Plutonium production piles

What had come up once again for discussion early in 1943 was how the plutonium production piles—the Du Pont engineers were beginning to... 

Groundbreaking for the lOO-B plutonium production pile at Hanford takes place. 

Now that DuPont would be building the plutonium production complex in the Northwest, Compton saw no reason for any pile facilities in Oak Ridge and proposed to conduct Met Lab research in either Chicago or Argoime. DuPont, on the other hand, continued to support a semiworks at Oak Ridge and asked the Met Lab scientists to operate it. Compton demurred on the grounds that... 

The two piles at Windscale were originally known as the British Production Piles in official documents — Production referring to the production of plutonium. Later, of course, they were simply referred to as the Windscale piles. 

Despite this, the Chiefs of Staff were demanding more plutonium for future atomic weapons and so a decision was later made to build a third production pile. But as the Minister of Supply wrote in a memo to his ministerial colleagues in October 1949 ... 

The production piles had been intended to have a life of ten years. By 1957, Pile 2 had been operating for six years. Now that the reactors at Calder Hall had become available, the need to use Pile 2 to produce plutonium was much less acute. Isotope production was another matter improvements in weapon technology meant that polonium would no longer be needed, but instead the demand for tritium had increased considerably. Producing tritium in the Calder Hall reactors would be possible, but it was thought that new fuel rods containing 93% uranium 235 would... 

TNA PRO AB 38/297. Production of electrical power from a plutonium-producing pile report by Parolle Electrical Plant Co. Also TNA PRO AB 38/298. Production of electrical power from a plutonium-producing pile illustrations. 

Ministers approve atomic pile in Britain for plutonium production. 

X PILE. A graphite reactor was built at Site X, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to produce plutonium for the Manhattan Project. The original intent was to prove the feasibility for scale-up from the laboratory level prior to undertaking full-scale plutonium production at Site W, Hanford, Washington. This reactor, known variously as the X Pile, X-10 Pile, and Clinton Pile, was the world s first continuously operated nuclear reactor. It operated for 20 years, from 4 November 1943 until 4 November 1963. After World War II, the reactor became the world s single... 

While a reactor is working the uranium-235 or plutonium-239 is slowly converted into fission products. The materials are intensely radioactive. Some of them capture thermal neutrons and thus diminish the efficiency of the pile. It is therefore necessary to take out the fuel rods from time to time and remove the fission products. For this purpose they are kept about 100 days to allow the short-lived radioelements to decay and then dissolved in nitric acid. Nitrous acid ensures that all the plutonium is in the Pu form. The reactions, with 11+ written for H3O+ (p. 194), arc... 

At present, owing to the extreme susceptibility of uranium to corrosion it is not possible to use the evolved heat for steam raising purposes. But the pile has many other uses including the production of new elements, such as plutonium the manufacture of radiocompounds for greenhouses, etc, or as tracers for engineering, chemical and medical purposes and for research into the production of complex substances. 

Production of plutonium was begun in Chicago in 1942 in an atomic pile. The bomb that devastated Nagasaki in Japan on 9th August 1945 contained plutonium. 

Compton repeated a conversation that ensued between him and Wigner on a possible schedule of the Germans. Like us, they have had three years since the discovery of fission to prepare a bomb. Assuming they know about [plutonium], they could run a heavy water pile for two months at 100,000 kw and produce six kilograms of it thus it would be possible for them to have six bombs by the aid of this year [1942]. On the other hand, we don t plan to have bombs in production until the first part of 1944. 

In the above described type of fast reactor or pile it is desirable to dilute the plutonium of the reactive core with natural uranium. This dilution makes it possible to operate the reactor at a higher rate of power production in kilowatts per kilogram of plutonium because the heat 70 conductivity of the plates 19 is increased and the heat production per unit volume of metal in the core may be maintaned at a high value consistent with the ability of the coolant to extract the heat. 

Seaborg s discovery and subsequent isolation of plutoniiun were major events in the history of chemistry, but, like Fermi s achievement, it remained to be seen whether they could be translated into a production process useful to the bomb effort. In fact, Seaborg s challenge seemed even more daunting, for while piles had to be scaled up ten to twenty times, a separation plant for plutonium would involve a scale-up of the laboratory experiment on the order of a billion-fold. 

Moving the pilot plutoniiun plant to Oak Ridge left too little room for the full-scale production plant at the X-10 site and also left too little generating power for yet another major facility. Furthermore, the site was tmcomfortably close to Knoxville shoidd a catastrophe occur. Thus the search for an alternate location for the full-scale plutonium facility began soon after DuPont joined the production team. Compton s scientists needed an area of approximately 225 square miles. Three or foin piles and one or two chemical separation complexes would be at least a mile apart for security purposes, while nothing would be allowed within four ndles of the separation complexes for fear of radioactive accidents. Towns, hi ways, rail lines, and laboratories would be several miles filler away. 

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