Ernest Lawrence, Glenn Seaborg,   and J. Robert Oppenheimer

Over the past decade, the Atomic Heritage Foundation (AHF) has received grants from Crystal Trust, a foundation in Wilmington, DE. But we were surprised and delighted to receive a two-hundred-fifty-thousand dollar check in the mail just before Christmas. The latest grant is to digitize and make available to the public some 180 Manhattan Project interviews.

 

These interviews are part of three collections of Manhattan Project oral histories currently in academic and private archives: the Stephane Groueff collection at Boston University (1965), the S. L. Sanger collection at the University of Washington (1986) and Richard Rhodes' private collection (1990s).

  

These recordings include over five hours with General Leslie R. Groves and hundreds more with over 180 other Manhattan Project participants. Among the interviewees are Nobel Prize winners Hans Bethe, Harold Urey, and Glenn Seaborg, many DuPont workers including Walter Simon and Crawford Greenewalt, and other top Manhattan Project personnel including Dorothy McKibbin, John Dunning, George Kistiakowsky, and Col. Frank Matthias.

 

Crawford Greenewalt

Over the next few months, we will digitize the tapes, transcribe and edit the interviews, and add them to the Voices of the Manhattan Project website. Soon you will be able to hear the personal accounts of the Manhattan Project in the voices of General Groves, Oppenheimer, and many others. We plan to use the interviews in museum exhibits, interpretive vignettes and other programming. This treasure trove of oral histories will help bring the Manhattan Project history to life for visitors to the new park.

 

The grant will also support recording more interviews with Manhattan Project veterans and their families. If you are, or know, a veteran who would like to be interviewed, please contact us at info@atomicheritage.org.

 

We are very grateful to Crystal Trust for their most generous and timely support. The oral history project is central to providing the public and future generations an immediate and vibrant connection with the Manhattan Project.

 

DOE Completes Demolition of K-25

 

 

On December 17, the Department of Energy completed its demolition of the K-25 gaseous diffusion plant in Oak Ridge, which produced enriched uranium during the Manhattan Project and Cold War. When the plant was completed in early 1945, after only about a year and a half of construction, it was the largest roofed building in the world. The mile-long, U-shaped plant covered forty-four acres, was four stories high and up to 400 feet wide.

 

K-25 North End Demolition

The National Park Service urged DOE to preserve a piece of K-25 for heritage tourism, explaining in its report, "Because the K-25 building has no substitute, the NPS considers it vital that the maximum practical amount of the original building and equipment be preserved to enable the best possible interpretation of this facility and its operation." NPS recommended that DOE preserve two cells of equipment, "the absolute minimum amount of equipment needed to properly illustrate and interpret the gaseous diffusion process."

 

AHF worked in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation and local historic preservation groups to preserve a sliver of the historic building. However, DOE officials announced in November 2011 that saving a portion of the building was "imprudent." 

 

Instead, DOE committed to recreating a portion of the K-25 facility and installing interpretive exhibits nearby. While DOE just awarded a contract for the work, there is "no money" to proceed at this time. 

 

We can only hope that the future Manhattan Project National Historical Park will spark greater recognition of the importance of preserving and interpreting Oak Ridge's monumental history. 

 

 

 

In December, the popular tech website Gizmodo highlighted unique Department of Energy photographs showing the Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1), the world's first controlled nuclear reactor. Arthur Compton was the director of the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago tasked with building the first nuclear reactor. Compton decided to build CP-1 under the west stands at Stagg Field without first seeking permission from UChicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins. 

 

"The only answer he could have given would have been 'No.' And this answer would have been wrong. So I assumed the responsibility myself." (Arthur Compton, Atomic Quest, Oxford University Press, 1956.) Photographs of CP-1 are rare and we appreciate DOE's adding them to its digital archive. 

 

Unfortunately, other valuable DOE online collections are disappearing. As nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein highlighted in a recent article, several top Manhattan Project digital archives run by DOE have been taken down in the last year for financial and technical reasons: the Marshall Islands Document Collection, Hanford Declassified Document Retrieval System, DOE Digital Photo Archive, and Los Alamos National Laboratory's Manhattan Project history website. These collections are unique resources for scholars and members of the public and should be reviewed and restored as quickly as possible.