Manhattan

No, i've not been to New York lately. Chances are i will never go there again. Nothing against your city, or anything, y'all. i'm just not big on the hustle and bustle.

i have been unusually busy since i returned from Pittsburgh, but have not wholly identified why. Ever have that problem? In November i had time to get my grading done, post in my blog, take photographs.... but in the last few weeks have found myself behind on everything that's important, making everything a dire priority. And other than my New Year's resolution to make time for the gym 3 days a week, i can't find my time sink.

So last night, around 7pm, still sitting in my classroom doing research for a lecture i am giving... today... i discovered something curious about my family's history. my class has just finished up the periodic table, and though their book does not address it, i decided we would also cover the mechanisms of radioactivity. Of course, 14-year-old boys have only one question about the strong nuclear force: how does it make an atomic bomb work?

The history teacher in 8th grade only covers the Civil War and Reconstruction, so i find myself needing to give a lecture on the Manhattan project, of which i knew virtually nothing except that it happened in New Mexico and produced one of the wonders of nuclear physics. Turns out, the National Laboratory at Los Alamos was just the main campus of the Project. There were also two other major sites: Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington.

Oak Ridge was chosen by the US Army in 1942. The site is located in those beautiful folded foothills of the southern Appalachians. And it was populated with rural people who would probably have frightened me with their one-toothed grins had i been around to meet them. They were farmers, mostly. Many of them had owned the land since colonial days, but when the Army decided that this was the spot for enriching Uranium, they gave them about two weeks' notice to vacate. i don't know whether the Army gave those people somewhere to go, or paid them for their land, or just told them to make like a drummer. The town growing up around the three nuclear plants was soon the 5th largest in the state. During the mid-40s, Oak Ridge used 1/6th of the nation's electricity - more than New York City, but the governor of Tennessee never knew it was there.

the Hanford site

The other other site was in Hanford, Washington. And while the verdant Appalachians were pumping out Uranium-235, the eastern Washington desert was pumping out Plutonium. The Hanford site sat directly on the Columbia River, using the water to insulate the cooling towers. At this point in my research, i made a connection. my mother was born in eastern Washington, and my grandfather was a nuclear engineer. So i called my mother and asked her. Sure enough, that's where granddad worked. Now, he wasn't there during the Manhattan Project, but he was there during the 50s, when the first H-bomb (a much nastier version of the atomic bomb which uses a fission device to trigger a fusion device) was tested. He's been dead since i was about two years old... one of the greatest regrets of my life. He and i were supposedly a lot alike. Both of us scientists and curious adventurers who love life and lived it hard.

As it's probably still classified to this day, i will never know what he actually did there. He may have been working on designing new rotors for the base vehicles. Or he may have been designing the most powerful weapon then known.