British Smyth Report

British scientists played a large part in U.S. atomic development during World War II, and knew the theory of it well. What they did not know, and what the U.S. would not tell them, was the practical engineering technique of making fissionable material out of uranium ore. The Ministry of Supply has now published a slim, illustrated booklet, Britain's Atomic Factories, which tells what the British, starting almost from scratch at near wartime pressure, have accomplished.

First essential was pure uranium, so the central planning group concentrated on a uranium refinery. Built quickly at Salwick in Lancashire, it did not use the U.S. process of purifying uranium by precipitating it from a solution. The British developed their own process, which uses ether as the separating agent.

For turning uranium into bomb-worthy plutonium, the British did not use water-cooled reactors like those at Hanford, Wash. They are too dangerous, potentially, to build near populated places, and they require a larger supply of water than was readily available in Britain. So Britain's reactors were air-cooled, with radia-torlike cooling fins around the uranium rods. There are two reactors, side by side, near Sellafield in Cumberland. Rows of great fans like outsized airplane propellers blow gales of filtered wind through holes around the uranium. After another filtering to catch radioactive dust, the hot air is discharged through two massive stacks 400 feet high.

The U.S. built its reactors and its uranium isotope separation plant at the same time. The finished products of both (plutonium and U-235) could be used in bombs, but no one knew which process--if either--would work better. The British, noting U.S. success, were reasonably sure of getting plutonium from their reactors, so they did not start their U-235 plant until later. The isotope plant was built at Capenhurst in Cheshire, and it uses the same process (gaseous diffusion of uranium hexafluoride) as the U.S. plant at Oak Ridge, Tenn. Its purpose is restoring U-235 to the partially depleted uranium from the reactors.

"Every factory," says the British Ministry of Supply, "came into operation within a month of the estimated date; the cost of every plant was within a small percentage of the estimated sum, and the first bulk plutonium was produced on the date specified."

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