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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 199 records · Page 11
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2021

Harold Agnew’s son gives Lab never-before-seen photos, documents

When I arrived at Los Alamos in 2003, the Laboratory’s long-retired third director was still a very popular figure. He was so popular, in fact, that he enjoyed an honor typically reserved for only the most adored and outrageous pop stars and Brazilian footballers: He was known by one name. Back then, most Lab staff knew exactly who you were talking about when you referred to “Harold.” Harold Agnew was at the helm from 1970 – 1979, though his career here began when he was still just in his 20s. He was recruited to work on the U.S. government’s top-secret project to build the first atomic bombs and help bring a swift end to World War II. Harold died in 2013 at 92, but March 28 would have been his 100th birthday. Although he’s no longer here to celebrate with us, we can gain inspiration by remembering his remarkable life of service – and mischief. Both are now well-documented in the collections of the National Security Research Center (NSRC), the Lab’s classified library, which also includes unclassified pieces of our history. The NSRC’s newest addition to its collections comes from Harold’s son John Agnew, who just recently gave me a box of about 250 images and about 15 documents that belonged to his dad. The contents are nothing short of remarkable, one-of-a-kind, and in some cases, hilarious. As the NSRC staff are accessioning these pieces into the Lab’s collections, looking through these materials is a chance for me to remember our former director and my friend.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗
DOE OSTI2021

A Father’s Day Tribute Father-son Nobel Prize-winning physicists worked together at the Lab

Partners in physics during the World War II years, father and son Niels and Aage Bohr worked side by side on the Lab’s top-secret effort to create the first atomic bombs. Arriving in Los Alamos in late 1943, Aage was just 21 years old. He had been studying physics to follow in the footsteps of his father, who had won a Nobel Prize in 1922. Aage’s higher education, however, had been interrupted by the rapid spread of Nazism in Europe. The Bohrs, who had Jewish heritage, fled their native Denmark to escape persecution, eventually arriving in Los Alamos to aid in the creation of weapons that would help end the war. Their story is part of the collections at the National Security Research Center, which is the Lab’s classified library and also houses unclassified historic materials. While at Los Alamos, Niels and Aage were accorded VIP status because of the family’s scientific renown and given new names to protect their identities: Aage was James Baker, while his father was Nicholas Baker, but the scientific community called him Uncle Nick. Whether called Niels and Aage or Nick and Jim, father and son were inseparable.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2021

Commuting again to work on-site? Lab’s first drivers faced their own challenges decades ago

After a long pause in commuting, more and more Lab staff are filling travel mugs, topping off their tanks, and heading up the hill for on-site work. As long as the Lab has existed, workers have snaked through tight mountain roads to get to their jobs. And, back in the early 1940s, drivers faced even more challenges. In the Lab’s earliest years, drivers likely worried about getting stuck in the mud, navigating intense switchbacks, or making sure important equipment, such as a disassembled power plant, didn’t fall off the back of the truck that was hauling it. Creative solutions could go a long way to get out of a jam. As many of us return onsite and get reacquainted with commuting, we look back at how transportation has changed since the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government’s top secret effort at Los Alamos to create the first atomic bombs to help end World War II. These stories and photos are part of the collections in the National Security Research Center, which is the Lab’s classified library and also houses unclassified artifacts from our past.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗
DOE OSTI2021

Winning Asset Management Improvement Team: Maintenance Planning and Scheduling in a Highly Regulated Environment

