Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [72]
2,000 Calutrons there. Groves, less convinced but nevertheless willing to place at least some of his chips on the magnets, built 500. In theory, these Calutrons should have produced enough U-235 for a bomb within two years, but design and construction problems resulted in the great machines’ shorting out with dismaying frequency. Mice and birds found their way into the Calutrons and shut them down until the animals’ remains were discovered and removed. By late 1943 the Calutrons had yielded virtually nothing. Much of the rest of the Clinton Works was devoted to separation by gaseous diffusion, in which Harold Urey played a key role. Yet here, too, manifold problems existed, especially with the manufacture of the delicate metallic barriers that were to filter the uranium hexafluoride gas through a series of cascades, producing the U-235 isotope. Debate over the composition of the barriers raged into early 1944, theory foundering more than once as it encountered the realities of engineering.38
Groves and the scientists had also originally intended to make plutonium at Oak Ridge. But the Tennessee Plant could not do everything, and if something went wrong with the plutonium-making process, and ‘the wind was blowing through Knoxville’, as Groves worried it might, there could be substantial loss of life, a shutdown of the Calutrons and gas diffusers, and, worst of all, a breach of security. Groves wanted yet another site on which to build a plant to conjure plutonium. His criteria were water power, a favorable climate, and, above all, isolation—‘at least twenty miles between the piles and separation area and the nearest existing community of one thousand or more inhabitants’. John Dudley had helped Groves find Los Alamos; in December 1942 the general asked Lieutenant Colonel Franklin T. Matthias to locate a place to make plutonium. With two engineers from the Du Pont Company, Matthias settled on a high desert cut by the Columbia River in southern Washington State, near the small town of Hanford, population 100. Groves reviewed the site and approved.39
Another massive building project ensued. Construction crews were recruited to live in barracks, segregated by sex and race, paid somewhat higher than wartime scale, and treated to an abundance of good food— a treat in 1943. They were building a city, one with the single purpose of producing an elusive element for a mysterious project based elsewhere. The Hanford site proved wilder than Oak Ridge. At one point there were over 50,000 people working in the remote desert, putting in nine hours daily and extra time nights and Sundays. They entertained themselves as best they could, in an enormous beer hall, a gambling hall with slot machines, movie theaters, and a bowling alley. There were fights—‘occasionally bodies were found in garbage cans the next morning’, wrote the physicist John Marshall—suicides, and prostitution.40
Du Pont was responsible for design and construction at Hanford; the Manhattan Project thus involved not only Big Science but Big Business. Some scientists were as suspicious of the men in suits as they were of those in khaki uniforms. Groves’s position, shared by Bush, Compton, and Lawrence, was that no one but a large firm could do a job on this scale. Needed at Hanford were three reactors, exalted versions of Fermi’s pile, and four plants at which plutonium would be chemically separated from slugs of uranium that had undergone a chain reaction within the piles. Eugene Wigner designed the reactors: enormous cylinders of pure graphite shot throughout with aluminum tubes, into which went 200 tons of uranium metal slugs, themselves ‘canned’ in aluminum. Water from the Columbia