactor, the Oak Ridge
Research Reactor produced most of the Laboratory's radioisotopes.
The Laboratory also used calutrons at the Y-12 Plant to produce
stable isotopes and cyclotrons to produce isotopes such as
gallium-67, widely used for tumor imaging. The Oak Ridge Research
Reactor closed in 1987, but ORNL's High Flux Isotope Reactor
remains an important source of radioisotopes for medical and
industrial uses.
The Laboratory's nuclear medicine program now centers on the
development of new radiopharmaceuticals and radionuclide generators
for diagnosis and treatment of human diseases, including cancer and
heart ailments.
Today radioisotopes are used for diagnosing 100 million patients
each year. This number gives credence to former ORNL Director
Alvin Weinberg's noted statement:
"If at some time a heavenly angel should ask what the
laboratory in the hills of East Tennessee did to enlarge man's
life and make it better, I daresay the production of
radioisotopes for scientific research and medical treatment
will surely rate as a candidate for the very first place."
ALEXANDER HOLLAENDER: A RADIANT BIOLOGIST
Alexander Hollaender was director of ORNL's Biology Division
from 1946 through 1966. Under his leadership, it became the
Laboratory's largest division and gained international recognition
for its contributions to radiation genetics, biochemistry,
radiation carcinogenesis, and molecular biology.
Hollaender, a native of Germany, became renowned both locally and
nationally. He was elected a member of the National Academy of
Sciences; in 1968, he was awarded a Finsen Medal at the Fifth
International Congress of Photobiology; in 1983 he received the
Fermi Award, the Department of Energy's highest honor; and in 1984,
he received the National Medal of Science. "He has made superior
contributions in three different fields of endeavor--scientific
discovery, scientific education, and scientific administration,"
wrote Richard B. Setlow, formerly of ORNL's Biology Division and
now an associate director at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Hollaender earned his Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry at the
University of Wisconsin. Before coming to Clinton Laboratories in
1946, he directed a radiobiology laboratory at the National
Institutes of Health (NIH), where he examined the effects of
ultraviolet radiation on fungi. From his studies, he correctly
suggested in 1939 that nucleic acids, not the cell's proteins,
carried the genetic information in reproduction.
Hollaender was attracted to Clinton Laboratories because of its
variety of radiation sources. He intended to acquire staff and
equipment and form a National Institutes of Health Institute of
Radiation Health at Oak Ridge. Instead, he formulated a plan for a
new Biology Division, which was given space in buildings initially
constructed for chemical reprocessing at the Y-12 Plant.
Hollaender was opportunistic and open to new ideas. He originally
thought the effects of radiation on the genes of all species could
be determined by studies of simple cells in microorganisms and
fruit flies. But when he heard of the pioneering work on the
genetic effects of radiation on mice by Bill and Liane Russell at
Bar Harbor, Maine, he realized that the results of mouse studies
might be more applicable to humans than the results of fruit fly
studies. He conceived of starting a large mouse genetics project,
however risky in terms of the cost and the long time needed for
useful results. So when Russell was thinking of leaving Bar Harbor,
Hollaender hired him and his wife Liane to set up a genetics
laboratory at ORNL, dubbed the Mouse House.
In addition to his scientific expertise and leadership, Hollaender
was an educator. With Mary Bunting and Glenn Seaborg of the AEC,
and Andy Holt of the University of Tennessee, in 1968 he founded
the University of Tennessee- Oak Ridge Graduate School of
Biomedical Sciences.
He is remembered for organizing many symposia on biological topics
held in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, for designing student trainee
programs in the Biology Division, and for leading group hikes in
the Cumberland Mountains. At Hollaender's retirement from the
Laboratory in 1966, Alvin Weinberg assessed Hollaender's career,
which extended beyond his specific accomplishments to a new way of
thinking that transformed and enriched both the Laboratory and the
biological sciences:
Alex Hollaender invented a new style of biological investigation:
the melding of enormous, expensive mammalian experiments with basic
investigations on a much smaller scale in which the principles
underlying the mammalian experiments could be demonstrated and
tested in the most delicate and far-reaching way. It is this unique
combination of the big and the small, the mission-oriented and the
discipline-oriented, that is Alex Hollaender's great contribution
to biomedical science. It is a contribution that has forever
changed biology.
KARL Z. MORGAN: MAN ON A MISSION
Protecting people from exposure to unsafe levels of radiation has
been the mission of Karl Z. Morgan, sometimes known as the father
of health physics.
