The Manhattan Project

by Cynthia C. Kelly

  courtesy Dick Donnell

  “Termination winds” were such a problem at Hanford, Washington, that Dick Donnell made them the subject of several cartoons featuring his popular “Dupus Boomer” character.

  “Whoever gets there first will win the war”

  Leon Overstreet was a pipefitter hired by DuPont to work on the construction of the B Reactor at Hanford. In this excerpt from his oral history, he discusses his decision to join the project in Washington State and willingness to work despite being kept entirely in the dark regarding the final product.

  From Working on the Bomb

  BY STEPHEN L. SANGER

  I was the ninth pipefitter hired on the Du Pont construction job and my brother Paul was the tenth. We came in together. I was working at the Sunflower Ordnance Works near Kansas City as a steamfitter. On a day in May 1943, I heard two laborers talking. “Boy, there’s a big job out at Walla Walla, Washington.” After work that day, I called the union business manager at Walla Walla. He said to “come on out and bring all of them who are willing to work.” He heard it was “the largest construction job in the world.” I got my brother and a welder I was working with interested and we got all our coupons for gasoline and tires and came out.

  Why did I want to leave Kansas? When I was a kid in Oklahoma, my geography classes had these big pictures of snow-capped mountains and clear-running streams.… I could just visualize that Northwest out there. I had always heard about it and I thought, “Man, this is my chance to get out there.” So we did.

  It took us several days. The welder pulled a trailer and he and his wife cooked our meals. They only had one bed in the trailer so my brother and I slept in the car. We landed in Prosser and stayed in a hotel. The morning we went out to go work, this fellow we rode out there with said it was the largest construction job in the world. When we came over the hill and looked down on this Hanford site, all we saw were eight or ten buildings, frame buildings, under construction. It didn’t look very big to us. That was May 7, 1943.

  Working conditions were good. They wanted to get on with the job. If you had a problem, they would try to deal with it. DuPont made an impression on me, probably the best company I ever worked for. Of all the places I’ve been since then, around Hanford, nobody comes close to DuPont. They knew how to organize and build a job.

  I worked in the Hanford Camp for about a year. The manager told us we had been selected to be “Q-cleared” to go out in the [top secret] areas to work. A lot of people were not selected because they had criminal records.

  We went out to 100-B [the first plutonium production reactor built at Hanford] in May 1944 and were among the first steamfitters on the job. I was amazed. I couldn’t figure it out. I looked at that thing we were working on, this reactor. It had all kinds of tubes and pipes running through it, and graphite blocks that the other crafts were laying around the pipes. Nobody could understand what kind of a contraption it was. They had never seen anything like it. You can usually understand what you’re doing. But boy, that one floored us.

  I had never heard of anybody splitting the atom. I had studied atoms, being the smallest particles, in school, you know. But I had never heard of anyone splitting one of them. When I first saw B reactor, it was just coming out the ground. They had the base of the thing done. Other crafts had done a lot of the preliminary work, but we came in on the piping end of it. And boy, they were really ganging that thing. You could hardly take a step without running over somebody. We swarmed over that thing like flies. When I first got to 100-B, I was running three-quarter inch stainless steel pipes through graphite blocks. I never did know what these were for. [They contained the fuel slugs that were irradiated in the reactor.]

  I remember when Colonel [Franklin] Matthias called a mass meeting outside at White Bluffs in the spring of 1944. Thousands came. He wanted to get it across to everybody how important [the work] was. Some people didn’t seem as dedicated as they could have been. He made a pretty good speech. It gave us all a shot in the arm. When we left there we were ready to build a plant.

  He did say that it was impossible to tell us what we were doing because the enemy would like to know. We were not allowed, he said, to discuss it with each other, just like our foreman had told us. But he said I can tell you this much, that it’s important and the enemy, Germany, is attempting to do the same thing we are, to build a plant like this. And whoever gets there first will win the war. And that was enough said. We didn’t ask any further questions.

  “The whole project was like a three-legged stool”

  In this oral history excerpt, Walter Simon, the first operations manager at Hanford, talks about the importance of collaboration in the startup of the B Reactor and the ingenuity required to solve a problem that threatened the success of the entire project.

  From Working on the Bomb

  BY STEPHEN L. SANGER

  The night the B Reactor went critical we had a lot of high-ranking technical people watching this startup, and when it went critical and then shut itself down, the silence was deafening. It was complete consternation. As background to this, the scientific people, the Chicago people, the Nobel Prize winners, Wigner and Fermi and Szilard, were all much more on the risk-taking side than Du Pont was. Du Pont was a conservative organization. For instance, if someone asked for a two-story building, Du Pont design would put enough steel in it for four stories, being convinced that sooner or later someone would add an extra floor or two. Du Pont conservatism paid off on the reactors. Enough extra fuel tubes had been added to overcome the fission product poisoning.

  There was a great deal of team effort in this whole thing. There were no autocrats who could say, you know, take the cigar out of his mouth and say “Do this or do that.” Things were pretty much decided in a consensus of judgment. The whole project was like a three-legged stool. The military, the scientific community and the commercial corporations were built on different philosophies. Spurred by a common fear of Nazi Germany, the three groups got along reasonably well as the results indicated, but this did not eliminate their fundamental differences. Each one needed the other two.

