Jim Young "One Man's Trash" Published June 24, 2005

Trip to Atomic City was a real eye-opener

For about 45 minutes on Saturday, June 18, I felt as protected as the President of the United States, possibly even safer!

I was inside the most secure location in East Tennessee and possibly the world, where the U.S. stores a supply of its fissionable material used for atomic weapons, the Y-12 National Security Complex. It was the first time that members of the general public had ever been allowed to tour any part of this facility that was originally built for use of the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb that ended World War II.

I was on the second bus tour of the day making me one of the first 50 people, outside of Y-12 employees and their family members, to ever to visit as tourists the building where some of the uranium U-235 was separated to make the first atomic bombs. The visit was part of Oak Ridge's Secret City Festival celebrating the heritage of those who worked in secret and mud to help end WWII. Visitors were allowed to see and learn about some of the equipment used over 60 years ago called beta calutrons.

Even many of those who had worked at the secret plant had never seen what we were allowed to see. On the bus I sat next to a lady who worked in another Y-12 building for several years and told me employees went from their cars to their work and at the end of a shift returned to their cars. Loitering and exploring other buildings were discouraged, she told me.

In order to go on the tour, you were required to preregister online and bring a photo ID and birth certificate or passport to prove your citizenship. We could not bring cameras, cell phones or PDAs into the plant with us. We were issued a temporary badge, a TLD dosimeter to check radiation exposure and a low-tech cooling device (a hand fan), as the building was not air-conditioned.

Once the bus was waved through several check points, called portals, featuring guards with M-16 rifles, we passed through a popup roadblock designed to stop a speeding car or truck. We stepped off the bus and into history, Isotope Separation Building 8204-3. While there were a lot of areas in the building blocked off by black curtains, we could see mundane things like old dial phones on the walls that looked like they had been there since the 1940s along with the huge calutrons and their control stations.

In addition to exhibits giving a very simplified explanation of how the calutrons worked, we got to meet and hear from Gladys Owens, one of the original "calutron girls." These young women, many who were fresh out of high school, were brought in to watch the needles on the controls and maintain the optimum operation. They had no idea what they were doing or why. They simply did what they were told and helped win the war.

The effort to construct the "super bomb" was rushed in to operation during WWII in order to beat any other country that might also be trying to build one; several methods were used to separate out the needed U-235 and to create plutonium. The Y-12 plant housed the electromagnetic calutrons process often called "racetracks" because of their shape, used for that purpose. Some of these calutrons actually used silver borrowed from the U.S. Treasury and made into wire to wind the electromagnets because copper was so critical for other war uses.

The calutrons we saw at Y-12 remain on "hot standby" and are ready to be used again in the near future because there are 50 types of medical isotopes that can only be created using the calutron process.

The City of Oak Ridge was recognized in the late 1940s and 1950s as the Atomic City for helping to end the war. In later years, Oak Ridge shied away from its past and most atomic references. Now, once again billing itself as the Secret City and proud of its place in history, there are exhibits of the Manhattan Project at the American Museum of Science and Energy and other ways the city is promoting its historic heritage.

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Jim Young is a Crossville Chronicle correspondent whose column is published periodically.