Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

384 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45)
If many of the scientists connected with the bomb project under
NDRC and OSRD secretly hoped that some principle might emerge prov-
ing the inherent impossibility of an atomic bomb, by mid-1942 that hope was
past. Theoretical possibility had become high probability, and in December
General Groves entered contract negotiations for the design and construc-
tion at Oak Ridge, Tenn., of a giant industrial complex beyond anything the
original members of the S—i Committee could possibly have contemplated.
The commitment had been made, and with the transfer of all OSRD con-
tracts to the Army in May 1943, the research responsibilities of the S—i
Committee ended.6'
By the fall of 1942 enough pure graphite, uranium oxide, and uranium
metal were arriving at the Metallurgical Laboratory at Chicago from industry
to justify building an actual self-sustaining chain reacting pile. Little more
than 6 tons of uranium metal were at hand, just barely sufficient for the pile
Fermi and his associates erected under the west stands of Stagg Field.
There on December 2, 1942, the first nuclear chain reaction was produced
in a system using normal uranium.
The immediate objectives of the Metallurgical Laboratory were
proved, that a controllable chain reaction could be produced in unseparateci
uranium, and that separation of fissionable plutonium from the U238 in the
pile was more feasible than separation of the uranium isotopes. The ultimate
objectives of the laboratory still remained, to determine a process for sepa-
rating the plutonium chemically from the pile, and to obtain theoretical and
experimental data on a "fast neutron" reaction, such as would be required
in an atomic bomb.62
The decision to build a pilot plant for the relatively large-scale extrac-
tion and purification of plutonium had been made in January 1942. Con-
struction of the plant known as the Clinton Engineer Works began just above
the town of Oak Ridge. The Clinton pile started operating in November
1943, its successful procedures and the data obtained in its performance
guiding construction of the large-scale plant going up at Hanford, on the
Columbia River, in the State of Washington. The first quantity production
of plutonium, from three of the five piles at the Hanford complex, began
in September 1944.63
On the principle that time was more important than money, and that
every probability and process that offered a chance of success must be ex-
plored, a number of large-scale separation plants for U235 and for deuterium
were ordered constructed. At least seven processes for separating uranium
Hewlett and Anderson, p. 115; Smyth Report, p. 224.
Hewlett and Anderson, p. 112; Smyth Report, pp. 98—99; Baxter, p 432.
"Smyth Report, pp. 106—107, 111.