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Stan Thompson
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The Webmaster Takes Off His Gloves
Seaborg and Thompson:
A non-Conciliatory View
Preface
Glenn
Seaborg left an apparently thorough history of his personal and scientific
accomplishments in his "journals." Especially when it is considered
that Glenn Seaborg left three volumes of over 400 pages each about his life
leading to the Second World War, plus four more volumes of equal size during
his War years, then "about a dozen" more lengthy volumes covering
the years from 1946 to 1958 and God knows how many more volumes after that.
It would seem impossible not to be appreciative of such thorough
contemporaneous documentation of his life. It is true that a journal may not
be thoroughly inclusive and as adequately documented as historians would
prefer. It may be uncomfortably judgmental or contain personal details that
are of little interest or use to historians. It probably will exclude events
that history has later shown to be significant but at the time the journal was
written were not even worth discussing. A journal's strength is that it
presents an insight to the author; an unexpurgated "real time" look
as he or she communicates from the past about their instant and immediate
experiences. It might be expected that a professional chemist's journal would
be especially useful since traditionally lab journals are expected to be
written in ink and corrections made by lining out the previous entry so that
the "trail" of my reasoning will be left in tact. In Seaborg's case,
it might be hoped that there would be useful information about ownership of
"intellectual property rights" (as they say these days in the
Silicon Valley--a version of intellectual "who knew what and when"
that carries accolades and patent money instead of jail sentences).
None
of these expectations are unreasonable from the library description, or on
examination of the text of the journals themselves, save for the fact they are
typed. Upon examination of the prefaces,
it becomes apparent that Seaborg's voluminous journals are not
"journals" at all. They are recreations of events from multiple
sources and edited at much later date than they occurred. In other words, they
combine to present a retrospective and highly edited image which allows
Seaborg to put his "spin" on any given period of his life. The
"journals" are nothing more than very poorly documented chapters of
a carefully shaped autobiography presented as if it they are independent
volumes of contemporaneous jottings revealing Seaborg's accomplishments and
prescience in the field of nuclear chemistry.
Seaborg
was an academic; he knew the difference between a journal and an
autobiography. These volumes were published under contract from the Department
of Energy--the Department of Energy knows the difference between journals and
autobiographies and has no reputation or grant programs for creative writing
or the use of literary devices in producing reports. These volumes simply
represent an irrefutable and illustrative example of Seaborg's intellectual
dishonesty and his desire "to have his cake and it eat too." They
are not about his prescience in the field of nuclear chemistry; they are about
his lack of principle, his insatiable desire for recognition, and his
incredible narcissism.
It
is important to remember that while the content of these volumes was carefully
chosen by Seaborg to prove he was even more competent than his Nobel Prize
indicated, the process of these volumes demonstrated the extent of his
insatiable narcissism and explained the sophisticated ease with which he stole
credit for scientific accomplishments that belonged to others.
Seaborg did not need a detractor; he had more than enough hubris to do
it to himself.
So
there is no confusion, the dialog that appears throughout the remainder of
this paper is "inferential" historical fiction or a literary device
in service of "inferential" historical fiction. In that regard, the
dialogue deserves slightly less credibility than the reports of conversations
given by Seaborg in his "journals." The narrative sections that
appear as part of the text are not fiction but logical inferences drawn from
facts documented by references. The author apologizes in advance for having
only taken four semesters of college chemistry and for never earning a grade
above a "C" in those. Additionally, not every effort has yet been
made to eliminate factual or inferential errors in the text. However, the
errors that remain are presently unknown and bona fide.
When Stan and Glenn
arrived in Northern California, Thompson went to work for Standard Oil in the
Richmond refinery laboratory. Seaborg could not find work and returned to the
University where he perceived more opportunity for his literary talents in
Chemistry. Seaborg was second rate scientist but a first rate politician. He
knew that to be the fact from the beginning. In an unusual moment of candor,
Seaborg, in the second paragraph of his 1978 tribute
to Thompson, writes of Thompson, “He avoided the administrative route to
fame, preferring to work in the laboratory.” Here we find Seaborg confessing
that he was only an administrator’s administrator and that it was Thompson
who was the chemists’ chemist.
No where is Seaborg's
lack of scientific talent more evident than the period before the Second World
War where Seaborg cannot escape scrutiny as a sole contributing (“wet
fingered”) chemist. Examining the record of his publications, all that can
be said is that he worked hard. He was not a first author on a paper until the
year after he took his degree. In fact, he was not even the first author on
the paper that reported the results of his doctoral dissertation. Up until his
scientific papers became top secret because of the War, Seaborg appears to
have done his best science sitting behind a typewriter or while grinding out
laboratory procedures that someone else had developed. Hard worker, yes;
chemical genius, no.
