The Apocalypse Factory

Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age

Steve Olson 2020, Beaverton Library 623.4511 OLS

• 05 plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb

• 31 Chemical separation of plutonium with S₂O₈ UCB Gilman Hall room 303 by Seaborg and Wahl Feb 1941

• 52 Chicago Met Lab, plutonium contaminated hose used to fix soda machine

• 55 Stone&Webster -> du Pont

• 63 1943 March eviction White Bluffs WA 300 residents
• 64 177 graves moved to Prosser (32 mi south) . . 65 600 square miles
• 66 Grove assistant 34yo Franklin Matthias, Hanford construction boss

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• 70 Matthias helps Wanapum natives, later barred from Hanford and ancestor's graves after the war
• 72 interviewed 250K workers, hired 100K, 45K remained, 15K blacks
• 76 1944 union "day's pay" campaign raised $162K to buy a B-17 for the air force
• 77 eight mess halls, 2700 people each, 50,000 box lunches
• 78 Leslie Richard Grove 1896- Born in Vancouver WA army housing, chaplain father, teens in Altadena, then Seattle, high school with UW, them MIT in 1914, West Point 1916 , rose to manage Army construction, the Pentagon building, and Hanford.

• 86 Leona Woods Marshall Libby

• 88 Grove and compartmentalization, suspicion of Szilard
• 90 steel and masonite (neutron-slowing-hydrogen) shielding
• 91 graphite bricks 10x10x120 cm, 25 kg. 5 cm holes down the long axis of some.

• 95 "canning" the uranium slugs difficult -> dipping in molten aluminum

• 96 B reactor startup September 26, 1944, less than a year after groundbreaking, D and F reactors soon after
• 98 Xenon-135 poisoning - fuel rods in "unneeded" process tubes could keep the reactor running
• 102 T and B and U plants, hugely-scaled-up UCB-Seaborg-Wahl process, dissolve the cladding with sodium hydroxide, and uranium and fission products with nitric acid, recovering 1ppm plutonium in the finishing shop next to the T Plant
• 105 much of the radioactive waste ended up in the air and in the Columbia River
• 106 177 gigantic underground tanks still contain waste as of 2020
• 108 Spokane architect Gustav Pehrson designed Richland, 2 dozen designs designated by letters, 4000 built over the next 18 months
• 111 Locked wooden box from Los Angeles to Los Alamos, worth $350M
• 113 atomic bomb releases its energy in a microsecond
• 114 U235, spontaneous fission rare. Pu239 spontaneous fission frequent, fizzle likely for a gun design
• 117 implosion design difficult, but used 10% of the fissionables. By summer 1945, Hanford produced enough Pu239 for several bombs per month
• 119 Nov 1944, Alsos team learns Germans never separated U235 or produced a chain reaction.
• 120 1200 tons of uranium ore hidden in caves near Strassfurt, discovered April 23 1945
• 121 Alsos Furman to leader Goudsmit, "if we have such a weapon, we will use it".
• 125 Memo to Truman, "Atomic Fission Bombs", 3 implosion bombs per month after August
• 125-135 Interim committee
• 135 Japanese balloon bombs

• 137 9 centimeter plutonium hemispheres, gold and nickel plated, bowling ball weight ( <7kg? ). Explosive lenses in 1.5 meter Duralumin sphere, 32 detonators, walnut shaped initiator, implosion compresses core to double densityDet

• 142 War Secretary Henry Simpson nixes Kyoto as target
• 143 four target cities: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, Nagasaki
• 146 Friday July 13 Trinity test in Jornada del Muerto desert, bomb core and last explosive lens inserted
• 150 Detonation July 16 at 5:29:45 AM
• 153 August 9 Charles Sweeney flies B-29 Bockscar from Tinian with Fat Man ( 2 by 4 meter ovoid ?)
  • "If his plane crashed, the ... it carried could vaporize much of the air base
  • Er, no, a crash is not a synchronized implosion
• 158 Primary target Kokura Arsenal, but clouds rolled in during a rendesvous delay