A Resource Document for the National Park Service, Special Resources Study on the Manhattan Project
Saving K-25 – A Still "Secret" Relic of the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge
From a Powerpoint by William J. (Bill) Wilcox, Jr., Co-Chair of the Partnership for K-25 Preservation (PKP)
1. This rusting old plant in Oak Ridge's "back yard" is a national historic treasure we need to save part of so future generations can come visit the actual site to see, understand, and appreciate what was done here for our country in such great haste and secrecy in the middle of World War II. Just as with historic battle-fields, future generations want us to do more than just mark off the ground and save some artifacts, they want to understand what was done here and what was its impact on our country’s history. That’s just what the growing group I'm privileged to lead - now called the Partnership for K-25 Preservation– is committed to do. We are a major part of the Oak Ridge Heritage & Preservation Association and work in close partnership with our Co-Chair Cynthia Kelly, President of the Atomic Heritage Foundation of Washington, D. C. who is devoted to saving meaningful remains of the Manhattan Project all over the U. S. A. We welcome and embrace other partners in this "Save K-25" effort, like the City of Oak Ridge who has for two years now shared the support we have got from the Congress. We hope to embrace many others in these important efforts.
1. What a great treasure the remains of this huge plant will be, shown here in a 1946 aerial. It was built in a great rush in by patriotic, young, risk-taking scientists and engineers, many not knowing what the end result of their efforts would be - but knowing they were helping their country in trying to win the most awful war in history. The average age of the 75,000 Oak Ridgers in 1945 was 27 years old.
2. The general public - even in Oak Ridge - doesn’t recognize K-25’s value as an historic or tourism asset simply because it has never been allowed to visit or even come close to the main building –that big "U" shaped structure. Nor have they ever had a chance to see the amazing equipment inside these huge buildings!
3. Well, is this old relic really a national treasure? Why would visitors want to come see it? Why not just tear it all down and be done with it? Here are some reasons.
5. First because this K-25 "U" building (44 acres under one roof) was the biggest and most costly of all the Manhattan Project facilities. The Clinton Engineer Works (later known as Oak Ridge) with its mission to produce highly enriched uranium was the largest, most costly, most complex, and the biggest employer of all. The pie chart below shows the Manhattan Project costs through the end of 1945. In fact the $2 billion project (except for Los Alamos was administered
from a seven-wing, wooden administration building in Oak Ridge we called "The Castle" where Oak Ridge's Federal Building now stands. The boss was Col. Kenneth D. Nichols, the Manhattan District Engineer, a PhD engineer, 34 years old when appointed by General Groves.
6.-----And K-25 was the most costly part of Oak Ridge effort:
The blue segment shows K-25 cost $512 million, in today's dollars equal to four of the big $1.4 billion Spallation Neutron Source projects all completed in less than 3 years. In red above is Y-12, almost as costly as K-25. The Oak Ridge Graphite Reactor effort (in yellow) was 2% of the cost, but also a crucial and very successful effort.
7. K
-25
with 44 acres under one roof was a great engineering accomplishment. The
process is continuous from one of the ends around to the other – each leg is
about a half mile long, up to 400 feet wide, 4 stories tall. Inlaid on this
drawing is a 100,000 seat football stadium up toward the North End., sometimes
called the North Tower. That is the part we want saved for future generations.
It's big.
8. K -25 required so many construction workers (peak of 25,000) that a new town had to be built for them. Torn down shortly after the war, its site is now all grown over with woods, it's Oak Ridge's "lost city" according to the History Channel documentary, during the war sarcastically called "Happy Valley" by her 12,000 residents.
8. Here is still another way to show how really big this national treasure is. These are global satellite images. all the same scale, with the K-25 "U" on the far right. Many folks travel afar to see these great structures, but few have ever been close to this remarkable sight in the hills of Tennessee.
