Nuclear energy Manhattan project

Since the earliest days of the atomic age, physicists and engineers have predicted the coming of practicable nuclear fusion within ten years or a generation. Histoi y therefore offers many reasons to be skeptical about the promise of nuclear energy. At the same time, this unparalleled form of energy is not going to return to the Pandora s box pried open by the Manhattan Project more than a half century ago. 

Analytical Chemistry of the Manhattan Project. National Nuclear Energy Series Div. VIII, Vol. 1. NewYork McGraw Hill 1950. 

E.g., Shah ca. 1929, Noyes and Noyes 1932, and Fisk 1936. Interestingly, in more recent years, the title has been resurrected by Glenn T. Seaborg (1994), the Nobel laureate nuclear chemist who discovered plutonium and other transuranium elements, worked on the Manhattan Project, and served on John F. Kennedy s Atomic Energy Commission. 

Nuclear flssion Nuclear fission, the splitting of an atomic nucleus, doesn t occur in nature. Humans first harnessed the tremendous power of fission during the Manhattan Project, an intense, hush-hush effort by the United States that led to the development of the first atomic bomb in 1945. Fission has since been used for more-benign purposes in nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants use a highly regulated process of fission to produce energy much more efficiently than is done in traditional, fossil fuel-burning power plants. 

The distinction between these two types of weapons is blurred because they are combined in almost all advanced modern weapons. For example, a smaller fission bomb is first used to create necessary conditions of high temperature and pressure which are required for fusion. Similarly, fusion elements may also be present in the core of fission devices as well because they generate additional neutrons which increase efficiency of the fission reaction. Further, most of the fusion weapons derive substantial portion of their energy from a final stage of fissioning which is facilitated by the fusion reactions. The simplest nuclear weapons are pure fission bombs. They were the first type of nuclear weapons built during the American Manhattan Project and are considered as a building block for all advanced nuclear weapons. 

During the early years of the Second World War, Emmett directed an important National Defense Research Committee project at Hopkins that involved the use of adsorbents in gas masks to remove poison gases. In 1943 he became a division chief in the Manhattan Project, dealing with enrichment by diffusion of uranium isotopes for use in nuclear weapons. From 1945 until his death he was a consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission on peacetime uses of atomic power. 

The first man-made nuclear fission reaction was achieved in 1938, unlocking atomic power both for destructive and creative purposes. In 1951, the first usable electricity was created via the energy produced by a nuclear reactor, thanks largely to research conducted in the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic weapons during World Warll. 

Reference Rothstein A 1949a. Uranyl Fluoride. In Voegtlin C, Hodge HC, eds. Pharmacology and toxicology of uranium compounds. National Nuclear Energy Series Manhattan Project Technical Section, Division VI, Vol 1. New York, NY McGraw-Hill, pp 548-560. 

The first nuclear reactor was built during World War n as part of the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. This reactor was constructed under the direction of Italian physicist Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) in a large room beneath the squash courts at the University of Chicago. Until the day on December 2,1942, when the Chicago reactor was first put into operation, scientists had relied entirely on mathematical calculations to determine the effectiveness of nuclear fission as an energy source thus, the scientists who constructed the first reactor were taking an extraordinary chance. 

As World War II approached, two German chemists, Fritz Strassmann (1902-1980) and Otto Hahn (1879-1968), pointed a stream of neutrons at a sample of uranium and succeeded in splitting the nuclei of some of its atoms. This splitting of nuclei is termed nuclear fission. The energy released through nuclear fission was the source of power for the first atomic bomb, which was built in the United States by a large team of scientists lead by U.S. physicist J. Oppenheimer (1904-1967). This secret research and development program was termed the Manhattan Project. 

Patton, Natl. Nuclear Energy Ser., Manhattan Project Tech. Sect. Div. IV, 14B, 851 (1949) through Chem. Abstracts, 45, 10192 (1951). 

For the development of nuclear energy for military purposes in World War II, the Manhattan Project of the U.S. Army Engineers Corps required large quantities of D.O, highly enriched and the fissionable isotope of uranium, 235y most difficult task was the production of kilograms of 90% U from the natural abundance of 0.7%. Many processes were... 

---