Truth About Atomic Plant At Oak Ridge

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 16, Issue 6, 11 October 1950, Page 3

Truth About Atomic Plant At Oak Ridge

By Frederick J. Ooughton. One hour after the switch operating the world's first plutonium oile was flicked on, techincians began to look worried. The battery of dials and indicators showed that no radioactive rays were being given off. At a point somewhere in a square mile of closely-packed machinery lay a fault. It may have been a microscopic speck of dust or just a fly which had found its way through the air vents. Whatever the fault, it cost Oak Ridge, the first atomic plant, five hundred million dollars. Oak Ridge was proving an expensive proposition from the start. Despite the immediate loss, the fault was discovered and rectified but it tok over six months to do it.

After the first failure, Oak Ridge became one vast research laboratory. Atomic research is fraught with a million problems. Production had to be halted until the plant was as perfect as man could make it. The bulk of the work was planned and executed in the 150 buildings comprising Oak Ridge National Laboratory, only a small part of the nuclear research centre. Strongly Guarded

Down there far from the haunts of man in the sweeping Tennessee Hills all that is visible on a clear day is a series of squat, mole-like edifices. For miles a stronglyguarded electric fence encircles the area, making it absolutely impossible for the unauthorised person to enter or take photographs which wil be of any use.

Thousands of miles away in the Belgian Congo the raw uranium is mined and sent across the ocean to America in the form of flat cakes of pitehblende. At Oak Ridge the pitchblende is dispatched to a processing plant where, under great heat, it is melted and drained away. The extracted uranium, which is invisible, is put into pieces of graphite about the size and shape of an ordinary building brick. Experimental piles- are made by placing a radio-active brick on top of a plain graphite one. By this means research workers are able to discover which uranium bricks are the most powerful by measuring radiations. The best are extracted from the pile for future use.