At the far left is the Eiffel Tower in Paris with its famous esplanade leading to the Palace of Justice. Next is Versailles Palace with its renowned gardens. Next is the National Mall in Washington – the area in the center is the World War II Memorial, construction was just being started in this view. And then St. Peter’s Rome, the largest church in the western world. Our K-25 is monumental indeed.
9. So we should save some of it first of all because of its size and cost. Now secondly, K-25 is a national treasure because it was such a technical marvel. It is comprised of a long series of diffusion units called stages In which hot uranium hexafluoride gas is pumped thru 3,000 successive stages all connected by miles of nickel lined, welded piping, all which had to be vacuum tight so moist air would not leak in and turn the gas into a powder that would plug the tiny holes in the diffusion membrane. That membrane, called barrier, had hundreds of millions of holes in every square centimeter. How to make it is the secret that took four years for scientists to discover. If the barrier tubes in all those 3,000 WWII tanks had been laid end to end they'd have reached from NYC to Tokyo.
10. A third reason why K-25 is a national treasure is because of its vital contribution to ending WWII. Starting up in spring 1945, it augmented Y-12's last minute production from their calutrons. Y-12 deserves the credit but K-25 helped them deliver the amount LASL had to have sooner, and every day counted hugely in terms of our boys lives. For those of you that have never seen any of this precious highly enriched bomb material you read so much in the papers about,
here's a photo of 9˝ pounds of it. It's a silvery metal lot heavier than lead, and yes, it's radioactive, but it's ok to handle it without shielding as you see. – the kind of uranium that's too hot to handle with your hands is uranium that's been in a nuclear reactor – our highly enriched U-235 has just been separated from the U-238 form it came out of the ground with, so its radiation is not intense at all, but it is a great deal more valuable because the rare U-235 has been separated from all that U-238 you can't make a bomb out of.
11. A fourth reason is because of the much more important contribution K-25 made to the winning the Cold War, as this graphic says. The amount of weapon grade U-235 that K-25 produced dwarfs what all of Oak Ridge made in WWII!
12. A fifth reason is because of what K-25 did after it stopped producing bomb grade U-235. It figuratively "beat its swords into plowshares," working then to supply the peacetime market for uranium enriching service. K-25 furnished the fuel for hundreds of nuclear power plants all over the world which improved the quality of life for millions of people.
13. A sixth reason some of it should be saved is because experts who know our history best agree it's a national treasure. At the turn of the century, in 2000, DOE headquarters, faced with facility modernization and D&D programs at each of their sites went to the federal Advisory Council On Historic Preservation for help in assembling a distinguished panel of experts to decide just which of the many Manhattan Project relics ought to be saved. The panel finally settled on eight they termed “signature facilities,” essential to telling the story of the Manhattan Project. Oak Ridge has three: the Y-12 Beta 3 Calutron Track, the Historic K-25 "U", and the ORNL Graphite Reactor. The Y-12 and ORNL's Signature Facilities are located in DOE facilities with ongoing missions so there are public access problems, but K-25 is at a site that the DOE wants to move away from so it is ideally positioned for preservation and public access in perpetuity.
14. And a big incentive for us to preserve this national treasure is because the thousands of WWII history buffs that have been crowding the Enola Gay exhibit at Dulles Airport, the WWII memorial in D. C. and the National WWII (formerly D-Day) Museum In New Orleans will love a chance to come to Oak Ridge to visit this really unique nuclear landmark that’s not yet in the history books because it has been kept under wraps for its entire 60 year history. It will be a welcome revenue stream for Anderson and Roane Counties and the City Of Oak Ridge coming when cleanup dollars start winding down a few years hence. And we don't have to entice them from all from scratch, we can start by tapping into the 10.5 million who visit Pigeon Forge and the Great Smokies every year. Last year 675,000 stopped to see the Casey Jones Home in Jackson, TN --it was the 6th largest tourist draw in Tennessee.
