AEC Plant No. 5

The fifth great production plant of the Atomic Energy Commission will be built somewhere in the Ohio River Valley. AEC General Manager Marion Willard Boyer announced last week that the Ohio Valley was selected because it has a good water supply and because power can be generated cheaply with coal mined near by. When completed in about four years, the plant will need 1,800,000 kw.--enough for a city of 2,500,000 inhabitants. Boyer reassured the prospective neighbors: the plant will be no more dangerous, he said, than any other large industry.

The Ohio Valley plant (cost: $1 billion) will separate explosive U-235 from natural uranium by the gaseous-diffusion process which is used at Oak Ridge and will also be used at the plant now being built near Paducah, Ky. The other AEC production plants at Hanford, Wash. and on the Savannah River are entirely different: they are reactors that make plutonium (and may make tritium for hydrogen bombs) through nuclear reactions caused by free neutrons given off by fissioning uranium. The fact that the AEC is building both kinds of plants suggests that:

1) Plutonium and U-235 have individual virtues. No information on this point has been released, but it is likely that the two fissionable materials may be used separately or together, in different atomic weapons. Some combination of both may promise to be the most effective "detonator" for hydrogen bombs.

2) The gaseous-diffusion plants, such as the new one in the Ohio Valley, may be used to make "enriched" uranium. Natural uranium contains only .7% of the fissionable isotope U-235. When it is used as fuel in a nuclear reactor it behaves rather sluggishly; the reactor, whether intended for plutonium production or as a source of energy, must be made very large. But uranium that has been enriched by removal of part of its nonfissionable U-238 is a livelier substance; it will work in smaller reactors, which will yield more energy and plutonium for their size.

3) Natural uranium from the mines must have become fairly plentiful. It is certain that the five production plants will call for many times as much uranium as was available when the AEC was formed, five years ago.

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