Still, Seaborg’s
greatest talent was recognizing genius and knowing how to use it for his own
aggrandizement. His strategy was invariant: first he catered the favor of
powerful or exceptional scientists by being their loyal sycophant, willing to
doing their most tedious scientific laboratory or writing chores (and
skillfully being included as the last author instead of as a footnote). The
most obvious case was the School of Chemistry's ancient Dean Gilbert. Gilbert
was a very powerful man who reported only to the President of the University
(by special arrangement). After receiving his Ph.D., Seaborg served Lewis
little better than as an over educated clerk
for two years just to remain in the rarified Berkeley atmosphere.
Another powerful
scientist Seaborg pursued was Ernest Lawrence. Seaborg courted his secretary.
Seaborg also drafted behind the talents of physicists Livingood and Segre to
build his reputation by his associations with them. For his efforts, Seaborg
eventually gained access to Lawrence's famous "atom smashing"
cyclotron.
By 1939, after having
been his handmaiden for two years, Lewis appointed Seaborg as an Instructor in
the Chemistry Department. In 1940, he and another instructor, J.W. (Joe)
Kennedy were given the plum of all plums, the permission to continue the
research
of Edwin McMillan. McMillan synthesized and identified the first transuranium
element, atomic number 93, neptunium. He was on his way to doing the same for
element 94 (later to be called plutonium) when he was summoned to MIT to work
on RADAR. McMillan's research had been so spectacular in the field of nuclear
chemistry that he would later be awarded one-half the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
in 1951 for his accomplishments during an eighteen-month period in 1939-1941.
"As fate would have it, the discovery of the first transuranium
element - element 93, neptunium - was a by-product of studies of the fission
process conducted by E. M. McMillan. McMillan, working at the University of
California at Berkeley, in the spring of 1940, was trying to measure the
energies of the two main fragments from the neutron-induced fission of
uranium. He found that there was an unstable, radioactive product of the
reaction -one which did not recoil sufficiently to escape from the thin layer
of uranium undergoing fission. He suspected that this was a product formed by
the capture of a neutron in the uranium. McMillan - and P. H. Abelson, who
joined him in this research - were able to show9 on the basis of
their chemical work, that this product was an isotope of the element with
atomic number 93 - neptunium-239, formed by neutron capture in uranium-238,
followed by electron emission (beta decay).
McMillan's and Abelson's investigation of neptunium showed that it
resembles uranium - not rhenium, as predicted - in its chemical properties.
Therefore, analogous to uranium - which was named after the planet Uranus
-element 93 was named neptunium, after the next planet, Neptune. This was the
first definite evidence that an inner electron shell (the so-called 5f
electron shell) is filled in the transuranium region.
Sucking up
had obviously paid off a big benefit to Glenn T. Seaborg.
When Seaborg “inherited”
McMillan’s work on synthesizing and identifying Element 94 (Plutonium),
Seaborg could see an extraordinary scientific (not to mention career)
opportunity if only he could muster the chemical genius to pick up where
McMillan left off. Unfortunately, chemical genius was not Seaborg’s long
suit. Examining his administrative genius, we find a good example of Seaborg
using the scientific genius of others to solve his career problems in what
might be termed the Christmas crisis of 1940. Frustrated by his inability to
make progress in the discovery of Element 94 in McMillan’s absence, Seaborg
invited his neptunium lab partner, J.W. (Joe) Kennedy, to accompany him to his
parents home in South Gate, California for the Christmas Holidays in 1940.
In terms of lab activities, it was not an auspicious time for both of them to
be gone at the same time since it meant leaving graduate student, Arthur Wahl,
in the lab by himself in the midst of irradiating the next set of samples in
their search for Plutonium. Aside from trying get rid of Kennedy's competition
by "placing" Kennedy at UCLA, the other reason for the trip was to
have lengthy discussions about research strategy with Thompson. Thompson was
also visiting his grandmother in South Gate that same Christmas season. A side
benefit was that Thompson’s grandmother could entertain his new wife, Alice,
while Stan spent the time to be brought up to date on the particulars of what
Seaborg had learned from Segre and inherited from McMillan. For Thompson and
Seaborg, this meeting started a long tradition of "off site"
consultation meetings in Southern California.
In any event, whether
because of Thompson or the water in South Gate, at the beginning of the New
Year 1941, Kennedy and Seaborg left Southern California and returned Berkeley
to discover Plutonium 238 in February and Plutonium 239 (the fissionable
Plutonium on which the construction of an atomic bomb hinged) in March.
Seaborg never comments on it but it was J.W.
Kennedy, not Glenn Seaborg, who was the first author
on the paper with Segre announcing synthesis and identification of Pu239,
the plutonium that swept Seaborg into the Manhattan Project. Seaborg just
drafted behind Kennedy and Segre. The full chemical properties of Pu239
would not be investigated until Seaborg reached the Chicago Laboratory and had
access to scientists who could work on the ultramicrochemical scale.
More drafting along behind giants for Seaborg the science writer. To get to
Chicago, in the early spring of 1942, Seaborg submitted a secret paper on Pu239
to a professional journal and to the Government.
