The Y-12 National Security Complex is a United States Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration facility located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, near Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It was built as part of the Manhattan Project for the purpose of enriching uranium for the first atomic bombs. In the years after World War II, it has been operated as a manufacturing facility for nuclear weapons components. Y-12 is managed and operated under contract by Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS), which is composed of member companies Bechtel, Leidos, Orbital ATK, and SOC, with Booz Allen Hamilton as a teaming subcontractor.
History
Y-12 is the World War II code name for the electromagnetic isotope separation plant producing enriched uranium at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as part of the Manhattan Project. Construction began in February 1943 under the management of Stone & Webster. Because of a wartime shortage of copper, the massive electromagnetic coils were made with 14,700 tons of coinage silver from U.S. government vaults at West Point. Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols met with the Under Secretary of the Treasury, Daniel W. Bell, and requested between five and ten thousand tons of silver. Bell's stunned reply was, "Colonel, in the Treasury we do not speak of tons of silver; our unit is the troy ounce." Thus the Manhattan Engineer District requested and was loaned 395 million troy ounces (13,500 short tons; 12,300 t) from the West Point Depository for the duration of the Manhattan Project. Special guards and accountants were assigned to the silver, and their responsible caretaking meant that at the end of the war, less than 0.036% (14,220 oz t) of the roughly $300 million ($5.91 billion in 2025) of loaned silver was lost to the process, equal to $10.8 million (equivalent to $212.81 million in 2025), with the remainder returned to the Treasury. The Y-12 facility began operating in November 1943, separating uranium-235 from natural uranium, which is 99.3% uranium-238, by using calutrons to perform electromagnetic isotope separation. Y-12 separated the uranium-235 for Little Boy, the nuclear weapon that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945. K-25, another facility in Oak Ridge, produced enriched uranium using gaseous diffusion. However, K-25 did not begin operating until March 1945 and fed slightly enriched uranium to Y-12's Beta Calutrons as the push to obtain enough uranium-235 for Little Boy came in the early summer of 1945. The S-50 Thermal Diffusion Plant at the K-25 site also provided feed material for Y-12's Beta Calutrons. Tennessee Eastman was hired by the Army Corps of Engineers to manage Y-12 during the Manhattan Project. The company transferred scientists from Kingsport, Tennessee, to Y-12 and operated the plant from 1943 to May 1947. The Y-12 electromagnetic plant units were initially operated by scientists from UC Berkeley to remove bugs and achieve a reasonable operating rate. They were then turned over to trained Tennessee Eastman operators who had only a high school education. Nichols compared unit production data and pointed out to physicist Ernest Lawrence that the young "hillbilly" girl operators were outproducing his doctorate-holding scientists. They agreed to a production race and Lawrence lost, a morale boost for the Tennessee Eastman workers and supervisors. The girls were "trained like soldiers not to reason why", while "the scientists could not refrain from time-consuming investigation of the cause of even minor fluctuations of the dials". The young women that worked in this capacity came to be known as "Calutron Girls." The Union Carbide corporation succeeded Tennessee Eastman as the operating contractor in 1947, remaining until 1984 when Union Carbide relinquished the contract for operating DOE's Oak Ridge facilities, and the Martin Marietta corporation (later Lockheed Martin) won the contract to take over the operation. BWXT Y-12 (name later changed to B&W Y-12) succeeded Lockheed Martin as the Y-12 operator in November 2000.
1958 criticality incident At 11 p.m. on June 16, 1958, a criticality accident occurred in the C-1 Wing of Building 9212 at the facility, then operating under the management of Union Carbide. In the incident, a solution of highly enriched uranium was mistakenly diverted into a steel drum, causing a fission reaction of 15–20 minutes duration. Eight workers were hospitalized for moderate to severe radiation sickness or exposure, but all eventually returned to work. In June 1960, the eight workers (Bill Wilburn, O. C. Collins, Travis Rogers, R. D. Jones, Howard Wagner, T. W. Stinnett, Paul McCurry, and Bill Clark) filed suit against the Atomic Energy Commission. The suit was settled out-of-court. Wilburn, who had received the highest radiation dose, was awarded $18,000 (approximately $195,000 in 2024). Clark received $9,000 (worth approximately $97,200 in 2024). Under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program, the eight later received additional compensation from the government; Clark collected multiple payments totaling about $250,000. Most, if not all, of the eight victims were diagnosed with cancer at some point during their lives. As of 2023, Clark is the only surviving member of the eight.
1999 explosion A chemical explosion injured several workers at the Y-12 facility on December 8, 1999, when NaK was cleaned up after an accidental spill, inappropriately treated with mineral oil, and inadvertently ignited when the surface coating of potassium superoxide was scratched by a metal tool.
2023 fire At 9 a.m. on February 22, 2023, a fire broke out in a uranium processing area of Building 9212. In a statement from the National Nuclear Security Administration, the fire was said to be contained later the same day.
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