Affectionately called "K. Z.," Morgan first made his mark in
radiation protection as director of the Health Physics Division of
Clinton Laboratories. With Elda Anderson, Myron Fair, and Doc
Emerson, he spearheaded the formation of the national Health
Physics Society and, with Jim Hart and Harold Abee, formed the
International Radiation Protection Association. He was the first
president of both of these organizations. Morgan also established
one of the first programs to train health physicists and, with the
help of Jim Turner and other Health Physics Division scientists,
wrote the first textbook on health physics.
Health physics was launched unofficially as a profession in
December 1942 when the staff took precautions to protect themselves
from radiation during the first controlled chain reaction at the
University of Chicago's uranium-graphite pile. Health divisions
were subsequently set up at the University of Chicago and Oak Ridge
under Robert Stone to deal with health and safety issues at the
Chicago pile and Graphite Reactor, respectively. The physicists
who staffed these divisions were called health physicists. They
instituted remote handling of radioactive material, controlled
access to "hot" areas, use of protective clothing, and
decontamination procedures for those inadvertently exposed.
Although trained and experienced as a cosmic-ray physicist, Morgan
became one of the nation's earliest health physicists, along with
the Laboratory's Herbert Parker and Ernest Wollan. These men
brought to this new field a thorough knowledge of basic physics and
radiation instrumentation. They redesigned and adapted the early
ionization chambers, film meters, electrometers, and Geiger-MŸller
counters to meet requirements for personnel monitoring and
radiation surveys of buildings and the environment.
Morgan came from Chicago to Clinton Laboratories in 1943 as a
member of the Health Physics Section, which Herbert Parker managed
until he left for Hanford, Washington, in 1944. In 1946, the
section became a division and Morgan its director. In this
capacity, he established a vigorous program to upgrade existing
instrumentation using improved techniques that emerged in wartime
research to develop radar and the atomic bomb. He remained an
enthusiastic supporter of basic physical research to aid the
development of health physics instruments and dosimeters.
As chairman of subcommittees of both the National Council on
Radiation Protection and the International Commission on
Radiological Protection, which were concerned with safe limits for
radionuclides in the human body, Morgan identified internal
dosimetry as an important area of research for his division and, in
1960, formed the Internal Dosimetry Section. Under Morgan, division
scientists determined radiation doses to the Japanese from the
atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and predicted
radiation doses from nuclear explosives proposed for use by Project
Plowshare to excavate canals and liberate trapped natural gas.
Acting as first editor-in-chief of the Health Physics Journal and
playing a major role in establishing a system for the
certification of health physicists were among his chief
contributions to the health physics profession.
In 1972 Morgan retired from the Laboratory and later became a
professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has continued to
speak vigorously on his lifetime mission--reducing low-level
radiation emissions from radon, medical procedures, and nuclear
power.
ERNEST WOLLAN: BADGE OF SOLID DISTINCTION
Ernest Wollan, who had studied crystal structures using X-ray
diffraction under Arthur Compton at the University of Chicago, came
to Oak Ridge in 1943. Known for developing the film badge to
monitor personal exposure to radiation, Wollan was present at the
University of Chicago's Stagg Field on December 2, 1942, when
Enrico Fermi's team achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear
chain reaction. He recorded the event on an instrument that
measured the intensity of the gamma radiation emitted in the
reaction.
Wollan came to Oak Ridge as a health physicist, and the Laboratory
hoped to use his expertise on film-badge dosimeters. His interest
in and experience with X-ray diffraction, however, prompted him to
conduct similar experiments using neutrons.
Installing a modified X-ray diffractrometer at a beam hole of the
Graphite Reactor in late 1945, he examined the scattering of
neutrons from various materials bombarded by a neutron beam from
the reactor. Thermal, or slow, neutrons have ideal wavelengths for
studying atomic structure and atomic vibrations, and because they
have no more energy than a molecule of room-temperature air, they
hardly disturb the materials. These and other properties make
neutron scattering a valuable scientific tool.
Joined by Clifford Shull in 1946 and later by Wallace Koehler and
Mike Wilkinson, Wollan and his associates devised machines and
diffraction techniques for determining the atomic structure and
magnetic properties of crystal lattices. This work laid the
foundation for a number of programs in solid-state physics and
materials science at the Laboratory and, later, throughout the
world.
