Metallurgical Laboratory at the

After replicating the German fusion of the uranium atom in early 1939, Fermi was recruited to join the secret U.S. atomic bomb project, the Manhattan Project. He initially worked at the project s metallurgical laboratory at the University of Chicago, where he was chief designer of an atomic pile that achieved a sustained nuclear reaction on December 2, 1942. Throughout the war he worked on reactor design and fissionable fuel production at several project facilities. 

For this purpose, chemists, physicists, and biologists were assembled at the famous wartime Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago. Here the physicists, led by the late Enrico Fermi, worked out the chain reaction for the mass production of plutonium from natural uranium and graphite. 

From 1942 to 1946, Seaborg, on leave from Berkeley, was employed by the Metallurgical Laboratory, at the University of Chicago. It was during this period that he devised chemical processes for the separation and purification of plutonium. Plutonium, critical to the success of the Manhattan Project, was given the code name copper. When actual copper was required in the project, the resulting confusion was eliminated by the use... 

This day marks my 30th birthday and a transition point in my life, for tomorrow I will take on the added responsibility of the 94 chemistry group at the Metallurgical Laboratory on the University of Chicago campus, the central component of the Metallurgical Project. 

Much was also learned at the Metallurgical Laboratory about the solution chemistry of plutonium during these first few years of investigation. This included elucidation of the ionic species present in aqueous solutions of different acids and determination... 

Clemens Alexander Winkler was bom at Freiberg on December 26, 1838, but grew up in Zschopenthal, a village in the Saxon Erzgebirge where his father, Kurt Alexander Winkler, operated a smalt works. Kurt Winkler was himself a well-known chemist and metallurgist, who had studied under Berzelius and N. G. Sefstrom, and had fitted up an excellent metallurgical laboratory in the smalt works (7, 30). 

BERKELIUM. [CAS 7440-40-6]. Chemical element, symbol Bk, at. no. 97, at wt. 247 (mass number of the most stable isotope), radioactive metal of the Actinide series, also one of the Transuranium elements. All isotopes of berkelium are radioactive all must be produced synthetically. The element was discovered by G.T. Seaborg and associates at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago in 1949. At that time, the dement was produced by bombarding 241 Am with helium ions. 4i Bk is an alpha-emitter and may be obtained by alpha-bombardment of ,4Cm. 245Cm. or 246Ciu. Ollier nuclides include those of mass numbers 243—246 and 248-250. Probable electronic configuration ... 

The bombardment took place in the Berkeley 60-in. cyclotron, after which the target material was shipped to the Metallurgical Laboratory at Chicago for chemical separation and identification. A crucial step in the identification of the a-emitting nuclide as an isotope of element 96, 2 Cm, was the identification of the known 224sPu as the a-decay daughter of the new nuclide. 

At the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago in 1944, Seaborg, Ralph James, Leon Morgan, and Albert Ghiorso began looking specifically for the next two elements, those with the atomic numbers 95 and 96. 

The first microgram quantities of plutonium were produced [S6] in 1942 by irradiation of natural uranium with deuterons in the cyclotron of Washington University in St. Louis. This plutonium was separated at the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory of the Manhattan Project by Seaborg and his collaborators, who employed the method of carrier precipitation frequently used by radiochemists to extract small amounts of radioactive material present at low concentration. As wartime urgency required that a plutonium separation plant be designed and built before macro quantities of plutonium could be available for process development, it was decided to use the same carrier precipitation process that had successfully produced the first small quantities of this element. 

The possibiUty of using fission products as agents of radiological warfare was often discussed at the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory during the war. This paper contains the earliest estimate of the feasibihty of using fission products for this purpose. 

Papers 12 and 13 record Wigner s contributions to the instruction manual prepared by the Metallurgical Laboratory for the du Pont Company which had just assumed reponsibility for the Plutonium Project. Even at this early time Wigner had analyzed various combinations of coolant and moderator of particular note is his analysis of the engineering problems associated with a heavy-water moderated reactor. 

After their success with neptunium and plutonium, Seaborg and his collaborators continued to look for more transuranics. (These collaborators included other scientists and graduate students who contributed many ideas and most of the work, and we regret that they must be consigned to a footnote.) They used cyclotron bombardment, a variety of targets, and microchemical techniques developed by Hahn. Americium and curium (elements number 95 and 96) were discovered in wartime at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago,... 

Sdentists at the Metallurgical Laboratory issue the Franck Report, advocating international control of atomic research and proposing a demonstration of the atomic bomb prior to its combat use. 

This suggestion was advanced in a secret report (Seaborg 1944) I prepared in July 1944 at the wartime Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, which is quoted in its entirety as follows. 

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