Eek A Mouse Tour


Posted by Admin

Eek A Mouse Tour

Eek A Mouse Tour

The two-and-a-half-hour guided tour spans over 60 years of scientific history at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, covering:

  • The ground-breaking of the Manhattan Project's first Secret City in 1943.
  • The enrichment of uranium fuel for the first atomic bomb, dropped on Japan in August, 1945.
  • The world's first full-scale nuclear reactor.
  • Storage and recycling of nuclear fuel for weapons during the Cold War.
  • Non-defense research on biofuels, nuclear power, and environmental cleanup.
  • The world-class neutron beam research facility--the Spallation Neutron Source.

First stop: The Oak Ridge Y-12 plant.

Built in the isolated Bear Creek Valley during World War II, Y-12 grew to hold thousands of workers, many of them women. The workers were brought in from all over the nation to operate calutron machines designed to separate the two main isotopes of uranium--U-235 and U-238. In nature, the amount of U-235 is less than 1%. To create the fuel that would explode a bomb, the naturally radioactive U-235 had to be enriched to over 90%.