Consequently, he was named the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory
Section Chief for Section C-1 in the Manhattan Engineering District. Why
Seaborg and not J.W. Kennedy (who actually did the work)? It was easy. Seaborg
and Kennedy were so close they might as well have been best friends
(certainly, Seaborg was always borrowing his car). Seaborg induced Kennedy to
leave Berkeley for at least two other jobs (both of which Seaborg had turned
down). One of these jobs was at UCLA
and the other was a with American Cyanamid
in the East. Kennedy accepted the latter and after a few months, hated his
work and asked to return to Berkeley. Seaborg assisted in his return but
Kennedy had been displaced from the transuranium team. He allied himself with
the Lawrence physicists and ended up at Los Alamos. After Kennedy, Wahl would
have been the next most logical choice because he knew far more about the
chemistry of Plutonium than Seaborg. Conveniently, Wahl was too invaluable at
Berkeley and could not accompany his major professor to Chicago. It is safe to
conclude that it was the personal treachery, not the chemical genius, of Glenn
Seaborg that resulted in his selection over Kennedy's. In the end, Seaborg
owed most everything he was, and every opportunity he would obtain, to Edwin
McMillan, J.W. Kennedy, and Stan Thompson. What was left, he owed his typist,
Helen Griggs, and so he married her and took her with him to Chicago. She
thought it was because he loved her.
"The chemical properties of elements 93 and 94 were studied by the
so called "tracer method" at the University of California for the
next year and a half. This meant that invisible amounts of these elements were
followed in chemical studies by their telltale radioactivity. These first two
trans-uranium elements were referred to by the group simply as "element
93" and "element 94," or by code names, until the spring of
1942, at which time the first detailed reports on them were written. The early
work, even in those days, was carried on under a self-imposed cover of
secrecy. Throughout 1941, element 94 was referred to by the code name of
"copper," which was all right until it was necessary to introduce
the element copper into some of the experiments. This posed the problem of
distinguishing between the two. For awhile1 plutonium was referred
to as "copper" and the real copper was "honest-to-God
copper." This seemed clumsier and clumsier as time went on, and element
94 was finally christened the element "plutonium," after the planet
Pluto and analogous to uranium and neptunium.
"The plutonium isotope of major importance is the one with mass
number 239 - that is, the nuclear species having 94 protons and 145 neutrons.
Other plutonium isotopes have the same number of protons, but different
numbers of neutrons. The search for this isotope, as ~ decay product of
neptuniwn-239, was being conducted by the same group, with the collaboration
of E. Segre, simultaneously with the experiments leading to the discovery of
plutonium. The isotope plutonium-239 was identified and its possibilities as a
nuclear energy source were established during the spring of 1941."
"The realization that plutonium, as plutonium-239, could
serve as the explosive ingredient of a nuclear weapon, and that it might be
created in quantity in a nuclear reactor or "atomic pile" - as it
was called then -followed by chemical separation from uranium and the highly
radioactive fission products, 'made it imperative to carry out chemical
investigations of plutonium with weighable quantities, even through
only microgram quantities could be produced using the cyclotron sources of
neutrons available at that time. In
August 1942, B. B. Cunningham and L. B. Werner at the wartime
Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, succeeded in isolating
about a microgram of plutonium-239 -- less than one ten-millionth of an
ounce -- which had been prepared by cyclotron irradiations. Thus, plutonium
was the first man made element to be obtained in visible quantity. The first
weighing of this man-made element took place on September 10, 1942, and was
performed by investigators Cunningham and Werner.
"These so-called "ultramicrochemical" studies conducted
by the research workers on plutonium were remarkable. It was possible to
perform many significant studies with almost invisible amounts of material -
work that was carried out under a microscope. If extremely small volumes are
used, even microgram quantities of material can give relatively high
concentrations in solution; and with the development of balances of the
required sensitivity, micrograms were also sufficient for gravimetric
analysis. Liquid volumes in the range of 1110th to 1/100,000th of a cubic
centimeter were measured with an error of less than one per cent by means of
finely-calibrated capillary tubing. Chemical glassware, such as
test tubes and beakers, was constructed from capillary tubing and was handled
with micromanipulators. This ultramicrochemical work was of necessity, since
almost all the plutonium used in experiments up until the operation of the
Clinton Graphite Reactor was cyclotron produced and available in only
microgram quantities. The first sizeable quantities of plutonium on the
research scale were obtained from the Graphite Reactor in early 1944."
What
if the Cunningham and Werner's Pu239 was different than Kennedy and
Seaborg's? That would have been an embarrassment. Everything had been so
conveniently secret in the reporting of Kennedy and Seaborg's Pu239
and its chemical properties would not be described until after the War. It is
possible that Seaborg was not confident that Kennedy and he and Segre ever
found Pu239 at all. Under those circumstances, wouldn't it have
been very convenient for Seaborg had the plutonium he brought to Chicago been
lost? It was not Cunningham's and Werner's because that's in a jar as a
showpiece in Chicago. Without identifying exactly whose Pu239 was
lost, Seaborg reported in his WWW bio:
"We had our share of setbacks. One night a shelf collapsed because
a worker overloaded it with radiation-shielding lead. A vial crashed on the
bench and a quarter of the world's supply of plutonium soaked into the Sunday
Tribune."
