In other words, the precipitation is such that there is more plutonium per pound on the _ (s/l precipity) than there is with bismuth, but bismuth doesn’t bring down fission products in uranium, where as lanthanum would have a tendency to bring out some of these other things. Allantoin brings now more plutonium for less. 1,500 pounds of metal, dissolve that up, separate the plutonium out of that at T Plant using a bismuth phosphate _ (s/l coprecipitator) in the front end of the canyon and then we would transfer it over to 224, and then they would use allantoin. So the law of the short half-life materials were gone and then we would bring it into T Plant cask. And the material that we got from the reactors would sit out in the reactor, in the basins, or in 200 R Area basin for at least 60 days for cooling off. WEISSKOPF: Would a 1,000 megawatt day have more…īAUMGARTNER: 240 and 241, and that’s not a good weapon material so we blended it with our 500 and basically _ (unclear) 750 megawatt days per ton which was our weapons. That’s plutonium and we use a chemical reaction to get the plutonium separated from everything. WEISSKOPF: And it ends up in your finished product…īAUMGARTNER: Right, and you can separate that out easily. The higher the MWd the more 240 and 241 is in the plutonium, which is not a weapon. WEISSKOPF: More than the general layperson.īAUMGARTNER: Okay, plutonium as it comes from the reactor, what you really want is plutonium 239 and you don’t want 240 and 241. Savannah River reactors were quite large and they couldn’t give us any material that had less than 1,000 megawatt days per ton, and so we had to end up blending to ours in order to get a weapon that… What do you know about plutonium? Our plutonium was what we call 500 megawatt days per ton. Our material that we made here had what was called the lowest MWd material, megawatt days per ton, that was a unit of measurement. WEISSKOPF: Were they going to ship stuff out here?īAUMGARTNER: They did. T Plant was going to shut down as soon as REDOX got going because REDOX was built to handle not only all of the material that our reactors could produce but what Savannah River could produce it was that big a plant. WEISSKOPF: So when you arrived, things were gearing up?īAUMGARTNER: We were gearing up for REDOX. So we were just in the process of making more and better than anybody else. We were going into, at that time, the cold war and things were getting really sticky because we knew that the Russians had weapons and they were making lots of them. At that time no one wanted to shut the plants down. We don’t have anything now “operating” that needs to operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I think they have changed that since then.īAUMGARTNER: Well, it depends. WEISSKOPF: Yeah, and they rotated them rather quickly right?īAUMGARTNER: Well, it would be like 7 graveyards…īAUMGARTNER: No 7 days. WEISSKOPF: But you were working normal 8-hour days.īAUMGARTNER: Normal 8-hour days 5 days a week, and see you’d work swing, days, and graveyard. The plant never shut down, it didn’t even shut down for holidays. In the original, from 1945 until at that time, there was only one shift chemist and we had four shifts, you know A, B, C, D shifts, which means we were working 7 days a week from the clock. The supervisors were changing because B Plant was shutting down or shut down, and so we were picking up those supervisors plus all the new chemists that were wandering through. And at that time we had a lot of changes, a lot of new supervision. At which time we then went to, I went to T Plant and I was in T Plant from August of ’51 until November of ’52. It took from June until the end of August. Think about it, all of these were Q-cleared people so it took several months in my case. There were 500 of us.īAUMGARTNER: No, because they were stocking chemists for REDOX.īAUMGARTNER: We came in June and REDOX went online, I think, in ’52 or ’53, and so they were getting us prepared. WEISSKOPF: _(unclear) been a lot of work here?īAUMGARTNER: Right. I didn’t have enough money to get back east so I took this one. The other one was Hanford here, with GE here. WEISSKOPF: Did you come here specifically from your degree?īAUMGARTNER: Yes. Got my degree on June 11th and I signed on on the 15th. WEISSKOPF: I don’t care what direction we go, I am interested in maybe, just, how about briefly what were you were doing before you came here?īAUMGARTNER: Oh, I came straight out of school. WEISSKOPF: Can you give me your name and…īAUMGARTNER: My name is William Vincent Baumgartner.īAUMGARTNER: Today is what, April 11th, the year 2001. Keywords: “200 Area”, “T Plant”, chemistry
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |