Manhattan Project veteran and Oak Ridge City Historian Bill Wilcox describes why the X-10 Graphite Reactor was built.
Narrator: In February of 1943, the Manhattan Project began constructing a pilot reactor to produce plutonium at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. As Manhattan Project veteran Bill Wilcox explains, the facilities at Oak Ridge served as prototypes for the massive, industrial-scale plants at Hanford, Washington.
Bill Wilcox: They broke ground for the X-10 Graphite Reactor, which was to be a pilot reactor for the manufacture of teaspoon-sized quantities of plutonium so that the chemists could do research on the processes that had to be used at Hanford, Washington, where the big plutonium reactors were going to be making the fuel for the second atomic bomb.
The question was, “We know how to make the plutonium by a nuclear reaction, but the question is, how are we going to separate that stuff from all the uranium fission products that are made?” And so far, the chemists had just had microgram quantities, so they wanted to get their hands on gram-sized quantities so that they could really do the research and develop good processes.
Narrator: With Nobel Prize-winning physicists Enrico Fermi and Arthur Holly Compton watching closely, the reactor “went critical” at 5 AM on November 4, 1943. The chemical separation process was begun in December. Building on Oak Ridge’s success, the first industrial-scale reactor at Hanford began operating less than a year later.