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By the time President
Roosevelt authorized the Manhattan Project on December 28, 1942, work
on the east Tennessee site where the first production facilities were
to be built was already underway.
On Saturday, September 19,
Groves had approved the acquisition of 59,000 acres of land along the
Clinch River, 20 miles west of Knoxville, Tennessee. Also
approved was the removal of relatively few families on the marginal
farmland and extensive site preparation to provide the transportation,
communications, and utility needs of the town and production plants
that would occupy the previously undeveloped area. At first,
this location was known as "Site X" and later changed to the
Clinton Engineer Works, named after the nearest town. After the
war, the name was again changed officially to Oak Ridge.
Original plans called for
the military reservation to house approximately 13,000 people in
prefabricated housing, trailers, and wood dormitories. By the
time the Manhattan Engineer District headquarters were moved from
Washington DC to Tennessee in the summer of 1943 (Groves kept the
Manhattan project's office in Washington and placed Col. Kenneth D.
Nichols in command at Tennessee), estimates for the town of Oak Ridge
had been revised upward to 45,000 people. (Note: The name Oak Ridge
did not come into usage until after World War II but will be used here
to avoid confusion). By the end of the war, Oak Ridge was the
fifth largest city in Tennessee and was consuming 1/7 of all the
electrical power being produced in the United States. While the
Army and its contractors tried desperately to keep up with the rapid
influx of workers and their families, services always lagged behind
demand.
The three production
facility sites were located in valleys away from the town. This
provided security and containment in case of accidental
explosions. The Y-12 area, home of the electromagnetic plant,
was closest to Oak Ridge, being one ridge away to the south.
Farther to the south and west lay both the X-10 area, which contained
the experimental plutonium pile and separation facilities, and K-25,
site of the gaseous diffusion plant and later the S-50 thermal
diffusion plant. Y-12 and X-10 were begun slightly earlier in
1943 than was K-25, but all three were well along by the end of the
year.
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