The Y-12 National Complex (Y-12) site has numerous aging facilities that are crucial to the Department of Energy and the national security strategy for the nation. Y-12’s commitment to safety and regulatory compliance is of the highest importance. The commitment to meet the national security mission also creates additional rigor and complexity to the everyday maintenance and planning process. Y-12 is a collection of many facilities, both old and new, nestled between two ridges in Oak Ridge, TN. Y-12 was made with the short-term focus of ending “The Great War” through the creation of the worlds’ first atomic bomb. Almost eighty (80) years have passed since the groundbreaking, with the mission of the site changing from decade to decade. While the mission has changed, the way Y-12 employees continuously meet the challenge has not. The site was created to react and overcome; Y-12 still takes pride in the ability to react and overcome. The difference is the site is no longer ignorant to the need for a better way to manage the aging facilities and infrastructure. Shear willpower and determination was once the way to reach the objectives, but as a wise man once said, “Work smarter, not harder.” The business case for change started within the senior leadership at Y-12. A team of managers sat down and dictated objectives to provide a clear scope for the maintenance planning and scheduling optimization team, to include our Eruditio integrated blended learning coaches. In addition to providing the direction, they also made themselves available for escalation of issues in the event the team ran in to road blocks.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2021

Be like Oppenheimer: Donate your weapons information for the next generation of LANL researchers

You can follow the Lab’s first physicists, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, Hans Bethe, and so many others through the years, plus know your information is helping future researchers — just like our first scientists did for you. How? Donate your physical or digital classified weapons records to the Lab’s National Security Research Center (NSRC), said Riz Ali, NSRC Director. The NSRC houses 80 years’ worth of one-of-kind records, which total in the millions and include nearly every medium imaginable. It is the Laboratory’s largest collection of research materials and the largest classified library of any Department of Energy lab. It all started with Oppenheimer, our first Lab director, and his Technical Library that was established during the Manhattan Project, which was the U.S. government’s top-secret effort to create the first atomic bombs to help end World War II. “Few NSRC patrons are aware that most of its vital materials come from the Lab’s own workforce,” said Chris C’de Baca, the NSRC’s Group Leader. “A significant portion of our critical material — which today’s researchers access regularly — is a direct contribution from research scientists. If people don’t contribute, then we won’t have the information we need when people come to the NSRC for research.”

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗
DOE OSTI2021

Phosgene Neutralization Chemistry for the Explosive Destruction System (EDS)

This report summarizes activities at Sandia National Laboratories as part of the Explosive Destruction System (EDS) Phase 3 (P3) System design. An exploration of chemical neutralization strategies of phosgene was conducted for safe disposal of recovered mortars and M79 1000 lb. bombs filled with carbonyl dichloride "phosgene" or "CG agent" (molecular formula = COCl 2 ). The incumbent strategy utilized aqueous sodium hydroxide was found to be the worst-case scenario, producing enough CO 2 gas that would cause an unacceptable pressure and temperature spike. Several chemical neutralization strategies were evaluated based on criteria set by the operating envelope of the P3 design. In the end, it was determined that a pure solution of N-methyl ethanolamine (MeEA) or 90% monoethanolamine (MEA)(aqueous) provided the best balance reaction profile, cost, and safety.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2021

Ranger

On January 11, 1951, the Atomic Energy Commission announced that the President of the United States had authorized the Commission to use part of Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range for “experiments necessary to the atomic weapons development program.” Sixteen days later, on January 21st, the first test, codenamed Able, exploded at 0545 hours Pacific Standard Time 1,060 feet over the dry lake bed of Frenchman Flat with a yield of one kiloton. In quick succession, four more devices were dropped over Frenchman Flat with yields ranging from one to twenty-two kilotons.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗
DOE OSTI2021

Operation Ivy

Operation Ivy, a two-shot test program, included the United States’ first thermonuclear device, Mike; and King, its highest yield fission bomb. Mike, if successful, held the promise of future weapons having megaton yields. King, pushing the limits of a fission design, provided a high yield alternative should Mike fail.

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗
DOE OSTI2021

Why didn’t Oppenheimer ever win a Nobel Prize?

For his scientific achievement, he would be forever known as the father of the atomic bomb – but never as a Nobel laureate. The pinnacle of global recognition, the Nobel Prize was bestowed on 18 of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s colleagues with whom he worked at the Manhattan Project site in Los Alamos. There, in just 27 months and in a perceived race with Nazi Germany, the scientists created the first nuclear weapons. Their efforts brought the world into the Atomic Age and helped end World War II. Several were awarded the prize before coming to work at the wartime lab, while most would go on to win later in life. Oppenheimer was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Physics three times: in 1946, in 1951, and in 1967. Colleagues, scholars, and surely Oppenheimer himself pondered why he was never bestowed the honor. “To understand this,” said James Kunetka, historian and author of The General and the Genius, “you have to first examine the man’s academic life before and after the war.”

