Talk:S-50 (Manhattan Project)

Merged back in?
I personally feel that S-50 should be broken out into its own article. From the prior merge discussion, it looks like folks felt there wasn't enough material on S-50 to support it broken out. However, someone (wish I had the time) really should do the research since the S-50 liquid gaseous diffusion plant was the successor to K-25 and Y-12.--P Todd 22:03, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Information about S-50 has been merged into the K-25 article (not by me). That's not ideal, but it's reasonable, since S-50 was adjacent to K-25. It was not a successor to K-25 and Y-12, however. Rather it started out as a parallel technology, but was abandoned because the other two technologies worked better. --orlady 17:35, 11 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I seem to remember reading years ago that S-50 stemmed from a small, low-key Navy research effort begun prior to the Manhattan Project investigating nuclear power for submarine propulsion. The Navy investigators had not built anything, but their work was rapidly absorbed into the Manhattan Project.
 * If true, that has implications for the widely held belief that it was Hyman Rickover who first saw the potential of nuclear propulsion after the several years later. If anyone knows something about S-50, I encourage them to add to this topic either on this talk page or at the K-25 article. At some point S-50 should have its own article again.--A. B. (talk) 18:03, 11 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I think there is enough material to create a separate article about S-50 once again, although there are some facts that need to be nailed down.


 * The page at http://www.mphpa.org/HISTORY/H-06b5.htm has some good information about S-50, including a Navy connection, but the connection is not as clear-cut as A.B.'s recollection implies.
 * [Note: "A.B.'s recollection" does even not fall into the category of "original research" -- rather it skates perilously close to "adopt-a-memory". --A. B. (talk) 20:30, 11 December 2006 (UTC)]

I think that http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev25-34/chapter2.shtml has the straight scoop: "In August 1946, Eugene Wigner opened the Laboratories' Clinton Training School with Frederick Seitz as its director. Although Wigner envisioned it as a small postdoctoral seminar in nuclear technology, more than 50 people from the military, industry, and academia enrolled. Among the first participants were Herbert MacPherson, Sidney Siegel, John Simpson, Everitt Blizard, Douglas Billington, and Donald Stevens, all of whom subsequently became renowned for their activities in science. The most famous graduate, however, was Captain Hyman Rickover of the U.S. Navy. The Navy had first provided Wigner and Szilard funding for nuclear experiments in 1939. During the war, Navy scientists developed a thermal diffusion process for separating uranium isotopes; the S-50 plant in Oak Ridge was built during World War II for this purpose. Navy interest in using nuclear energy for ship propulsion continued, and in early 1946 Philip Abelson of the Navy research team spent several months at the Laboratory studying Wigner's approach to reactor design. In May 1946, Admiral Chester Nimitz assigned five Navy officers and three civilians to Oak Ridge. The officers were Hyman Rickover, Louis Roddis, James Dunford, Raymond Dick, and Miles Libbey." Thus, the Navy was the source of the technology used at S-50, and (as is widely known and documented around Oak Ridge) the post-war nuclear Navy had its genesis at Oak Ridge, but there is no direct connection between S-50 and the post-war nuclear Navy.


 * The mostly reliable site http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq10.html lists some significant factoids about S-50:
 * June 3, 1944 - After visiting the uranium enrichment pilot plan at the Naval research Laboratory, a team of Manhattan Project experts recommends that a thermal diffusion plant be built to feed enriched material to the electromagnetic enrichment plant at Oak Ridge.
 * June 18, 1944 - Groves contracts to have S-50, a liquid thermal diffusion uranium enrichment plant, built at Oak Ridge in no more than three months.


 * September 16, 1944 - S-50 enrichment plant begins partial operation at Oak Ridge, but leaks prevent substantial output.
 * January, 1945 - Substantial production of ~0.85% enriched uranium begins at S-50, with ten of 21 racks going in to operation.
 * March 15, 1945 - All 21 racks at the S-50 thermal diffusion plant finally in operation.
 * September 9, 1945 - S-50 plant completely shut down.


 * The childrenofthemanhattanproject website also has a nice photo of the S-50 plant in operation; since only the US federal government had cameras in Oak Ridge during WWII, we can be sure it's a federal photo and thus in the public domain. :-) That particular article says in one place that Union Carbide was the contractor for S-50; elsewhere it says that the contractor was H. K. Ferguson Company of Cleveland. Most other online sources identify either Ferguson or Carbide, but not both. My guess is that Ferguson was the construction contractor, and maybe Carbide was the operating contractor.
 * The account at http://www.atomicheritage.org/oakridge.htm is consistent: "Besieged with trouble with the Y-12 and K-25 plants, Groves decided to invest in the technique developed by Philip Abelson for the Navy. This time the contractor, H.K. Ferguson Company of Cleveland, was given just 90 days to construct the facility, involving 2,142 columns, each over 40 feet tall. With the pressure of the war, there was no time to pursue each process sequentially. Each of the facilities was a gamble on an enormous scale. As of April 1945, none of the processes worked well. In an almost desperate but insightful move, Oppenheimer ordered that Oak Ridge's three enrichment processes be run serially. The thermal diffusion process, a huge facility built in less than three months, achieved less than two percent enrichment but this slightly enriched material greatly increased the efficiency of the gaseous diffusion process. When this product, enriched to about 23 percent U-235, was fed into the electromagnetic separation process or calutrons, the result was about 84 percent enrichment. Fortunately that was sufficient as demonstrated by the Little Boy bomb dropped over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945."
 * According to http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/systems/anp.htm, after the war the S-50 plant was used for the nuclear-powered airplane program. (I've never heard that detail before, but I don't doubt it...) --orlady 20:12, 11 December 2006 (UTC)


 * This is great stuff, orlady! --A. B. (talk) 20:31, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Philip Abelson
There are references for the Philip Abelson article that might be useful here and vice versa. I think also that the references here might be used to correct some confusion in the Philip Abelson article about his exact involvement with naval nuclear propulsion. I think it understates his early work while overstating (until I changed some things) his later work during the Rickover era. --A. B. (talk) 17:14, 13 December 2006 (UTC)