Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago

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. 

Curium was discovered in 1944 by Glenn Seaborg (1912—1999), Ralph A. James, and Albert Ghiorso (1915—). These researchers, from the University of California at Berkeley, were working at the Metallurgical Research Laboratory (MRL) at the University of Chicago where research on the first atomic bomb was being conducted. 

By the end of 1943 preliminary designs had been developed at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory for several types of heavy-... 

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 ... 

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. 

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,... 

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. 

Americium, element 95, was discovered in 1944-45 by Seaborg et al. [1] at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago. The reaction used was ... 

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