Montreal Laboratory
The Montreal Laboratory was established by the National Research Council of Canada during World War II to undertake nuclear research. It absorbed some of the scientists and work of the Tube Alloys nuclear project in Britain. It became part of the Manhattan Project, and designed and built some the world’s first nuclear reactors. The small ZEEP went critical on 5 September 1945, and the larger NRX on 21 July 1947. For a time the most powerful research reactor in the world, NRX was for a time the mostpowerful research reactor.
About Montreal Laboratory in brief
The Montreal Laboratory was established by the National Research Council of Canada during World War II to undertake nuclear research. It absorbed some of the scientists and work of the Tube Alloys nuclear project in Britain. It became part of the Manhattan Project, and designed and built some the world’s first nuclear reactors. The small ZEEP went critical on 5 September 1945, and the larger NRX on 21 July 1947. For a time the most powerful research reactor in the world, NRX was for a time the mostpowerful research reactor. It was closed in July 1946, and replaced by the Chalk River Laboratories, which opened in 1944, and later became the University of Montréal. The Montreal Laboratory is now a museum of nuclear history, with a special section dedicated to the work of George Laurence, the first Canadian to conduct nuclear research in the 20th century. It is located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on the banks of the St Lawrence River, near the city of Lorette, where the first nuclear reactor was built in the 1930s. It has been the subject of a number of books, including The Nuclear Age of the Sun, by George A. Laurence (1939-1962), and The Nuclear Engineering of the World, by George A. Laurence (1960-1961), both of which are published by Simon & Schuster. The book is also available in English and French, and has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Slovakian, Swiss, Austrian, Swiss and German.
The Canadian contingent included George Volkoff, Bernice Weldon Sargent and George Laurenc, and promising young Canadian scientists such as J. Carson Mark, Phil Wallace and Leo Yaffe. The first eight laboratory staff arrived in Montreal at the end of 1942. The laboratory was established in a house belonging to McGill University; it moved to permanent accommodation at the Université deMontréal in March 1943. In 1943, the Quebec Agreement merged Tube Alloy with the American Manhattan Project. The Americans agreed to help build the reactor. Although Canada was a major source of uranium ore and heavy water, these were controlled by the Americans. The experiments continued in 1942, but were ultimately unsuccessful; the problems posed by impurities in the coke and uranium oxide had not been fully appreciated, and as a result too many neutrons were captured. By 1940, they had decided to use carbon instead of heavy water because it was cheaper and more readily available. This paid off when Lord Melchett arranged for Laurence to receive a USD 5,000 grant to continue his research. This was made by Imperial Chemical Industries through Canadian subsidiary A. Lew Kowarski, who had been conducting similar experiments since 1939. In 1940, the team of scientists in France that included Hans von Halban, Lew Kowski, Francis Perrin and A. A. Perrin, were given permission to use heavy water as well as heavy water.
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This page is based on the article Montreal Laboratory published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
