How the Manhattan Project’s Nuclear Suburb Stayed Secret | Hacker News Reader

How the Manhattan Project’s Nuclear Suburb Stayed Secret

atlasobscura.com

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If you're interested in atomic history and the Manhattan Project, a great book is Richard Rhodes' The making of the atomic bomb (ISBN: 1451677618). It's ~900 pages of history, from the personalities of the scientists involved, to the sites of Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Hanford, and the first uses. I enjoyed reading it while interning at ORNL and Sandia in the summers during undergrad.

The weapons are horrifying in their destructive power, but the Project is a testament to what we can accomplish in science and engineering if we apply virtually unlimited resources toward R&D to solve a problem. Beyond the obvious product of the Project, it led to the creation of the DOE national laboratory system, which has since served as a means of maintaining an able technical workforce in the US, with physicists, mathematicians, chemists, biologists, and computer scientists, among others, all working in the public interest (and on things beyond weapons). Investing in science can pay dividends well into the future.

For some perspective, the cost of the Manhattan Project was on the same order of magnitude as the Apollo Program in terms of inflation-adjusted cost, about $22-26 billion in 2016 dollars. Of course that amount does not include the environmental cost still being felt in Hanford and elsewhere, or the human cost.

Knowing the cost of those two programs really makes you question some other efforts, like the program to develop the F-35 aircraft, estimated to cost $380 billion before even considering the additional $1.1 trillion in operational cost. For comparison there, the Interstate Highway system cost about $500 billion to construct.

I read somewhere that the Manhattan Project was at one point consuming 1/7 of ALL electricity generated in USA. And this is when all factories (and many newly built ones) were running at full capacity. Truly mind boggling.

The other mind-boggling info about the project is that they needed copper for the Y-12 electromagnetic separation magnets. But because there was a war on, they couldn't get it. So they went to the US Treasury and borrowed 14,700 tons of silver.

Daniel Bell, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, supposedly said:

"Young man, you may think of silver in tons, but the Treasury will always think of silver in Troy Ounces"

(turned out to be 400 million Troy Ounces)

https://phys.org/news/2010-01-silver-crucial-wwii.html

I highly recommend this talk by Richard Feynman on Los Alamos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY-u1qyRM5w. His personal anecdote on some interesting details while he was working there.

Thanks. Adding that book to my list.

Two other good books about early nuclear weapon manufacturing: “Plutopia” and “Making a real killing: Rocky flats and the nuclear west”. Plutopia focuses on Hanford and is quite eye opening. It also compares and contrasts the early American and Soviet programs

I grew up in Oak Ridge (ORHS class of '82). It's an interesting little town. It's in the deep south, but at the time, it had the highest concentration of Ph.D.'s anywhere in the country (or so we were told growing up, I never actually verified this. But it seems plausible.)

If you ever visit there, be sure to go to the graphite reactor. It's the closest you will ever come to the business end of a real (though now decommissioned) nuclear reactor. The Museum of Science and Energy (originally called the Museum of Nuclear Energy, but that was changed because political correctness) is also worth visiting. (I got my very first programming job there in 1980, writing code in BASIC for exhibits running on Commodore PETs. One of my duties was to go around the museum and re-load the software on all the exhibits from cassette tapes. Ah, those were the days!)

>political correctness

Huh? How in the hell is that politically incorrect? It's not like the Museum of Nuclear Science in Albuquerque changed its name.

In the late 1970s, nuclear energy was very much out of favor. It's no coincidence that The China Syndrome was made in 1979.

Oak Ridge is a pretty awesome little city (very beautiful too). I live nearby in Knoxville and did a lot of work on the Titan supercomputer and spallation neutron source at ORNL while in grad school. Interestingly, Oak Ridge was rated the safest city in the U.S. in 2017 (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.realtor.com/news/trends/saf...).

> One of its major summer events is the Secret City Festival—a weekend of parades, concerts, and tours of the federal facilities. “It’s the only time during the year that the public can gain access,” Smith says.

From the article. This sounds like it's not publicly accessible 51 weeks of the year. Shouldn't that explain it? :)

I especially liked how the article looked closely at the architected, pre-fab housing and showed how easy that problem is to solve when there's a will to do it.

