“Bear Creek Valley someday will be filled with great buildings and factories, and they will help toward winning the greatest war that will ever be. Big engines will build big ditches, and thousands of people will be running to and fro. They will be building things, and there will be great noise and confusion, and the earth will shake. I’ve seen it; it’s coming.”
The Secret City, 59,000 acres of farmland and rural communities transformed basically overnight into the third largest city in the state of Tennessee. Created in 1942 by the army corp of engineers to aid in the research and development of nuclear weapons, this city would forever change the course of not only the war, but human history.
The site on which you stand is the former sight of the K-25 gaseous diffusion plant, a critical part of an effort which led to the ultimate surrender of imperial Japan on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sunday September 2, 1945.
K-25 was the codename given by the Manhattan Project to the program to produce enriched uranium for atomic bombs using the gaseous diffusion method. Originally the codename for the product, over time it came to refer to the project, the production facility located at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the main gaseous diffusion building, and ultimately the site. When it was built in 1944, the four-story K-25 gaseous diffusion plant was the world's largest building, comprising over 1,640,000 square feet (152,000 m2) of floor space and a volume of 97,500,000 cubic feet (2,760,000 m3).
Gaseous diffusion is based on Graham's law, which states that the rate of effusion of a gas is inversely proportional to the square root of its molecular mass. The highly corrosive uranium hexafluoride (UF6) was the only known compound of uranium sufficiently volatile to be used in this process. Before this could be done, the Special Alloyed Materials (SAM) Laboratories at Columbia University and the Kellex Corporation had to overcome formidable difficulties to develop a suitable barrier.
Construction of the K-25 facility was undertaken by J. A. Jones Construction. At the height of construction, over 25,000 workers were employed on the site. Gaseous diffusion was but one of three enrichment technologies used by the Manhattan Project. Slightly enriched product from the S-50 thermal diffusion plant was fed into the K-25 gaseous diffusion plant. Its product in turn was fed into the Y-12 electromagnetic plant. The enriched uranium was used in the Little Boy atomic bomb used in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In 1946, the K-25 gaseous diffusion plant became capable of producing highly enriched product.
After the war, four more gaseous diffusion plants named K-27, K-29, K-31 and K-33 were added to the site. The K-25 site was renamed the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant in 1955. Production of enriched uranium ended in 1964, and gaseous diffusion finally ceased on the site on 27 August 1985. The Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant was renamed the Oak Ridge K-25 Site in 1989, and the East Tennessee Technology Park in 1996. Demolition of all five gaseous diffusion plants was completed in February 2017.
Now part of the Manhattan Project National Historic Park which includes the X-10 Graphite Reactor, Buildings 9731, and 9204-3 at the Y-12 Complex, and the K-25 site as well as sites in Hanford, Washington and Los Alamos, New Mexico.
More information on this park can be found at https://www.nps.gov/mapr/index.htm.
The purpose of this virtual is to bring insight to the fact that this city, once humble farmland, played a major part in ending what some say is the greatest war that ever has been or ever will be. This city that no one except those who lived here knew existed laid the foundation for the nuclear age.
In order to claim this geocache please answer the following questions:
Required Questions:
How large was one side of the original K-25 Building?
Between what buildings do you stand? (Please reference as K-XXXX)
What material was ultimately produced here?
What was this material used for? When was this first used?
Optional Questions:
How have you been affected by the work that went on here?
Do you have any stories to share related to this?
Share a photo of yourself or something interesting you found at the site.
More information on the K-25 Site can be found here - http://www.k-25virtualmuseum.org/
I have also placed waypoints at the Y-12 New Hope Visitor Center which contains a museum with artifacts from this era and is free and open to the public. As well as the American Museum of Science and energy. I have included the AMSE website below.
http://amse.org/
Virtual Reward - 2017/2018
This Virtual Cache is part of a limited release of Virtuals created between August 24, 2017 and August 24, 2018. Only 4,000 cache owners were given the opportunity to hide a Virtual Cache. Learn more about Virtual Rewards on the Geocaching Blog.