Metallurgical Laboratory. University

Metallurgical Laboratory, University of Chicago Chemistry Division Sum-... 

The work on the Plutonium Project in early 1942 was centralized in the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago. The following extract from my journal describes my arrival in Chicago with my colleague Isadore Perlman ... 

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. 

Berkeley, and, essentially simultaneously, by Hindman and coworkers (1949) at the Metallurgical Laboratory and Mastick and Wahl (1944) at the Los Alamos Laboratory the latter two groups utilized the milligram amounts of plutonium made available at the time through the operation of the reactor and chemical separation plant at the Clinton Laboratories in Tennessee. The existence of the V oxidation state was established in the summer of 1944, through the use of plutonium obtained from the Clinton Laboratories, by Connick and coworkers (1949), at the University of California, Berkeley. 

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 ... 

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. 

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. 

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... 

Professor of Physics, University of Chicago, and first Director of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory... 

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