After his college years, Tinner went on to work for International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and was made responsible for uranium reactor for the purpose of power generation. Throughout this time, Tinner kept close contact with Dr. A. Q. Khan.
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George Craig Laurence (21 January 1905 – 6 November 1987) was a Canadian nuclear physicist. He was educated at Dalhousie University, and at Cambridge University under Ernest Rutherford. He was appointed as Radium and X-ray physicist to the Canadian National Research Council in 1930. In 1939-40 he attempted to build a graphite-uranium reactor in Ottawa, anticipating Enrico Fermi's work by several months.
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In the early stages, the Soviet atomic bomb project was in critical need of uranium. In May 1945, the sole atomic laboratory, Laboratory No. 2, only had seven tons of uranium oxide available. The critical nature of their stock can be realized when compared to the amounts needed for their first uranium reactor F-1 and their first plutonium production reactor "A" in the Urals. The first load of F-1 required 46 tons.
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Naimark, 1995, 208–209. On 30 March, the Alsos Mission reached Heidelberg, where important scientists were captured including Walther Bothe, Richard Kuhn, Philipp Lenard, and Wolfgang Gertner. Their interrogation revealed that Otto Hahn was at his laboratory in Tailfingen, while Heisenberg and Max von Laue were at Heisenberg's laboratory in Hechingen, and that the experimental natural uranium reactor that Heisenberg's team had built in Berlin had been moved to Haigerloch. Thereafter, the main focus of the Alsos Mission was on these nuclear facilities in the Württemberg area.
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On 30 March, the Alsos Mission reached Heidelberg, where important scientists were captured including Walther Bothe, Richard Kuhn, Philipp Lenard, and Wolfgang Gertner. Their interrogation revealed that Otto Hahn was at his laboratory in Tailfingen, while Werner Heisenberg and Max von Laue were at Heisenberg's laboratory in Hechingen, and the experimental natural uranium reactor that Heisenberg's team had built in Berlin had been moved to Haigerloch. Henceforth, the main focus of the Alsos Mission was on these nuclear facilities in the Württemberg area. Michael Perrin, John Lansdale, Jr., Samuel Goudsmit, and Eric Welsh search for uranium in a field at Haigerloch, Germany.
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Because of his experience with the spectra of carbon arcs he realized that even high quality graphite contains minute quantities of boron impurities that could make it potentially unusable as a neutron moderator in a uranium reactor, confirming a suspicion of Szilard. As a result of this meeting, over the next two years, MacPherson (together with L. M. Currie and V. C. Hamister) developed thermal purification techniques for the production of low boron content graphite, which resulted in the product "AGOT Graphite" of National Carbon. According to W. P. Eatherly, it was "the first true nuclear grade graphite". By November 1942, National Carbon had shipped 250 tons of AGOT graphite to the University of Chicago where it was used in the construction of Fermi's Chicago Pile-1, the first nuclear reactor to generate a sustained chain reaction.
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Vallecitos Nuclear Center viewed from Pleasanton Ridge Regional Park The Vallecitos Nuclear Center is a nuclear research facility, and the site of a former GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy electricity-generating nuclear power plant in unincorporated Alameda County, California, United States. The facility is approximately east of San Francisco, under jurisdiction of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Region IV.Alameda County Maps The Vallecitos boiling water reactor (VBWR) was the first privately owned and operated nuclear power plant to deliver significant quantities of electricity to a public utility grid. During the period October 1957 to December 1963, it delivered approximately 40,000 megawatt-hours of electricity. This reactor—a light-water moderated and cooled, enriched uranium reactor using stainless steel-clad, plate-type fuel—was a pilot plant and test bed for fuel, core components, controls, and personnel training for the Dresden Nuclear Power Plant, a Commonwealth Edison station built in Illinois five years later.
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German scientists repatriated from Sukhumi in February 1958 The Soviet Alsos or the Russian Alsos was an operation that took place during 19451946 in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, and whose objectives were the exploitation of German atomic related facilities, intellectual materials, material resources, and scientific personnel for the benefit of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Soviet scientists, aided greatly by Soviet espionage within the Manhattan Project, would have been able to eventually build their first atomic bomb without exploitation of German technology and scientists. However, the contributions of the German scientists is borne out by the many USSR State Prizes and other awards given in the wake of the second Soviet atomic bomb test, a uranium-based atomic bomb; awards for uranium production and isotope separation were prevalent. Also significant in both the first Soviet atomic bomb testa plutonium-based atomic bomb which required a uranium reactor for plutonium generationand the second test, was the Soviet acquisition of a significant amount of uranium immediately before and shortly after the close of World War II. This saved them a year by their own admission.
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In October 1939, Soviet physicists Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich and Yulii Borisovich Khariton concluded that heavy water and carbon were the only feasible moderators for a natural uranium reactor, and in August 1940, along with Georgy Flyorov, submitted a plan to the Russian Academy of Sciences calculating that 15 tons of heavy water were needed for a reactor. With the Soviet Union having no uranium mines at the time, young Academy workers were sent to Leningrad photographic shops to buy uranium nitrate, but the entire heavy water project was halted in 1941 when German forces invaded during Operation Barbarossa. By 1943, Soviet scientists had discovered that all scientific literature relating to heavy water had disappeared from the West, which Flyorov in a letter warned Soviet leader Joseph Stalin about, and at which time there was only 2–3 kg of heavy water in the entire country. In late 1943, the Soviet purchasing commission in the U.S. obtained 1 kg of heavy water and a further 100 kg in February 1945, and upon World War II ending, the NKVD took over the project.
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