S-50 (Manhattan Project)

The S-50 Project was the Manhattan Project’s effort to produce enriched uranium by liquid thermal diffusion during World War II. The process could not enrich uranium sufficiently for use in an atomic bomb, but it could provide slightly enriched feed for the Y-12 calutrons and the K-25 gaseous diffusion plants. The plant was demolished in the late 1940s and replaced by a new nuclear power plant in the U.S. Army Air Forces Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft project.

About S-50 (Manhattan Project) in brief

The S-50 Project was the Manhattan Project’s effort to produce enriched uranium by liquid thermal diffusion during World War II. Pilot plants were built at the Anacostia Naval Air Station and the Philadelphia Navy Yard, and a production facility at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The process could not enrich uranium sufficiently for use in an atomic bomb, but it could provide slightly enriched feed for the Y-12 calutrons and the K-25 gaseous diffusion plants. It was estimated that the S- 50 plant had sped up production of enriched uranium used in the Little Boy bomb employed in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by a week. The plant was demolished in the late 1940s and replaced by a new nuclear power plant in the U.S. Army Air Forces Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft project. It is located at 35°54′58″N 84°24′43″W and 35. 91611°N 84. 41194°W. The liquid thermal Diffusion process was based on the discovery by Carl Ludwig in 1856 and later Charles Soret in 1879, that when a temperature gradient is maintained in an originally homogeneous salt solution, after a time, a concentration gradient will also exist in the solution. The discovery of the neutron by James Chadwick in 1932, followed by that of nuclear fission in uranium by the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in 1938, opened up the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction with uranium.

The former makes up 0. 714 percent of the uranium atoms in natural uranium, about one in every 140; natural uranium is 99. 28 percent uranium-238. There is also a tiny amount of uranium-234, 0. 006 percent, in the uranium-235 isotope. This was first demonstrated by Klaus Clusius and Gerhard Dickel in Germany in 1938. They used an apparatus called a vertical tube with a hot wire down the center. In the United States, Arthur Bramley improved on this design using concentric tubes using different temperatures. In 1938, who used it to separate isotopes of neon used it as a means of isotope separation. This is known as the Soret effect, which explains that lighter gas tends to concentrate at the cold end of a mixture. This theory was experimentally confirmed by Sydney Chapman in 1916. Since hot gases tend to rise and fall, this can be used as a way to separate uranium isotopes. It can also be used to separate plutonium from uranium-240. It has been used in nuclear power plants since the 1950s and 1960s to separate heavy and light isotopes, such as plutonium and tellurium. It’s also been used for nuclear weapons, including the development of the B-52 bomber and the V-2 rocket. The U.N. has been using it for nuclear power since the 1960s and 1970s, and it is still being used today.

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K-25 Calutron Uranium British contribution to the Manhattan Project