Manhattan Project Feed Materials Program

The Manhattan Project feed materials program located and procured uranium ores, and refined and processed them into feed materials for use in the Manhattan Project's isotope enrichment plants at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and its nuclear reactors at the Hanford Engineer Works in Washington state.

The original goal of the feed materials program in 1942 was to acquire approximately of triuranium octoxide () (black oxide). By the time of the dissolution of the Manhattan District on 1 January 1947, it had acquired about , of which came from the Belgian Congo, from the Colorado Plateau, and from Canada. An additional came from "miscellaneous sources", which included quantities recovered from Europe by the Manhattan Project's Alsos Mission.

Ores from the Belgian Congo contained the most uranium per mass of rock by far. Much of the mined ore from the Shinkolobwe mine had a black oxide content as high as 65% to 75%, which was many times higher than any other global sources. In comparison, the Canadian ores could be as rich as 30% uranium oxides, while American ores, mostly byproducts of the mining of other minerals (especially vanadium), typically contained less than 1% uranium. In 1941, both the Shinkolobwe mine and the Eldorado Mine in Canada were closed and became flooded; the Manhattan Project had them reopened and returned to service.

Beyond their immediate wartime needs, the American and British governments attempted to control as much of the world's uranium deposits as possible. They created the Combined Development Trust in June 1944, with the director of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie R. Groves Jr. as its chairman. The Combined Development Trust procured uranium and thorium ores on international markets. A special account not subject to the usual auditing and controls was used to hold Trust monies. Between 1944 and his resignation from the Trust in 1947, Groves deposited a total of $37.5 million (equivalent to $ million in ). In 1944, the Combined Development Trust purchased of uranium oxide ore from the Belgian Congo.

The raw ore was dissolved in nitric acid to produce uranyl nitrate, which was reduced to highly pure uranium dioxide. By July 1942, Mallinckrodt was producing a ton of oxide a day, but turning this into uranium metal initially proved more difficult. A branch of the Metallurgical Laboratory was established at Iowa State College in Ames, Iowa, under Frank Spedding to investigate alternatives. This became known as the Ames Project, and the Ames process it developed to produce uranium metal became available in 1943. Uranium metal was used to fuel the nuclear reactors. Uranium tetrachloride was produced as feed for the calutrons used in the Y-12 electromagnetic isotope separation process, and uranium hexafluoride for the K-25 gaseous diffusion process.

Background

Uranium was discovered in 1789 by the German chemist and pharmacist Martin Heinrich Klaproth, who also established its useful commercial properties, such as its coloring effect on molten glass. It occurs in various ores, including pitchblende, torbernite, carnotite, and autunite. In the early 19th century it was recovered as a byproduct of mining other ores. Mining of uranium as the principal product began in Joachimsthal in Bohemia in about 1850, at the South Terras mine in Cornwall in 1873, and in Paradox Valley in Colorado in 1898.

A major deposit was found at Shinkolobwe in what was then the Belgian Congo in 1915, and extraction was begun by a Belgian mining company, Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, after the First World War. The first batch of uranium ore arrived in Belgium in December 1921. Only the richest uranium-bearing ore was exported to Olen, Belgium for the production of radium metal by Biraco, a subsidiary company of Union Minière du Haut Katanga. The metal became an important export of Belgium from 1922 up until World War II.

The high grade of the ore from the mine—65% or more triuranium octoxide) (), known as black oxide, when most sites considered 0.03% to be good—enabled the company to dominate the market. Even the 2,000 tonnes of tailings from the mine considered too poor to bother processing contained up to 20% uranium ore. Black oxide was mainly used as a glaze in the ceramics industry, which consumed about annually as a coloring agent for uranium tiles and uranium glass, and in 1941 sold for USD (equivalent to $/kg in ). Uranium nitrate () was used by the photographic industry, and sold for USD (equivalent to $/kg in ). The market for uranium was quite small, and by 1937, Union Minière had thirty years' supply on hand, so the mining and refining operations at Shinkolobwe were terminated.