A
friend in need is a friend indeed.
Courtesy of Cunningham
and Werner, at least Seaborg finally had a visible quantity of Pu239 to
show the Army Generals. Still, it was not a very large quantity to use to
design a chemical process that had to work on an industrial scale to safely
produce Pu239 in "lots" of about a pound per day. By
then, Seaborg was on notice that within ten months, the DuPont Corporation
needed a final decision from him on a scalable chemical separation process.
The creation of this process was the reason for the existence of Seaborg’s
lab. Once a chemical separation process was chosen, it would fix the design of
both the pilot plant (at the Clinton Semi-Works in Oak Ridge Tennessee) and
the huge facility for the first industrial manufacturing and purification of a
man made element, fissile grade plutonium, in Hanford, Washington. Seaborg was
a young academic chemist, not a seasoned industrial chemist.
After the weighing of the whole microgram of visible Pu239, a man dressed in a brown Army
uniform with Generals' stars on his shoulders approached Glenn Seaborg. The
General was of frightening proportions: he was a couple of inches taller than
Seaborg and filled out very solidly. He outweighed Seaborg by as much as forty
pounds and all of it was muscle. The man looked grizzled and rough. He looked
grizzled and rough because he was grizzled and rough and to prove it he
roughly put his huge, grizzled hand on Seaborg's shoulder and squeezed until
Seaborg winced. He looked young Glenn in the eye and said, "Son, if you
fuck this up with your college boy arrogance, I'll personally put your ass in
a sling." Seaborg knew the General meant it.
Glenn T. Seaborg was scared to death. The General had
him pegged dead to rights. Seaborg had never been anything but bullshit in the
laboratory. He could talk and write a fine game but he could not perform in
the lab nor could he tell others what to do there. He was a science writer,
not a research chemist. Seaborg was close to desperate. Now he was the senior
person and he had no genius to draft behind. Normally, at a time like this, he
would have called his friend Stan Thompson for some reassurance and for some
ideas. He could not do that now because of the distances involved and the
secrecy imposed by the Manhattan Project. These few months since he left
California had been the longest period of time he had been separated from Stan
Thompson by any greater barrier than a local telephone call since they were
both thirteen years old! With this excellent opportunity at the Met Lab and
unlimited funding, Seaborg had hoped he could prove himself the scientist he
wished he was but all he had managed to prove was that he was in way over his
head.
Seaborg hoped he could become the chemist with
industrial experience who understood nuclear chemistry. He had hoped he would
have been able to master the industrial aspects of the job and that he would
get to be the hero. He was obsessed by the fear that if Glenn T. Seaborg did
not do it himself and had to call in an outsider, Seaborg would be displaced
by the new expert. After all, why would a man with the ability to purify
plutonium need Seaborg? The conversation with the General changed things.
Seaborg was now convinced that if Glenn T. Seaborg wasn't going to be that man
to purify plutonium himself, he had sure as fuck better find the man who was
going to do it soon, so he called for his confidant and scientific colleague
over the previous seventeen years, Stan Thompson. He wouldn't have taken the
job as Section Chief of C-1 if he didn't know that if worst came to worst, he
could always call on Stan to bail him out. Stan had never let him down yet.
Outsiders might have some reservations about Stan: he
was as young as Seaborg and lacked the advanced degrees. Glenn knew Stan was
perfect. Stan knew everything that was going on in Seaborg's lab at Berkeley.
God knows, he had given enough free consulting time to Seaborg since the two
of them had arrived Berkeley in 1935. In the wake of getting McMillan's lab,
Stan had become deeply involved in helping Glenn.
As to producing a pound of plutonium a day, Stan worked
for a fucking refinery, for Christ's sake. He knew about industrial grade
equipment and process engineering. Thompson was exactly the “wet fingered”
chemical genius who had the intellectual and laboratory abilities to refine
plutonium on an industrial scale. Glenn also knew he could trust Stan not to
steal all the credit from him. If he had brought Stan with him from the
beginning, he would not be in such a mess now.
Seaborg knew this was going to be a considerable
imposition on Stan and his wife, Alice. It would not be easy for Thompson to
have to put up with all the academic prejudice he would encounter for his lack
of advanced degrees. To take the job, he would even have to become a graduate
student at Cal. Stan did not need a graduate degree or the bullshit that went
with getting one: he had a draft deferment and a very promising future with
Standard Oil. Still, Glenn knew Stan would be easy to manipulate with a call
to patriotic duty and a plea for personal loyalty from a close friend.
Besides, it was an interesting chemical problem.
By urging Thompson to come to Chicago, Glenn T. Seaborg
took the wisest and biggest step on his “administrative route to fame.”
The route ultimately led him to share the Nobel Prize with Edwin McMillan in
1951.
