“Beta-3 housed a critical technology that contributed to changing the lives of nearly everybody in the world – twice,” Ausmus said. “It was the last operating electromagnetic uranium enrichment facility of the Manhattan Project, and it was the primary facility for producing stable precursor isotopes in the development of specialized radioisotopes. Few understand that radioisotope development and production would have been significantly suppressed without the Beta-3 calutron facility – lives would have been lost, and technology would have been priced out of reality.”
Beta-3 was initially built to be a stopgap facility to produce enriched uranium until the improvement of gaseous diffusion, a then-newer technology in which DOE was investing.
“Instead, it was cleaned, modified and served the nation for five decades in stable isotope production,” Ausmus said. “Its five acres of floorspace housed post-war projects for the Air Force and early ORNL experiments, with the East track being used for research and development and actinide enrichment.”
Later, the building housed the ORNL Isotope Research Materials Laboratory and the Isotope Business Office, the precursor to the NIDC.
Ausmus and Tracy were working the evening shift on the very last calutron run, in 1998.
“We were enriching strontium-84 using pre-enriched feedstock worth about $1 million,” Ausmus said. “Collectively, across the shifts, the approach was to run as long and as stable as possible. The run had lasted well past the average run time, and output had begun to drop slightly.”
The filament that provided electrons for ionization had worn thin and burnt out from a slight overcurrent, he said.
The government decided to move forward with electromagnetic isotope separation devices, or EMIS. By 2011, a team that included Brian Egle, now section head of ESED’s Stable Isotope Research, Development and Production, and Kevin Hart, now retired, had a working EMIS prototype that could separate argon isotopes.
“I was so excited to get to ‘drive’ the new machine on its first day of operation that I forgot to eat lunch,” Ausmus said.
Now, several generations later, EMIS technology is being incorporated in the Stable Isotope Research and Production Center, which DOE is constructing on the ORNL campus to reestablish U.S. capability to enrich stable isotopes.
“As the program continues to grow to meet this national need, the people involved seem to share the same enthusiasm and sense of purpose that comes from participating in important missions,” Ausmus said.
He’d like to make sure the historical link between the calutrons and EMIS is documented for posterity. Tours of the building are no longer allowed, because of safety concerns, but a “virtual tour” of the facility is being filmed. The ESED team will then use it to identify items to be transferred to ORNL for preservation.
“As we are losing the best people to tell the story of Oak Ridge’s transition from the Manhattan Project era into the modern era, their stories and the associated physical artifacts become more valuable,” Ausmus said. “The story of the calutrons is sometimes limited to the scope of the Manhattan Project. The repurposing is not as well-known and is just as remarkable.
“I would like to say we were among the ones to preserve the precious few artifacts remaining, and to keep telling the full story.”
This Oak Ridge National Laboratory news article "Rescuing history" was originally found on https://www.ornl.gov/news