The discovery of nuclear fission by chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in December 1938, and its subsequent explanation, verification and naming by physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch, opened up the possibility of uranium becoming an important new source of energy. In nature, uranium has three isotopes: uranium-238, which accounts for 99.28 per cent; uranium-235, 0.71 per cent; and uranium-234, less than 0.001 per cent. In Britain, in June 1939, Frisch and Rudolf Peierls investigated the critical mass of uranium-235, and found that it was small enough to be carried by contemporary bombers, making an atomic bomb possible. Their March 1940 Frisch–Peierls memorandum initiated Tube Alloys, the British atomic bomb project.

In June 1942, Colonel James C. Marshall was selected to head the Army's part of the American atomic bomb project. He established his headquarters at 270 Broadway in New York City; Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Nichols became his deputy. Since engineer districts normally carried the name of the city where they were located, Marshall's command was called the Manhattan District. Unlike other engineer districts, though, it had no geographic boundaries, and Marshall had the authority of a division engineer. Over time the entire project became known as "Manhattan". Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves assumed command of the Manhattan Project in September 1942.

One of Groves's first concerns upon taking charge was securing the supply of raw materials, particularly uranium ore. At the time, there was insufficient uranium even for experimental purposes, and no idea how much would ultimately be required.

Organization

Initially, the firm of Stone & Webster made arrangements for the procurement of feed materials, but as the project grew in scope, it was decided to have that company concentrate on the design and construction of the Y-12 electromagnetic plant, and arrangements for procurement and refining were handled by Marshall and Nichols.
In October 1942, Marshall established a Materials Section in the Manhattan District headquarters under Lieutenant Colonel Thomas T. Crenshaw Jr., an architect. To assist him, he had Captain Phillip L. Merritt, a geologist, and Captain John R. Ruhoff, a chemical engineer who, as St Louis Area engineer, had worked on uranium metal production. When Ruhoff, a chemical engineer who worked for Mallinckrodt, was inducted into the Army, Nichols had him assigned to the Manhattan District. Crenshaw became the officer in charge of operations at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in July 1943, and was succeeded as head of the Materials Section by Ruhoff, who was promoted to lieutenant colonel.

The following month, the Manhattan District's headquarters moved to Oak Ridge, but the Materials Section and its successors remained in New York until 1954. Nichols, who succeeded Marshall as district engineer on 13 August 1943, felt that this was a better location for it, as it was close to the ports of entry and warehouses for the ores and the headquarters of several of the firms supplying feed materials. He reorganised the section as the Madison Square Area; engineer areas are normally named after their location, and the office was located near Madison Square.

As area engineer, Ruhoff was responsible for nearly four hundred personnel by 1944, of whom three-quarters were in New York. There were two field offices that were responsible for procurement: Murray Hill in New York and Colorado in Grand Junction, Colorado, and five responsible for feed materials processing: Iowa (in Ames, Iowa), St. Louis, Wilmington, Beverly and Tonawanda. Ruhoff was succeeded in October 1944 by Lieutenant Colonel W. E. Kelley, who in turn was succeeded by Lieutenant Colonel G. W. Beeler in April 1946.

The original goal of the feed materials program in 1942 was to acquire approximately of black oxide. By the time of the dissolution of the Manhattan District at the end of 1946, it had acquired about . The total cost of the feed materials program up to 1 January 1947 was approximately USD$90,268,490 (), of which $27,592,360 () was for procurement of raw materials, $58,622,360 () for refining and processing operations, and $3,357,690 () for research, development, and quality control.

Uranium procurement

Africa

Early activities

In May 1939, Edgar Sengier, the director of Union Minière, visited a fellow director, Lord Stonehaven, in London. Stonehaven arranged for Sengier to meet with Sir Henry Tizard and Major General Hastings Ismay. The Foreign Office had contacted Union Minière and discovered that the company had of uranium ore on hand in the UK, and that the going price was 6/4 per pound, or £19,000 () for the lot. Another was in Belgium. Sengier agreed to consider moving this stockpile from Belgium to the UK. In the meantime, the British government bought a ton of ore from Union Minière's London agents for £709/6/8 (). As Sengier left the meeting, Tizard warned him: "Be careful and never forget that you have in your hands something that may mean a catastrophe to your country and mine if this material were to fall into the hands of a possible enemy".