Stan and Alice Thompson arrived in Chicago on October
1, 1942. Seaborg had been without
his consulting/confidante services for five months; they were the longest five
months since they first met. Then, according to Seaborg,
“Within
three months, he [Thompson} conceived and tested experimentally the Bismuth
Phosphate Process which was put into successful operation at Hanford,
Washington within two years. This process represented the largest scale-up in
history, a chemical and technological achievement of enormous proportions. In
the course of this very successful development, about whose potential success
much skepticism was expressed, he [Thompson] directed the training of hundreds
of chemists.”
"When we moved into the New Chemistry Building in December. 1942.
We at last had space to test the various separation processes which had been
proposed. Although our knowledge of plutonium chemistry grew at an impressive
rate. Our research did not indicate that any one process had a clear-cut
advantage.
"Early in 1943 we decided that we would use an oxidation-reduction
process in aqueous solution, but it was not at all clear whether lanthanum
fluoride or bismuth phosphate would be the best carrier of plutonium. Until we
made that decision, Du Pont could not fix the design of the Oak Ridge pilot
plant. I remember we discussed the alternatives at a meeting in Chicago on
June 1, the deadline which Du Pont had established for the decision. Because
the engineering data did not indicate a clear choice, Greenewalt turned to me
for an opinion. With the fate of the whole wartime project hanging on my
judgment, I said I was willing to guarantee at least a 50-percent recovery of
plutonium from the bismuth phosphate process, developed by Stanley G. Thompson
of our group. With that assurance, Greenewalt focused most of his engineering
talent of his organization on bismuth phosphate. It would be eighteen months
before I could be certain that my decision had been the right one."
"So
Stan, what do you think? Which do we go with?"
"No
question Glenn, bismuth phosphate. How many times do I have to tell you that
lanthanum fluoride is too toxic? You won't be able to find equipment that will
hold up to it nor will be able to live with yourself if there is an
unnecessary industrial accident that kills more people than it should and
screws up the production schedule."
"Greenewalt
tells me the same General who threatened to put my ass in a sling told him
yesterday that the General would drop all six of our young balls in hot sand
if we get this wrong," whined Glenn.
"Knowing
the general, I'm sure he means it. You think lanthanum fluoride is going to
keep your balls out of hot sand?" replies Stan, shaking his head.
"The
general likes lanthanum fluoride because it makes for such an efficient
recovery," whines Glenn.
"Well,
Glenn, you can go with your General and lanthanum fluoride but you will have
to do it without me. In fact, Alice and Standard Oil will thank you for it
because that will get us back to California real soon. I am not going to lie
and tell you I can make a process work that cannot be engineered safely or
reliably. I do not care what percentage of plutonium lanthanum fluoride
recovers when it works. It will not work and in the end you will have to go
with bismuth phosphate anyway. You might want to consider that when you do,
you will have to find somebody else to make even bismuth phosphate work
because I won't be available again."
"How
can you be so sure of bismuth phosphate, Stan?"
"These
things come easy too me, I guess," Stan said in a friendly way.
Seaborg
couldn't do without Thompson at his side.
He couldn't hold his own without technical help from Stan because it
was Thompson who was the scientist in charge of developing the processes that
were relevant to the War effort. Stan
always succeeded while Seaborg's other pet projects were either discontinued
on orders from above or cut back in their priority. Every meaningful
contribution Seaborg's C-1 Section made to the War Effort came from the hard
work and genius of Stan Thompson. When
Seaborg traveled to the Oak Ridge and the Clinton Semi-Works, he had to take
Stan Thompson with him. They
traveled together to Site-X for the first time on September 14th of
1943. They made additional trips on October 9th and
November 3rd of 1943, and again on Jan 16th of 1944.
Additionally, Thompson led a team (without Seaborg) to trouble-shoot
the opening of the separation unit from November 20th to December
15th of 1943.
"Let
me recount for a few moments some of the exciting history of those early days
associated with the Graphite Reactor. Among the major problems facing the
Manhattan Project in the production of plutonium for military uses were of
course the development of a production reactor and the chemical procedures by
which to separate the produced plutonium-239 from the parent uranium and all
the highly radioactive fission products. My coworkers and I spent many months
on the latter problem at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory
and developed a promising separations method based on the precipitation and
dissolution of bismuth phosphate. Much of the work was performed on the
ultramicrochemical scale. It was felt necessary to test this process on a
large pilot plant scale.
"It
was agreed as early as September 1942 to locate the plutonium pilot plant in
Tennessee. The move to the Clinton Engineer Works, or Clinton Laboratories, as
the site was known in those days, took place during the
fall of 1943. The plant had
been largely built by that time; and a nearby village, given the name of Oak
Ridge, was constructed to hou8e the personnel associated with the operation.
