75 years of science and technology
In the early days of the Manhattan Project, all roads led to the University of Chicago, where some of the 20th century’s most brilliant minds gathered at the Metallurgical Laboratory, the precursor of today’s Argonne National Laboratory.
It was the site of the first nuclear reactor, a temporary construction named Chicago Pile-1. But even before that history-making event, scientists were making plans for a full-scale operation to produce plutonium in Hanford, Washington.
One major question was whether a pilot plant would be necessary to demonstrate the process. Some believed the pilot project would take too much time, others that it was the more prudent approach.
The prudent side won, and the Graphite Reactor and plutonium processing facility were built at the Manhattan Project’s X-10 Site in East Tennessee, which would become ORNL a few years after the war.
The Oak Ridge reactor was created at breakneck speed, having been theorized, engineered and built in just nine months. As various facilities came online, entire organizational sections from the Metallurgical Laboratory were transferred to Oak Ridge. Many of those scientists ended up setting down roots.
The war did not end Oak Ridge’s relationship with the University of Chicago. While X-10 was created as a pilot plant, the Graphite Reactor was just too well built to be abandoned. When, several years later, control rods of the Chicago Pile-3 reactor showed signs of corrosion, X-10 opened its gates to Argonne researchers needing to perform experiments and gave them priority over other external users.