The possibility that Belgium might be invaded was taken seriously. In September 1939, Sengier left for New York with authority to conduct business should contact be lost between Belgium and the Congo. Before he departed, he made arrangements for the radium and uranium at the company's refining plant in Olen, Belgium, to be shipped to the Great Britain and the United States. The radium, about 120 grams, valued at $1.8 million (equivalent to $ million in ) arrived, but of uranium compounds was not shipped before Belgium was overrun by the Germans in May 1940.

In August 1940, Sengier, fearing a German takeover of the Belgian Congo, ordered some of the stockpile of uranium ore there to be shipped to the United States though Union Minière's subsidiary African Metals Corporation. Some of uranium ore was shipped via Lobito in Angola to New York in two shipments: the first, of departed Lobito in September and arrived in New York in November; the second, of , departed in October and arrived in December. The ore was stored in 2,006 steel drums high and in diameter, labelled "uranium ore" and "product of Belgian Congo", in a warehouse at 2351 Richmond Terrace, Port Richmond, Staten Island, belonging to the Archer-Daniels-Midland Company.

In March 1942, a few months after the United States entered Second World War, Sengier was invited to a meeting co-sponsored by the State Department, Metals Reserve Company, Raw Materials Board and the Board of Economic Warfare to discuss non-ferrous metals. He met with Thomas K. Finletter and Herbert Feis, but found them interested only in cobalt and not uranium; the State Department would not be informed of the Manhattan Project until the Yalta Conference in February 1945. At its 9 July meeting, S-1 Executive Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), which was in charge of the American atomic project, saw no immediate need for additional quantities of uranium ore beyond it had ordered from the Eldorado Gold Mines Company in Canada. In August, though, it learned that Boris Pregel, an agent for both Union Minière and Eldorado, was seeking to buy of Sengier's ore, and he had applied for an export license to ship it to Eldorado for refining. The S-1 Executive Committee realized that the ore it was paying to be mined and shipped from the Arctic might actually be coming from Staten Island. On 11 September, Vannevar Bush, the head of the OSRD, asked the Army to impose export controls on uranium.

The US Army takes over

Events began to move swiftly once the Army became involved. On 15 September 1942, Ruhoff secured Sengier's approval for the release of of ore, which was shipped to Eldorado's refinery at Port Hope, Ontario, for testing of the oxide content. Nichols met with Sengier in the latter's office at 25 Broadway on 18 September, and the two men reached an eight-sentence agreement that Nichols recorded on a yellow legal pad, giving Sengier a carbon copy. Under this agreement, the United States agreed to buy the ore in storage on Staten Island and was granted prior rights to purchase the in the Belgian Congo, which would be shipped, stored and refined at the US government's expense. African Metals would retain ownership of the radium in the ore. At a meeting on 23 September, they agreed on a price: USD (equivalent to $/kg in ), of which $1 would go to African Metals and 60 cents to Eldorado for refining. Sengier opened a special bank account to receive the payments, which the Federal Reserve was instructed to ignore and auditors instructed to accept without question. Contracts were signed on 19 October.

The ore in Staten Island was transferred to the Seneca Ordnance Depot in Romulus, New York, for safe keeping. Meanwhile, arrangements were made to ship the ore from the Belgian Congo. The Shinkolobwe mine had been closed since 1937, and had fallen into disrepair and flooded. The United States Army Corps of Engineers restored the mine, expanded the aerodromes in Léopoldville and Elisabethville, improved railroads and built a port in Matadi, Congo's single outlet to the sea. The army also secured the remaining ore in Shinkolobwe, which was shipped to the United States: 950 tons of approximately 70% ore and 160 tons of 20% ore. As the port of Lobito in neutral Angola was considered a security risk, all uranium transported by sea from the last week of January 1943 was routed through Matadi in sealed barrels marked "Special Cobalt." The uranium was first sent north by train from Shinkolobwe to the railhead