M. D. Whitaker became the head of the plant; R. L. Doan, the director of
research; W. C. Johnson, and later J. R. Coe, Jr., the head of the Chemistry
Division; A. H. Snell, a leader of the Physics Division; H. C. Leverett, the
head of the Technical Division; and K. Z. Morgan and J. E. Wirth, the heads of
health physics and biology. Metallurgical
Project Director Arthur H. Compton moved to the site to watch over the
operations. L. B. Borst, L. W. Mordheim, and E. 0. Wollan directed important
segments of the work.
"The
Clinton Laboratories, also known by the code name of "Site X," was
the responsibility of the University of Chicago, with personnel from the du
Pont Company playing the key role in the design, building, and operation of
the air-cooled Graphite Reactor and the bismuth phosphate extraction plant
which served as prototypes or pilot plants for the later Hanford operation.
(After the war, as you all know, the Clinton Laboratories became the Oak
Ridge National Laboratory, operated first by the Monsanto Chemical Company,
soon to be followed by the Union Carbide Company, the present operator.) S.
W. Pratt managed these pilot production activities from the standpoint of the
du Pont Company, with the help of W. C. Kay and with L. K. Wyatt in charge of
the reactor and F. B. Vaughan in charge of the chemical extraction plant. J.
Gillette also played a role in the successful construction and operation of
the plutonium plant.
"During
the period August through November 1943, most of the chemists and engineers
associated with the work on chemical processes moved from the Metallurgical
Laboratory in Chicago to the Clinton Laboratories to prepare for the beginning
of plant operations there. The chain-reacting pile that had been under
construction since early in 1943 began to operate at low power level on
November 4, 1943--twenty years ago. Its performance was excellent. Much of the
success of the reactor was attributed to the group under Miles Leverett
working on the engineering problems associated with the reactor's construction
and early operation. This group, drawn from various operations of the du Pont
organization included A. Rupp, J. E. Lane, C, J. Borkowski, S. E. Beall, and
B. Briggs.
"Construction
of the separations plant was nearing completion, the process
semi-works had been transferred from Chicago and began to operate in September
1943 in a division under the direction of O. H. Greager. The group of process
development chemists under J. B. Sutton transferred to the Clinton
Laboratories in November. A large number of chemists transferred from the
Metallurgical Laboratory and continued on chemical extraction process work
under the direction of I. Perlman, with groups under the leadership of S. G.
English, D. R. Miller, D. E. Koshland, Jr., V.R. Cooper, and B. A. Fries. R.
W. Stoughton later headed a group working on uranium-233. Other groups with C.
D. Coryell (on fissionproduct research, hot-laboratory operations, and
process thermodynamics) and G. E. Boyd (on analytical chemistry and continued
research on potential adsorption processes as possible alternate methods for
the separation and decontamination of plutonium) were similarly transferred to
Clinton, and these latter groups all worked in the Chemistry Division under We
C. Johnson. J. A. Swartout and K. Kraus also were involved in these
early chemical studies. H.S. Brown, after initially directing research on
volatility processes for the separation of plutonium, served as Assistant
Director of the Chemistry Division. I should also mention that it was during
these days that C. K. Larson first came to Oak Ridge as an Assistant
Superintendent of the chemical Research Division at the Y-12 Plant. A little
later in 1945 Al Weinberg came on the scene as Section Chief in the Physics
Division of the Clinton Laboratories.
"The
first uranium from the Clinton pile entered the separations plant on December
20, 1943. By the end of January 1944, metal from the pile was being processed
in the plant at the rate of one-third ton per day; by February 1, 1944, 190
milligrams of plutonium had been isolated; and by March 1, several grams had
been produced. This and the following plutonium was of special importance to
the Los Alamos Laboratory. The yield from the plant at the very start was
about 50 percent, and by June 1944 it was between 80 and 90 percent[19]."
The real action on the
transplutonium front was out where a total of six tons of uranium was becoming
a pound of day of Pu239. The load was split between two pair of
giant, identical separation buildings. That action started with turning
high-grade uranium into tin cans so that it could be more easily handled (and
so that there would not be any dust since breathing radioactive stuff was
pretty damn bad for you). After the uranium and been shaped into little cans
and tined, it got shoved into one of the many geometrically arranged tubes in
one of the Hanford reactors. This fresh new can of uranium was about to get
"bred (they were called breeder reactors, after all)" The breeding
was not that clean an operation. In a perfect world, the reactor would have
been brought to a critical mass with one set of highly refined, quality
control tested, cans of uranium. Once we knew what our reactor could do, and
then we could feed in a few new cans of uranium for bombardment by all those
sub atomic particles to create the Pu239 for the folks at Los
Alamos. Alas, we did not have that kind of time. Oh no! We needed all the Pu239
we could make from the get-go. So all the cans of uranium got changed in every
reactor once every 24-hours. New stuff in, even newer stuff out. The reactor
was not just making one new element, plutonium; it was making lots of isotopes
and a few new elements, bombarding hell out of everything that was being
created and thus making stuff that had never been made before. At least it had
never been made before in appreciably large enough quantities to study (and
there was a big interest in studying it since it might kill someone or degrade
the quality of the Pu239 product). More horrifying, since what was going
in was not always the same, neither was what was coming
out. What you could count on was Pu239 but you better keep your
eye pealed for lots of fission products from the heavy metals and you could
also find spectrographic evidence that there were some new elements being made
with atomic numbers greater than plutonium's. It was all bad shit, at least
from a safety conscious nonprofessional's point of view, all of it.