15. Well then,-where do we stand on preserving it? The local DOE led by Oak Ridge Operations Office Gerald Boyd and Environmental Manager Steve McCracken, mandated to take down the badly-deteriorated K-25 building and equipment that has stood unheated/uncooled for 40 years, have had to plan the demolition in conformance with the National Historic Preservation Act, and has been working closely with we historic preservationists and with the City and other stakeholders for over four years. The result is a MOA that provides for historic preservation of key elements of this historic treasure. And now our PKP organization is working out what else needs to be done to turn that into the heritage tourism attraction it can be (and how to pull it all off financially.) Let me briefly share with you what we envision the all-cleaned up & restored visitor experience might be in the time frame of 2012, depending on how the demolition and our fund-raising goes.
16. We're not saving this just for scholars & historians, it will be for folks just interested in their country's history, we like to think of our future tourists as individuals like Joe, Sally and their kids from Peoria, IL.
17. They drive out the short 10 miles from the town of Oak Ridge or the 5 miles right off the I-40 Knoxville-Nashville interstate. Then to keep from interfering with CROET'S reindustrialization efforts in their very appropriately named Heritage Center, we have Sally drive them in around the back of the plant via Blair road directly to a restored WWII guard gate
where they get their tickets – a photo id badge and simulated security briefing. Then they walk up to the huge north tower. Inside they visit an interpretative center to appreciate
why everything was so urgent, so secret, and so difficult; see interesting artifacts, hear oral histories they choose, see models of how the plant looked and get as much understanding as they want of how it all worked.
18. Then they'll have a look at this big North Tower building , over a football field long and another one wide – enormous – yet the entire "U" building was 20 times as large! And unlike Y-12 which was very labor intensive (22,400 employees at their peak), this K-25 plant almost ran itself with operators riding around on bicycles and stationed at various places.
19. Next, Joe and Sally return to the Cell (process equipment) floor where they can walk into a motor alley that looks just like it did when the Secretary of War Henry Stimson visited in 1945.
This corridor too is over a football field long, lined with WWII equipment built by the industrial giants of the era: Allis-Chalmers, General Electric, Chrysler, Crane, and others. And there is one place
where the hot-box housing has been opened up so visitors can actually see the diffuser that contained the barrier tubes that was the heart of the whole process. This was one of 5 sizes of the 3,000 stages in the"U".
20. Their final stop in the north tower is the Cold War exhibit hall, Here they'll see the dramatically larger and more efficient diffusion equipment that made possible increasing by 4 times the USA output of U-235 during the arms race with the Soviet Union all through the decades following WWII. Please notice the man standing between two of the 13 foot diffusers.
21. That's Joe and Sally’s tour of the North End, now they go outside to visit the courtyard and marvel at the size of that enormous structure that was there.
They can stroll or drive in their car along the history walls on each half-mile long leg of the “U” seeing the names and pictures and stories of K-25's history and pre-history depicted in various ways. We have lots of ideas we've collected on how to use these walls to display history, attract visitors, and raise funds.
22. DOE has also promised to mark the footprint corners in some way to show the height as well as the width. We are looking into several ideas for marking the building outline visually so as to help folks visualize this monumental structure.
23. Of course you are wondering how can we turn this vision, part-already-assured, part-still-only-a-vision, into reality. We certainly have some big hurdles, both technical and financial.
24. It will require a mix of moneys, private plus public. But to get either we must build a strong community support base. “Community” means not just Oak Ridge, but the whole nation-wide community that wants to see valuable historic assets like this saved for future generations.
25. We're moving forward, very bullish about our potential.
It is up to our generation, in the next five years to make this historic national asset live on so future generations can come to Oak Ridge not to just look at photographs, not to just see artifacts in a museum, but come to see real, authentic, in-context WWII equipment in its wartime context and place, and so to honor those thousands who brought this monumental achievement to life at a critical turning point in the history of this land we love. K-25 truly is a national treasure.
u u u
