May 17, 2008

May 17, 2008

From Knoxville, TN it was a half hour to Oak Ridge and our last installment of nuclear history. There were three main sites in the Manhattan Project. Los Alamos was the research brain, Hanford, WA, the manufacturer of plutonium, and Oak Ridge, the enricher of Uranium. The American Museum of Energy here preserves Oak Ridge’s history. Natural Uranium contains only 1% U-235 useful for an atomic bomb. It must be separated from its sister isotope U-238 in very difficult processes. (A process Iran is now trying to master.) This secret Tennessee city, which didn’t exist on any maps, built three different huge production plants hoping that one would succeed in producing sufficient quantities for the war. Oak Ridge produced just enough uranium for one untested bomb. Unfortunately for the Japanese it worked the first time, at Hiroshima. The rest of the museum is devoted to other forms of energy, which we breeze through. Aimee spends her museum time in the bathroom reading about oddball facts on toilet paper history and soap.

From Oak Ridge we head towards the far northeast corner of Tennessee and the Cumberland Gap National Historic Park. The Appalachians consist of parallel mountain ridges and valleys formed when the African continental plate rammed into North America millions of years ago. Cumberland Gap is a notch in one of these ridges. When the original colonies started getting crowded, they looked west for expansion. Daniel Boone led pioneers along his new Wilderness Road over this pass from Virginia to Kentucky opening the Ohio Valley to settlement. From the park Visitor Center, Aimee and I hike the Wilderness Road up to the Gap retracing part of Boone’s journey.

With a few hours of daylight left we drive thru beautiful rolling hills eastward into Virginia stopping at a private park in Glade Springs, VA.