Houses like that could solve a lot of today's problems. In the same way, in the span of a few months, with ownership perpetually limited to low-income families.

Where would you put them? E.g. in the bay area, where you're not allowed to build regular housing and regular apartments to meet the demand, why would they let you build tiny prefab houses?

The problem isn't an inability to construct housing, it's the regulatory capture in the form of bad zoning by home and land owners that prevents the increase of housing supply. We desperately need to fix that, sadly we probably won't until things get much much worse.

That’s a problem in some places. But even with available land, construction is difficult and risk prone.

I have a few acres of land, and saving 25% per square foot on a modular home is a compelling prospect. Modern homes are expensive to build.

It's a problem in almost every American city and town. Look up your zoning codes and get back to us about what you see

To build a house? No, it’s not.

To build an apartment building in a single family neighborhood? Yup. That’s what the citizens want.

You also need to put infrastructure in. Depending on how much the population increases, the water, sewage, electric and transportation might need expansion too. And you may need to put in an extra school. And social programs, if you are talking low-income.

Infrastructure scales pretty well with density. You run more miles of pipe to cover less dense regions. Power lines pass more people per mile. Same with fiber.

A single cell tower covers more people.

With enough density that walking out biking is possible, you need fewer highways or subways to move the same number of people. Sidewalks are dirt cheap!

You might be amazed at how the infrastructure costs aren't very high, and with more people you have more sources of income

But the political issues - good luck getting the school bond past the voting public, especially if it's for those people!

Sadly, I think you're right. NIMBY is an asinine reality. 'We got ours. Get outta here.'

And it's spreading. In today's news: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/housing-crisis-small-ci...

There's a lot of empty land in the US ... so, like Oak Ridge and Hanford, there'd have to be new communities, capable of attracting small businesses ... enough to employ the new residents. Some of the first low-cost pre-fabs could be preferentially doled out to people who have have, or want to start a new, small business.

Also ... and I'm thinking of Olympia, WA for example ... government business seems to be fairly stable, and seems to resist recessions quite well. Nice quiet place, for people into that sort of thing.

Nineteenth-century railroads were built in the space of months, if there was a billion feet of wood to be 'harvested'. They didn't cost $10M per mile either. Replace the wood with access to a city 15 or 20 miles away.

It was doable before, and it's just that much more doable.

Even places like Olympia have gotten much much more expensive over the past decade. But we should definitely be doing more to spread the load. As you say railroads are key - Olympia to Seattle on a modern train would be a one hour commute, perfectly within the realm for many people especially those that don’t have to be in the office every day.

But railroads in the US are my biggest pet peeve, we just can’t do them right here. If I had my druthers I’d essentially nationalize the railroads and then hire the Swiss to run them.

That one Oly to Seattle Amtrak that went too fast around the corner makes me sure you're right about our RRs.

Looking back (I'm not much of a rail historian, but) from what I do know, the US rail system was built-out to serve resource exploitation (including populating the mid-continent), not passengers. So personal autos got a leg up on them, in the mid-20s, before they could afford better passenger routes (outside of major inter-city corridors).

I'd guess that if it wasn't for WW2, US passenger rail would have croaked much sooner than it did. The Interstate system didn't help either. AND THEN they were allowed to rip up the old tracks. Ay yay. So clearly some interests were aligned against the RR's. And our atmosphere has and is paying the price.

This is where my grandparents met. My grandfather was a chemist. My great grandfather was a machine operator for one of the construction companies commissioned to build the town. He brought his daughter along with him and she ran away with a scientist (my grandfather). They are passed away now but their stories of Oak Ridge were so fascinating.

My grandfather always maintained some secrecy as to what his responsibilities at Oak Ridge were, but his expertise in uranium was well-known. He gave many talks at universities, etc. on the topic. He continued working for the Nuclear Energy Commission for the rest of his career. His next job was working at a facility in Waverly, OH which was disguised as a Goodyear plant. My mother and her siblings thought their father worked at a tire factor for most of their childhood. They insist this secret went more or less unquestioned.

> the government approached the families that lived there—some of whom had owned their farmsteads for generations—and “summarily evicted” them. [.. They described the project as a “demolition range,” so any possible holdouts could be scared off with the threat of near-constant explosions.

