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Oak Ridge Research Paper

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In 1938, three chemists in Berlin discovered how to split a uranium atom, and with it, they learned that the energy from this could be enough to be used as a bomb. Soon after that, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, expressing his concerns that the Germans might successfully build such a bomb. President Roosevelt agreed to start a nuclear research program, which only moved slowly at first. Over the next two years, the “critical mass” of uranium needed was determined, and it was also proven that plutonium could be used to make a similar bomb. These new findings made the development of an atomic bomb a priority for the United States. As a result, in 1941, the United States officially started the Manhattan Project.1 One of the main research and production sites for the Manhattan Project was located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In the years since, countless scientific developments have stemmed from this area, but have its facilities done more to help or hurt the areas surrounding it? At the time, Oak Ridge was known as Clinton Engineer Works, named after the nearby town of Clinton, Tennessee. It was an extremely secretive city, in which most of the workers were on a need-to-know basis and did not know the end goal of their jobs. Oak Ridge was designed …show more content…
It has since been revealed that up to 2.4 million pounds of mercury were “lost” to the environment, and radioactive cobalt-60 was found in the soil beneath the laboratory over 30 years after the Manhattan Project’s heyday.9 One study found evidence of radioactive cesium-137 from the Y-12 plant traveling 80 miles down to Chattanooga. It is difficult to determine exactly how many deaths have occurred due to late effects of radiation leakage from Oak Ridge, but the leukemia mortality rate in the area has reached at least 63 percent higher than the expected

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