Nuclear Tourism (Part II)
So the National Park Service, at the direction of Congress, is studying four Manhattan Project sites for inclusion as a unit in the national park system.
(You can link to the NPS Web site dealing with this issue here.)
The sites being looked at are Hanford Site (motto: “Sixty-five years old and still hot!”); Los Alamos, N.M.; Oak Ridge, Tenn. and Dayton, Ohio.
Having lived in New Mexico and in Washington state , I can understand the significance of Los Alamos (that’s where the brain trust led by Oppenheimer did the R&D) and Hanford (B Reactor and center for plutonium production). And although I’ve never visited Oak Ridge, I know that’s where the huge uranium processing facility was built to produce U-235 (that being one of the two fissionable materials needed for the bomb.)
But Dayton? What the heck happened in Dayton?
It was about then that a press release crossed my desk about a public meeting in Richland to take comments on this proposal. (I confess I failed to do a brief on it. It got buried by other work and the deadline passed.) But it did give me a number to call which put me in touch with a nice guy in the faceless NPS bureaucracy which let me ask, “Why Dayton?”
It turns out Dayton does have a connection to the Manhattan Project. “It’s where they manufactured the triggers,” he explained. It was where the “Dayton Project” was located (well, duh!) which was aimed at “the research and development of polonium refinement and industrial production of polonium for atomic bomb triggers.” (Source: Wikipedia)
But unlike Hanford, Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, just about everything associated with the Manhattan Project in Dayton has pretty much vanished in the intervening years. So, again, why was Dayton singled out?
“Well, you know how Congress works,” my guy said with a laugh. Apparently, when the proposal was making its way through process, somebody saw a chance to earn points with the voters in Dayton by getting the city included on the list.
Well, to quote Elmer Fudd, “Oh, those wascally Waytonians!”
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