Conveners
Tour Graphite Reactor
- Robert Saethre (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
Description
https://www.ornl.gov/content/graphite-reactor
X-10 Graphite Reactor
Manhattan Project National Historical Park
The X-10 Graphite Reactor is on Oak Ridge National Laboratory property. No public access is currently offered by the US Department of Energy.
On February 2, 1943, only two months after the first experimental nuclear reactor was constructed by Enrico Fermi's team at the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, design work began on the X-10 Graphite Reactor. The Chicago reactor, known as CP-1, had only operated for a few minutes; X-10, by contrast, was designed for continuous operation so that Manhattan Project personnel could develop the necessary skills and technologies for the production-scale reactors and plutonium separation plants at Hanford, WA.