I'm curious how this was done legally in the US, given the strong property rights there and especially given it was the south? Sounds like a very soviet style beginning.

But I guess they bought some land or had some existing public property, then scared the other nearby landowners away by saying it would be used for 'demolitions'... with offers of money for their property?

Or was it a straight up legal order / eviction that the federal government has some ultimate power to do?

Federal and state government have the right of eminent domain, though it does not sound like it was used here. Just sounds like they offered to buy the land, and told any potential hold outs that their land would lose value if they refused.

Though, in 1943 the "ultimate power" of the military and Federal government was virtually limitless.

The article did not say that owners were compensated. The wikipedia page (if you trust it) for Oak Ridge makes mention of the fact that not everyone was compensated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Ridge,_Tennessee#History

The Wikipedia article only implies that some people were removed from their properties before compensation was paid, not that compensation was never paid.

"Forced out before receiving compensation" just means it was done quickly; it doesn't necessarily (or even likely) mean they weren't paid. Not paying would lead to far higher risk of security compromise for the site (from legal challenges, etc.), so it seems unlikely they wouldn't pay.

The US has always had eminent domain, and critical wartime projects are just about the least objectionable usage I can imagine. Unlike other situations where people dispute whether the taking is in the public interest, the only contentious issue would be assessing the fair-market value. And the price of the farm land compared to the immense financial resources available for the bomb make it likely the farmers were paid well.

Minor claim to fame here - my great-grandfather was one of the engineers who initially surveyed and selected the Oak Ridge site. Sadly he died when I was about 6 months old, so I was never able to ask him about it.

I have read about all this, of course. Am currently re-reading the Rhodes book after many years. But I hadn't seen pictures before. That plant was truly massive.

Also (and yes, I know they're probably poster shots), take a look at the better of those houses. Then look me in the eye and tell me you wouldn't give your right arm to live in them.

Wow, I find this fascinating, the government effectively used a large-scale project to seed a town/city. There was another HN post a few weeks back that was asking about if governments should create more cities. This story provides an interesting case study on the efficacy of the federal government to do so.

This is (and was) pretty common practice in Israel. There was a lot of trial-and-error involved - lots of the early towns were planned with lots of housing to handle the big waves of Middle Eastern Jewish immigration and no employment opportunities - but they've gotten pretty good at it since then.

There's lots of towns that grew up around military bases.

Washington DC is a federally planned city.

A less drastic measure than trying to start new cities is to move services to existing cities that have lots of housing (or a clear path to expanding housing).

I'm not sure how much new housing was built specifically for Hanford, since the existing tri-cities (Richland, Pasco, Kennewick) were nearby and within commuting range.

Plenty --- Richland is still filled with "alphabet houses" built by the government. The Tri-Cities really weren't very developed when the feds first came to town.

"Richland was a small farm town until the US Army purchased 1660 km² (640 sq mi) along the Columbia River for the war effort, evicting the 300 residents of Richland as well as those of the now vanished towns of White Bluffs and Hanford just upriver. The army turned it into a bedroom community for the workers on its Manhattan Project facility at the nearby Hanford Engineering Works (now the Hanford site). The population increased from 300 in July and August 1943 to 25,000 by the end of World War II in August 1945. Richland became a closed city (federally controlled Atomic Energy community), with access restricted to residents and others authorized by the U.S. Army. All land and buildings were owned by the government. Housing was assigned to residents and token rent was collected; families were assigned to houses or duplexes; single people were placed in apartments or barracks.

"Much of the city was planned by Spokane architect Albin Pherson in conjunction with the Army Corps of Engineers.[2] While there were dormitories and barracks built at the time, prefabricated duplexes and single family homes are all that survive today. Because homes were allocated based on family size and need, there were a number of floorplans available. These were each identified by a letter of the alphabet, and so came to be known as alphabet houses." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Coast_Historic_District_(...

Quite a bit of Richland housing:

https://www.ci.richland.wa.us/home/showdocument?id=2750

I count 3513 "alphabet houses" from that document, plus 1342 unlettered prefab houses and 17 dormitories for women.

The Tri-Cities area was a very small agricultural community before the Manhattan Project.

It didn't?

The only potential adversary that mattered, the soviet union, knew what was going on the entire time and essentially had full access to the oak ridge facility

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