Returning to the process
of synthesizing the plutonium, recall our new can of uranium being shoved in
one end of a tube that was very hot because the other cans it contained were
part of a critical mass of uranium; an atom smashing/combining critical mass.
Fission and Fusion just like a coffeepot percolating. It would be another
eleven years until Werner Von Braun's memorable 1955 national television
performance on Disneyland that would make "fission" a household
word. Anyone of any age who saw it will never forget when Walt Disney threw
out that one Ping-Pong ball into a room full of mousetraps loaded with two
ping pong balls each. The single ball hit the first mousetrap which sent two
balls airborne then those two balls came down to hit two more mousetraps and
then four balls went airborne, and then eight and then the next thing you knew
the whole fucking room was thick with flying Ping-Pong balls. All that was
missing was the mushroom shaped cloud. At Hanford, the real thing was taking
place except it was atom parts, not ping-pong balls, that were making the
action. The mini explosions that were taking place generated so much heat it
took much of the Columbia River to cool it. There were also graphite rods to
tame it. As our one new can of virgin uranium went into a tube, another can of
well bred uranium (containing now smidges of plutonium and God knows what
other horrible things) popped out the other end of the tube on the opposite
side of the reactor. It was just like a fat man with a full belly eating a
corn dog while sitting on a toilet: to get something more in, something else
had to come out. In deference to the horrible things that were in that can
that was excreted after its visit to the core of the reactor (or
"pile," as the European's liked to say), it was dumped into a pond
under thirty feet of water for a month to let all the unwholesome and unwanted
short-lived radioactive isotopes get to the end of their most toxic few
half-lives. Then the can was "safe enough" to be processed in a
fully automated plant where no human being could even look at it directly.
That is where the wheat of "fusion" was separated from the chaff of
"fission" by Stan Thompson's bismuth phosphate process.
The identical buildings
they built to house his bismuth phosphate chemical process were something to
behold; ugly wonders of the world: each was once and half as wide as a
football field and almost three football fields long! It was 100 feet high! A
third of it was buried into the ground. All the walls and floors were four
feet thick! Inside, below grade, were 22 bays into which the "spent"
(fully irradiated with a smidgen of plutonium) uranium cans were deposited by
a fully automated, no human in sight, process. At that point, the most caustic
chemicals imaginable were used to dissolve the most toxic tin cans imaginable
to capture the little tiny little bit Pu239 from a whole lot of
uranium and scads of radioactive isotopes and even a few new elements. It was
like trying to find the single healthy sprout in a can of filled with botulism
and gray string beans. It was not like there was a lot of Pu239. A
ton going into each building (from the ponds) only got you a half-pound of
bomb grade plutonium coming out. Even then, it took several successive
centrifuging and acid dissolutions before enough plutonium was present to be
visible to the naked eye. Not that there were any naked eyes in the vicinity
of those 22 bays, there weren't any naked eyes looking at what was going on
without a periscope to bend the light to stay out of harms way from all that
bad radioactivity. It turns out that the radioactivity was too mean to be bent
by a simple mirror.
Thompson arrived at
Hanford (with Alice and Ruthie in tow) on October 15th of 1944
according to Seaborg's memoirs. The first report that this paper can quote
(because most have not yet been released by the Government) was dated 13
December 1944.
Thompson and his family stayed only until May 24th of 1945. The HEW
Monthly Report produced the following month documents his departure and his
accomplishments. It appears that
Thompson's position was that of Senior
Supervisor for the Separation Engineer Division 200 Area Technical Department
and was the highest-ranking technical position in the separations area of all on-loan
Du Pont employees (i.e. civilian scientists). Thompson had over two-hundred
competent scientists and technicians to help him test his hypotheses and
collect data. Unlike Seaborg, Thompson had a strategy and knew how to direct
his people to run the experiments that were required to do what he knew needed
to be done to make Pu239 as safely and as efficiently as possible.
The cutting edge of
nuclear chemistry was here at Hanford because it was perceived as a matter of
life and death for the success of the United States war effort; there was an
unlimited budget and a staff of hundreds around the clock. The cutting edge of
nuclear chemistry was also thousands of miles away from either the body or
abilities of Glenn Seaborg. This cutting edge was short lived and at its
sharpest from November of 1944 until the end of May, 1945. During that period,
just as it should have been, that acute instrument of science in service of
destruction was being wielded by Stanley G.
Thompson, the man who had conceived and scaled up the chemical
processes that were working successfully in these two giant buildings.