  There was friction between the scientists and Du Pont, honest differences of opinion on how to get the job done in the quickest way. Friction may be too harsh a word because we were all on speaking terms. They were annoyed, let’s say, that Du Pont people were exercising some degree of judgment, but on the other hand people in the Corps of Engineers had encouraged Du Pont to exercise judgment. They often said that is what we hired you for. At one point, we weren’t too keen on technical dissension. We had to go.

  At the beginning, the reactor looked more formidable than the separation process, which was a chemical process. The main problem with separation was it had so much radiation, it had to be manipulated with various automated equipment, but as a process it was understandable to our chemists. Protecting people from radiation added a dimension that made it a little more difficult. The scientists were absolutely astounded at our ability to design arms and devices that could do these tasks. They stood a little bit in awe of how it all worked out. It was technically very good.

  There was a discussion in the scientific group as to whether you should build a reactor with a solid material like carbon or liquid like heavy water. The Germans were making a great point about making heavy water in Norway and shipping it to Germany. Of course, at that time everything the Germans did was considered very smart. So, the design problems of a heavy water plant looked insurmountable. Keeping it from leaking, the corrosion, all sorts of things. A solid material, carbon, looked like a practical solution. The heavy water advocates, of course, always thought we were going down the wrong path.

  Fermi was very discreet about disagreements. He was a very pleasant person. His mind raced all the time. For instance, if there was a little time to kill while they were loading the reactor, he would do equations in his head, with someone next to him with a calculator. You know, multiply 999 by 62 and divide this by that, and he did th
at for amusement. His mind raced so much the only way he could relax was to walk on the desert. They would try to take him to a movie, and he would sit there and in five minutes he would have the whole plot figured out. He had a tremendous intellectual capacity, absolutely. Fermi was interested in chess and one or two of the men who were run of the mill technical people had spent a lot of time playing chess. Boy, when he found a good chess player, he tied him up. One boy was not particularly intellectual but he was a supremely good chess player. Fermi would come around calling for him, “Where’s so and so?”

  Now, one of the most difficult problems we had before plutonium production began was making the uranium fuel slugs. The uranium was held in an aluminum can, a slug, about eight inches long and an inch and five-eighths in diameter. The can had to fit very tightly with no air space or bubbles. They couldn’t leak because if water got into the uranium it destroyed the ability to react. So the concept was that the scientific people would find out how to do this and give us instruction. They found out how to design it but they never made a slug in the laboratory that didn’t leak.

  Well the summer of ’44 was coming along and the reactor was shaping up and there would be nothing to put into it. We had a production superintendent at Hanford named Earl Swensson, who was a real dyed-in-the-wool production man. This was a case where one man did sell an idea. He said you know they’ll never make one of these in the lab, even if they work on it for 10 years. It’s a statistical matter. Why don’t we make a thousand a day, we’ll examine each one and test them all, and the poor ones we’ll strip the aluminum can off and save the uranium and the next day we’ll make another thousand. The first day a thousand failed, but there were maybe 10 better than the others and we tried to figure out why these 10 were better. The next day maybe they had 18 that were better. And they kept doing this and lo and behold after about three weeks they had one perfect can. Purely statistical. If you made a thousand a day for three weeks, you had made 20,000 until you got a good one. They made five good ones the next day, and 10 the next and after a while out of a thousand they were making 500 and then 600 a day that were right. That’s how they did it. It was a little terrifying because if we didn’t have them it would stop the whole thing. The reactor would be ready on September 15 and we would have nothing to put into it.

  Cover Stories

  Colonel Franklin T. Matthias was the Army Corps of Engineers officer in charge of the Hanford Engineer Works. In this oral history excerpt, he discusses some of the steps he took to ensure that Hanford’s mission to produce one of the key ingredients for the world’s first atomic bombs remained secret.

  From Working on the Bomb

  BY STEPHEN L. SANGER

  A lot of local people would ask us what was going on at Hanford. We rigged up a cover story right at the beginning. There was a new explosive developed just before the war that was called “RDX.” It was much stronger than gun powder, and dynamite, or nitroglycerin.… We ended up calling Hanford a place to make RDX. Nobody questioned it. Du Pont was known as an explosives maker.

  I handled the newspapers early. I went to Spokane, for instance, to talk with the Spokesman-Review and others the day the order came from federal court to start acquiring land. That must have been in January, 1943. I also went to Seattle and Portland. Another man on my staff, Bob Nissen, covered all the little towns along the Columbia River all the way up. I went to Yakima and Walla Walla.

  I told people I needed their help in keeping this project quiet. I told them it was a big important war project, and that’s all I could tell them. We had very few problems after that.

  When I was given this job, I went to the war censorship department. One of the high-ranking people there was a fraternity brother of mine at Wisconsin and we were very close friends. I went to see him and told him that we needed all the help we could to keep Hanford from being publicized. He told me you know, we can’t censor anything. I said I was asking for his help because he must have quite a lot of influence among the newspapers. He gave me a hot-line telephone number and told me any time I had problems, I should call and they would try to intercede.