PROMETHIUM UNBOUND: A NEW ELEMENT
During World War II, chemists focused on the actinide series, a
group name for elements with atomic numbers between 89 and 104 in
the periodic table. Glenn Seaborg, Edwin McMillan, and colleagues
at the University of California at Berkeley had discovered the
elements 93, neptunium; 94, plutonium; 95, americium; and 96,
curium. At Clinton Laboratories in Oak Ridge, chemists
investigated these elements and the lanthanide series (elements
with atomic numbers between 57 and 71), long known as the rare
earth elements.
The existence of one rare earth, element 61, was predicted by the
1930s, but it had never been produced and identified before Charles
Coryell's chemistry group at Clinton Laboratories did so in 1944.
Larry Glendenin and Jacob Marinsky, using ion-exchange
chromatography applied by Waldo Cohn for separating fission
products, separated element 61 from other rare earth elements
produced by uranium fission in the Graphite Reactor.
Too busy with defense-related chemistry during the war, Glendenin
and Marinsky did not claim their discovery until 1946 after Coryell
had moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Having
established their claim as the discoverers of element 61, they were
accorded the privilege of naming it. After considering
"clintonium" in tribute to the Laboratories, they instead chose the
name "promethium," suggested by Coryell's wife, in recognition of
Prometheus of Greek mythology, who stole fire from heaven for human
benefit.
FROM INSTALLATION DOG TO KATY'S KITCHEN
In the fall of 1947, Luther Agee, a draftsman at the new Oak Ridge
office of the Atomic Energy Commission, was asked to work on a
special project. He was told to design a secret facility according
to specifications but was not told the purpose of the facility. He
was instructed to say nothing about the project. After its
completion, Agee and the other personnel involved in the facility's
design, construction, or maintenance had to undergo periodic
polygraph tests to determine how much they knew and if they had
discussed this project with anyone.
Agee's design included a concrete building that was partially
underground, a barn-type structure, and a farm silo. The idea was
to camouflage the facility so that it could not be distinguished
from other old farm buildings in the area.
The barn covered the outside entrance to the building, which was
actually built into the side of a hill. A plain wooden structure
with large swinging doors, the barn was designed to fit on the hill
and was draped over the building's entrance. From the ground it
looked unusual, but from the air it resembled an ordinary barn with
a silo.
The building's outer walls were made of thick reinforced concrete,
and it contained a long room designed so a truck could be driven
into it, a pump room, and a "room within a room." This inner room
was of standard bank-vault construction. A barbed wire fence and an
elaborate alarm system surrounded the structure. Alarm panels and
controls were located in the Y-12 area, and responses were sent out
from there. Even intruding animals like foxes could set off the
alarms.
For a year, Installation Dog, as this facility located near ORNL
was called, served as a temporary storage facility for enriched
uranium after it was produced at the Y-12 Plant. The uranium was
taken to and from the facility by truck. No one was allowed into
the area unless authorized, and no one actually worked in the
building, except to unload and load the trucks. Two security guards
patrolled the facility at all times.
Although Installation Dog was used only from May 1948 to May 1949,
it was kept under guard for several years in case the need for it
arose again. After 1949, enriched uranium was never stored there
again; instead, it was shipped to a weapons assembly site in the
West.
In 1957, ORNL's Analytical Chemistry Division acquired the facility
from the AEC to use as a low-level counting laboratory. Its
isolated location and shielded walls made it ideal for such work.
The facility came to be known as Katy's Kitchen when Katherine
Odom, the secretary for Myron Kelley of the Analytical Chemistry
Division, visited the facility several times. She often had lunch
there, so Katy's Kitchen seemed an appropriate name.
In the 1970s, Katy's Kitchen was used as a laboratory for the
Walker Branch Watershed studies by the Environmental Sciences
Division. And more recently a steel structure has been built in
front of the vault to be used by the Department of Energy's
Atmospheric Radiation Monitoring Program to study changes in cosmic
rays and solar radiation that may occur as a result of increased
greenhouse gas concentrations.
The vault is used to store animal skins, plant tissues, and aquatic
insects for use by researchers at ORNL's National Environmental
Research Park. Ironically, the vault that once stored bomb-grade
uranium now stores samples of dead organisms, some of which have
been contaminated by low levels of uranium fission products. What
goes around comes around.
(keywords: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, history)
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Date Posted: 2/22/94 (ktb)