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Anotchka (nuclear reactor)
Even while this facility was still in the planning stage, a government commission inspected and approved a location east of the Urals for a plutonium production facility similar to the American Hanford Site, with nuclear production reactor much larger in size than the research reactor, combined with a radiochemical extraction factory. Constructed some fifteen miles east of the small town of Kyshtym, this plutonium production complex came to be known as Chelyabinsk-40 and later still, as Mayak. The area was chosen in part because of its proximity to the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant which had merged during the war with the evacuated Kharkov Diesel Works and parts of the Leningrad Kirov Plant into a major tank production complex popularly known as "Tankograd". To supply the complex and dozens of other armament works in the area, a huge new power station had gone up in 1942 from which electricity could be drawn. Chelyabinsk province, particularly around the small town of Kyshtym, was also a major gulag station, with some twelve forced labor camps in the area.

Kurchatov and Alexandrov had their work cut out for them convincing Beria that the plutonium-production reactor should be different from the reactors the United States had built at Hanford. The Hanford production reactors were horizontal cylinders of graphite bored with several thousand horizontal channels into which aluminum-clad fuel elements could be loaded. When the fuel elements had been irradiated long enough to transmute some of their U238 into plutonium, they could be pushed through the reactor out the other end for plutonium separation. Military security was crucial to the Soviet project, however-Chelyabinsk was potentially within range of American B-29s-and in pursuit of that security the Chelyabinsk reactor would be sheltered underground, in a huge pit, like F-1. The pit, as well as the scientists' first experience with Fa1, argued for a vertical design. "Every day," Pervukhin recalls, "there were heated arguments in the reactor section concerning the choice of design for the industrial reactor. After lengthy discussions, the vertical design was chosen. But the project for a horizontal graphite reactor was prepared as well, and only after considering all the arguments for and against did everyone agree on the advantages of the vertical design." It is significant that those advantages primarily concerned security, a subject Beria understood.

The place where the pile was under construction was over ten kilometers from Chelyabinsk-40

Not only directors and generals shipped out for Chelyabinsk-40. A conscript soldier remembers being assigned there to guard the zeks who were digging the pit for the first objekt-the graphite production reactor, the A reactor, nicknamed Anotchka ("Little Anna"). "The town ... had a triple belt of barbed wire," the soldier writes: "the external fence with guard towers, then the zone with the settlement 'Techa' (after the river Techa) where the scientists lived, then the central 'zone' with the work force-soldiers, prisoners and released prisoners-and finally, the object itself, also surrounded by barbed wire. They carried out the construction in parts. Some people worked on the initial stage, then others went on with it and yet others finished. That way, no one knew what was being built." Graphite for the production reactor was manufactured on the site, diverting most of the Soviet supply that year; US intelligence discovered "a serious shortage of graphite electrodes" in the USSR in 1947 and early 1948. (The US had continued selling graphite to the Soviet Union after Lend-Lease ended-about 5,500 tons in 1946. "With the development of the cold war," the CIA noted in 1951, "exports were restricted to 1,500 tons in 1947 and stopped altogether in 1948 after the delivery of 700 tons.") The graphite core of the A reactor would be about 30 X 30 feet in height and width, drilled with 1,168 vertical channels for aluminum-clad natural-uranium metal slugs, which would be dropped in at the top, irradiated and then gravity-discharged out the bottom into a spent-fuel pool. The core would be set below ground in a pit sixty feet deep. Zeks dug the pit by hand, shoring it with timber, until they got to bedrock; the rock, says the soldier, "was cut by explosives and we loaded the fragments onto trucks which carried them away." When the pit was finished they lined it with water tanks, then poured a concrete well with walls ten feet thick to encase the graphite block. Over the reactor went a substantial building in the Soviet neoclassical style with stone facing on the first floor and two-story columnar facings above. They began assembling the reactor block in March 1948. Kurchatov delivered a speech. "You and I are founding an industry not for one year," he told the staff, "not for two [but] ... for centuries." He hoped that a city would grow on the site with "kindergartens, fine shops, a theater" and that their children would succeed them at the work. "And if in that time not one uranium bomb explodes over the heads of people, you and I can be happy! And our town can then become a monument to peace. Isn't that worth living for!"

"When reactor assembly started," writes Mikhail Pervukhin, "B. L.Vannikov, I. V. Kurchatov and E. P. Slavsky [the director of Chelyabinsk-40, a metallurgist] were always on hand. [MVD general] Avrami Zavenyagin would sometimes visit the site, as would A. N. Komarovsky, who was in overall charge of construction.... I also visited several times. We inspected the assembly work very carefully, especially in the part of the reactor that would later become radioactive. We entered the reactor through a special manhole to check the quality of the work, the welding in particular. Since Vannikov, Zavenyagin and Komarovsky wore general's uniforms, the construction workers called the entry we used 'the General's manhole.'" The workers were welding pipes to carry water through the reactor to cool it, a change from the F-1 system made necessary by Anotchka's higher power level."

Igor Kurchatov's team finished assembling the A production reactor at Chelyabinsk-40 at the end of May 1948. After a week of instrumentation testing, Kurchatov initiated a dry criticality run on June 7 (since the cooling water was a neutron absorber and would lower the system's reactivity, the reactor could be nudged to low-power criticality more simply without it). Sometime after midnight, Kurchatov had the system running at ten kilowatts and shut it down. After additional uranium loading, the reactor achieved full criticality on June 10. "We were all triumphant," Mikhail Pervukhin recalls, "and we congratulated Kurchatov and his colleagues." The A reactor reached its designed power of 100,000 kilowatts on June 22. "At the beginning, our reactors were not powerful," Georgi Flerov recalled late in life, ". . . and there was only one. We were afraid to go larger. This one could produce about 100 grams of plutonium in twenty-four hours." That would be one solid Christy core-about 6.2 kilograms-every sixty days, but in fact the first Soviet bomb core was not ready until the following spring. Espionage had missed a critical physical process that soon shut the Chelyabinsk reactor down-not Wigner's disease, which Kurchatov knew about from Beria's collections, but the swelling of uranium metal slugs in high-flux reactors. Uranium metal swells under intense neutron bombardment because some products of fission-argon and other gases accumulate within the structural space of the metal and deform it. Twisted, rippled slugs in the Chelyabinsk A reactor stuck in the discharge tubes and blocked them. Beria came running, alleging sabotage. "Kurchatov was able to parry the blow," reports Golovin, "[by convincing] the necessary people of our approach to the unknown area of natural phenomena, high-power neutron fields, where various surprises could be expected." They stopped the reactor, drilled out the channels, dissolved the entire loading of uranium slugs, extracted the accumulated plutonium, studied the swelling, redesigned and replaced the slug channels throughout the reactor and manufactured a new loading of uranium. The disaster delayed the operation until the end of the year. The big remote-controlled chemical plant needed to extract the plutonium was still under construction nearby in any case and would not be finished until December.

Vladimir Merkin Chief nuclear engineer