Oak Ridge, Tennessee/oakridge155
Previous | Home | Next"Welcome to the Graphite Reactor.
The World's First Continuously Operated Nuclear Reactor.
The Graphite Reactor was designed and built in only 11 months following the operation of the CP-1 (Chicago Piles 1) reactor on Dec. 2 1942, at the University of Chicago. CP-1 demonstrated that a nuclear chain reaction could be self-sustaining and controlled and showed nuclear fission offered exciting possibilities as a new source of power. With these promising results, the U.S. government proceeded with land for a major national effort to produce fission bombs. Construction of a pilot plant -- the Graphite Reactor -- for the production and chemical separation of plutonium had been justified.
The government acquired land in 1942 under the pretense, for security reasons, of establishing the Kingston Demolition Range. The U.S. Army's Corps of Engineers started construction of a town (Oak Ridge) and office buildings under the name Clinton Engineer Works. The project was part of the large-scale production activities required to produce an atomic bomb.
Clinton laboratories, new Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was established as a direct result o the success of CP-1, which proved the theory of nuclear chain reaction.
because of the Manhattan Project's urgency, the ordinary procedure of completing pilot-plant tests before undertaking full-scale production was not followed. The government also built a production plant in Hanford, Washington -- a site chosen because of its isolation, abundance of electrical power, and the quality of the Colombia River water, which was used as the reactor coolant.
With the selection of the Hanford Site, it became the Graphite Reactor's mission to carry out necessary research and development for plutonium production as well as to supply the first quantities of plutonium. Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico was established to develop the bomb itself.
Construction at the Graphite Reactor was completed on Oct. 15, 1943. On Nov. 3 at 4:30 p.m., fuel was loaded into the reactor under the supervision of Enrico Fermi, who had been responsible for CP-1. At 5:00 a.m. the following day, the Graphite Reactor began operating.
The development o nuclear energy moved rapidly forward during the years of the Graphite Reactor's operation. Having fulfilled its missions, the reactor was shut down in 1963."