  I told all the papers that any time there was news they could use, I would see that they had it. When this thing breaks open, [I told them] I will see you get the word. I managed to keep that promise the day the first bomb was dropped.

  U.S. Department of Energy

  The Hanford Engineer Works in Washington State involved a massive industrial effort, including the construction and operation of the B Reactor, the first plutonium production reactor.

  K-25 Plant: Forty-Four Acres and a Mile Long

  General Groves had to hedge his bets in 1942. There were no sure ways to separate the isotopes of uranium on the scale needed to produce sufficient quantities for an atomic bomb. As Manhattan Project veteran and Oak Ridge City Historian William Wilcox relates, at first the “calutrons” at the Y-12 plant looked most promising, but by the end of the war, the K-25 plant’s gaseous diffusion method proved most efficient.

  BY WILLIAM J. WILCOX

  Producing sufficient quantities of the uranium isotope “U-235” that could be used to fuel and atomic bomb was the mission of the Clinton Engineer Works, the Manhattan Project code name for Oak Ridge. Of the four methods of separating the isotopes of uranium being researched in December 1942, Gen. Leslie R. Groves first chose the electromagnetic isotope separation (calutron) method proposed by the University of California at Berkeley. Huge calutrons at the Y-12 plant were operated by Tennessee Eastman Corporation with 22,000 employees working to produce the uranium isotope during the war.

  But with so much at stake, Groves’s policy committee decided they could not risk everything on the electromagnetic separation approach. They decided to build a “backup” plant using gaseous diffusion, the second most promising approach. This process was the brainchild of Columbia University scientists in New York City who began researching it in 1940. The backup plant, which was given the code name K-25, sprang up at the western end of the Clinton Engineer Works, about a year after Y-12 appeared. The construction of K-25 cost $512 million, or at least $5.7 billion in present-day dollars.

  K-25 was a tremendous engineering achievement built in the midst of World War II. The K-25 process involved a long series of more than 3,000 repetitive diffusion steps, or cascades, through which uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas passes. Most cascades have two electric motor–driven gas compressors and a gas cooler. Because the U-235 atoms are smaller than the U-238 atoms, only the U-235 atoms can diffuse through tiny pinholes in the “barrier” material between the cascades, enriching the UF6 gas in a slightly higher concentration of U-235. This increase in enrichment by only a fraction of a percent is repeated thousands of times, resulting in the desired uranium enrichment required for nuclear fuel or a nuclear weapon.

  Construction of the 44-acre, mile-long “U” shaped plant, which is four stories high and up to 400 feet wide, posed many new problems for design engineers, construction contractors and bicycle-riding plant operators. New materials had to be discovered or developed to withstand the extremely reactive nature of UF6 gas. The hundreds of miles of piping had to have pinhole-free nickel plating, all welded together as vacuum-tight as a thermos bottle, to prevent the in-flow of air. Any air leaking in would introduce moisture, decomposing the UF6 gas into powder that would plug the tiny holes in the diffusion barrier.

  K-25 started up in the spring of 1945, surprising many and relieving everyone by operating almost flawlessly. Near the end of 1946, weapon-grade U-235 (greater than 80-percent enrichment) was produced for the first time. The good news for K-25 workers was that K-25’s continuous process produced highly enriched uranium at less than a tenth of the cost to make it using Y-12’s batch process. This was bad news for Y-12 workers. At the end of 1946 Y-12 calutrons were shut down and 20,000 Y-12 workers lost their jobs. This year-long layoff was Oak Ridge’s biggest ever. The huge loss of jobs was the major reason why our city’s population dropped from 75,0
00 to around 30,000, the current population despite new programs coming and going.

  The K-25 “U” continued to operate smoothly and became the base for a major expansion of U-235 production capacity during the U.S. arms race with the Soviet Union that began in 1949. That is when the U.S.S.R. exploded its first nuclear device, a “carbon copy” of the Trinity shot at Alamagordo, New Mexico.

  In 1964, after producing highly enriched U-235 for 17 years, the federal government decided enough nuclear fuel had been produced to meet future defense stockpile needs. As a result, the “old” World War II K-25 “U” building was shut down. Today, plans are to preserve a portion of the K-25 plant, the North End building, to help future generations appreciate the complexity of the challenges and sheer enormity of the undertaking.

  WHERE IN TENNESSEE?

  In 1942 Franklin D. Roosevelt summoned the leaders of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives to the White House for a secret discussion of what was to become the Manhattan Project. Knowing that the accelerating war effort required bipartisan leadership, the Congressional leaders meeting with FDR and his scientific advisers agreed to put aside petty concerns. At the conclusion of FDR’s briefing, Kenneth D. McKellar, the powerful senior Senator from Tennessee and chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, is reported to have said: “Mr. President, I agree that the future of our civilization may depend on the success of this project. Where in Tennessee are we going to build it?”

  —PHILIP M. SMITH, THE SCIENCES, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2000