Thompson could conduct as much research in a day with the resources at his
command as what it took a year (or more) to do in Berkeley before the war (and
would again after the War). Thompson's giant advances leading to, and
culminating in the events at Hanford, "conditioned by the war,"
made possible the subsequent separation and identification of every remaining
element of the actinide series beyond plutonium. The University of
California's association with the actinides (the transplutonium elements) had
mostly to do with UC's association with Stanley G. Thompson. It was UC's great
fortune that Thompson elected to maintain his relationship with Seaborg after
his success at Hanford and to return to Berkeley via Chicago. In the years
that would follow, Seaborg would have the opportunity to serve ten presidents
as their expert in atomic energy for having been nothing more than the
duplicitous recruiter of his high school friend..
Nothing
could be sillier than Seaborg proposing that he and his non-Hanford team were
on the forefront of anything. Hanford was where the breakthroughs were coming
in the synthesis and identification of the fission products of the heavy
metals and new transplutonium elements. To happen in Chicago required ancient
technology: a medical doctor in Berkeley running the cyclotron to irradiate a
flyspeck of Clinton Semi-Works plutonium. Even then, the best Seaborg and
Hamilton could do was to produce evidence of elements beyond plutonium. They
sure as hell could not tell you what it was without Stan Thompson. It was
insulting, intellectually dishonest, and even unpatriotic that Seaborg
published an article in Science
(no less) on the "production" of elements 95 and 96 in 1945 as if he
was the expert when the real expert was out risking his life at Hanford where
actinide separations were an every day fact of life.
"Those
of still in the chemistry group in 1944 continued our research in "New
Chem" with a program that included a search for transplutonium elements.
These efforts did not bring any success until we formulated a new theory
postulating the existence of a group of "actinide" elements in the
heavy element region with properties similar to the lanthanide rare-earth
series in the traditional periodic table. Experiments during the summer and
fall of 1944 and extending into the beginning of 1945, using both cyclotron
and reactor irradiated plutonium, led to the detection of element 96,
which we later called "curium" and of element 95, which we named
"americium." During the remainder of the war, in addition to
supporting activities at Hanford and Los Alamos, we investigated the processes
which made possible the isolation of these new elements in pure form,
americium in the fall of 1945, and curium in 1947. As I look back on these
events. I realize that some of the most exciting moments of my scientific
career occurred in the flimsy laboratories of the Met Lab."
And
"After
the completion, at the wartime Chicago Metallurgical
Laboratory, of the most essential part of the investigations concerned with
the chemical processes involved in the production and separation of plutonium,
attention turned to the problem of synthesizing and identifying the next
heavier transuranium elements. As my collaborators in this endeavor, there
were A. Ghiorso, R. A. James, and L. 0.
Morgan.
There
followed a period during which the attempts to synthesize and identify
elements 95 and 96 bore no fruit. The unsuccessful experiments were based on
the premise that these elements should be much like plutonium, in that it
should be possible to oxidize them to a higher oxidation state and utilize
this oxidation in the chemical isolation procedures. It was not until the
middle of the summer of 1944, upon the first recognition that these elements
were part of an "actinide" transition series (i.e., were chemically
very similar to the element actinium and to the long known rare earth
elements), that any advance was made; and then progress came quickly.
Incidentally, this element-by-element analogy in chemical properties
between the actinide and lanthanide (rare earth) elements has been the key to
the chemical identification - and, hence discovery of the
subsequent transuranium elements."
"As
soon as it was recognized that these elements could be oxidized only with
extreme difficulty, if at all, the identification of An isotope then thought
to be element 95 or 96 followed immediately. Thus, the isotope of element 96--
curium, with an atomic mass of 242-- vas produced in the summer of 1944 as a
result of the bombardment of plutonium-239 with 32-Mey helium ions in the
cyclotron at Berkeley.
"The
identification of element 95, americium, followed, during late 1944 and early
1945, As a result of the bombardment of plutonium-239 with neutrons in a
nuclear reactor, the Oak Ridge Graphite Reactor.
"Some
comments should be made, here, concerning the rare earth-like properties of
these two elements. Other hypotheses that they should greatly resemble the
rare earth elements in their chemical properties proved to be so very true
that, for a time, it appeared to be unfortunate. The better part of a year was
spent in trying without success to separate chemically the two elements from
each other and from the rare earth elements; and although we felt entirely
confident, on the basis of their radioactive properties and the methods of
production, that isotopes of elements 95 and 96 had been produced, the
chemical proof was still undemonstrated.
The elements remained unnamed during this period of futile attempts at
separation (although one of our group referred to them as "pandemonium" and "delirium," in recognition of
our difficulties). The key to their
final separation, and the technique which made feasible the separation and
identification of these and subsequent transuranium elements, was the
so-called ion exchange technique. The elements were named americium,
after the Americas, and curium, in honor of Pierre and Marie Curie, by analogy
to the naming of their rare earth counterparts (i.e., homologues) -europium
(After Europe) and gadolinium (after the Finnish chemist Gadolin)."
"We
succeeded because I dared to challenge the conventional wisdom of the day.
When nuclear researchers say 'discover,' they are generally using nont |
