Science: Spreading the Know-How

The forbidden “City of the Atomic Bomb” (Oak Ridge, Tenn.) looked the same last week as it had 14 months ago when its product smashed Hiroshima. Its slapdash houses were better painted, its hillbilly help more sophisticated. But MPs still patrolled its “perimeter.” Scientists still bit their tongues in midsentence, lest a secret pop out, and the gigantic, hidden plants still ground out U-235. The chief business was still atomic war.

Last week more than 100 atomic scientists gathered at Oak Ridge to confer not about bigger, more frightful bombs, but about the peaceful applications of nuclear physics. The big job now was to spread atomic know-how, make industrialists, educators and the public aware of the benefits atomic discoveries might bring.

Licking Secrecy. Biggest obstacle: “military security.” Oak Ridge scientists complain that many atomic “secrets” are already out, that others still jealously held have no military importance. Some argue that if secrecy is continued too long, the U.S. may sit back, cocky and self-assured, while other nations catch up and forge ahead. Their recommendation: release all secrets not strictly military. Then U.S. industry, informed and excited, could climb on the atomic bandwagon and gain an unchallengeable lead, as it has in auto manufacturing.

Top-level policymakers who boss Oak Ridge may have come to some such decision. One sign: 35 students from universities and industrial corporations were at large last week in the tightly guarded Clinton Laboratories, learning innermost secrets from Director E. P. Wigner. Strict security rules still gag this “College of

Nuclear Knowledge.” They will also gag the much larger Institute of Nuclear Studies which is being set up at Oak Ridge by an academic cooperative of Southern universities. But in a year or so, Oak Ridge scientists hope, gags will be cut away, and students can go out into the world as missionaries of the Atomic Age.

Piles for Power. The scientists who dominate the raw and regimented city are not relying on missionaries alone. They are giving the Atomic Age a mighty shove by designing a power-producing pile, the most promising peacetime application of nucleonics.

Present piles (at Oak Ridge, Hanford and Chicago) are kept cool, but power piles will run at high temperature. Among the reacting uranium rods of a power pile will circulate a chemically inert gas, hot as a dragon’s breath, deadly with radioactivity. This will heat a conventional boiler, yielding high-pressure steam, which, the scientists hope, will not be too radioactive to use in a turbine.

Isotope Rush. One group of Oak Ridge scientists is already doing a growing business in radioactive isotopes. Every week, with elaborate precaution, they pull a lead plug from a hole in the massive concrete shield around the Clinton pile. Out comes a graphite bar studded with little aluminum cans of chemicals which have been exposed to the storm of neutrons raging inside the pile. These contain the isotopes for which the world of science is clamoring. Sealed in heavy lead shipping cases, they are rushed to hospitals and research laboratories.

Oak Ridge scientists are sure that isotopes will have an enormous effect upon both science and industry. Most immediate use is as “tracers”: delicate radioactive tags which allow a chemical substance to be followed step by step through an industrial process or the human body. Isotope enthusiasts believe that the tracers will explain the mysterious reactions inside living cells.