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2021

Lab’s original mission inspires entire genre of comic books, characters

The Lab’s advent of the atomic bomb that helped end World War II in 1945 fueled the imagination of comic book writers. The public’s focus on emerging nuclear science made the idea of people-turned-super through radiation wildly popular in many aspects of pop culture.

63 RADIATION, THERMAL, AND OTHER ENVIRON. POLLUTAN↗
DOE OSTI2021

Physical Lab Security: Before and After World War II

Physical security during World War II was important to maintaining the secrecy of the Manhattan Project, the government’s wartime effort to create the atomic bomb. In a perceived race against Nazi Germany to do so, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Lab’s first director, and General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, needed a secluded place to build the clandestine Lab.

98 NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, SAFEGUARDS, AND PHYSICAL P↗
DOE OSTI2021

Chicago Pile-1 paved the way for nuclear science and a lab in Los Alamos First self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was nearly 80 years ago

On a bitter-cold winter day, 43 scientists gathered at an abandoned squash court at the University of Chicago where they would ultimately enable a secret lab in Los Alamos to change the world just years later. It was December 2, 1942. The group, led by Italian physicist and Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, stacked graphite bricks, piling 57 layers that totaled more than 770,000 pounds. Later named Chicago Pile-1, their goal was to create the world’s first self-sustaining, controlled nuclear chain reaction. Inside the approximately 20-feet-tall pile were smaller blocks of uranium and control rods that, when removed, would cause the reaction to go critical – meaning create a nuclear chain reaction. It was roughly $1 million worth of materials, equivalent to nearly $16 million today, and a concept that a nuclear chain reaction would allow the weaponization of the atom. “Its success would be the crucial proof needed to know it would be possible to create an atomic bomb,” said LANL Historian Roger Meade (C-NR). “This was the precursor to the Lab we have today, nearly 80 years later.”

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Celebrate Valentine’s Day with Three Early Lab Love Stories

This Valentine’s Day revel in several remarkable relationships that occurred leading up to and during the Manhattan Project, the United States government’s effort to build the atomic bomb and help end World War II. Further details of the lives and work of early Lab staff can be found in the legacy collections housed at the National Security Research Center, LANL’s classified library and curator of unclassified legacy items.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2022

An April Fools’ Day read from Lab history Famed physicist Richard Feynman’s safecracking, cipher-creating sense of play

Richard Feynman was fresh out of Princeton University’s doctoral program when recruited to assist in the creation of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. In 1943, Lab director J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote that the 24-year-old was, “by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this.” Feynman attempted to live and examine life in a state of play and, as such, it’s only fitting to take a look back at the Nobel Prize winning scientist’s years at the wartime Lab as April Fools’ Day approaches.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Oppenheimer biographer tours Lab while movie is filmed locally

While a Hollywood movie crew filmed the Oppenheimer movie in Los Alamos these past few weeks, a special guest stopped by the Lab in between takes and chats with big-name actors. Director Thom Mason invited Kai Bird, co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, to LANL while Bird was in town. The film’s director, Christopher Nolan, wrote the screenplay based on Bird’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, published in 2005. Oppenheimer was a physicist and the Lab’s first director of its wartime mission to secretly create the atomic bombs and help end World War II.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Characterization, Chemistry, and Particle Size Distribution of Fallout Particles Isolated from Filter Samples

Nuclear particulate fallout is the radioactive byproduct of a nuclear event formed by the mixture of proximate environmental materials with vaporized bomb debris. The debris can be transported into the atmosphere during cloud rise, raining out locally and globally constituting a radiation hazard. Questions remain on how entrainment of environmental material in the fireball affects fallout formation processes and radionuclide incorporation during cooling.

38 RADIATION CHEMISTRY, RADIOCHEMISTRY, AND NUCLEA↗