In July 2017 we went to the American Museum of Science and Energy (AMSE) in Oak Ridge. When I was stationed in Japan I was about an hour from Hiroshima and I've been to the Peace Park Museum there, and I saw the Enola Gay at an air show in Asheville some years ago, so going to Oak Ridge completed the atomic circle for me, so to speak, albeit in reverse order. I had known of the Manhattan Project, of course, but didn't know very much about the nuts and bolts of it. My wife's grandparents actually worked in Oak Ridge during the war and her aunt was elementary age and lived there. She said she remembered seeing a whole street of houses being put up in a day.
The museum was fantastic. As a civil engineer I found the process of building a secret city in the middle of nowhere and building the uranium processing plants so quickly to be fascinating and incredible. I didn't know there were multiple processes running concurrently. What I found especially amazing was that those processes were being run to produce a fissile material for a bomb that no one really knew for sure would work. My dad was a Navy nuke and then worked in commercial power so I grew up around nuclear power, but this was obviously a completely different animal.
My grandson studied WWII in history last year so we thought it would be cool to take him to AMSE since we were over that way on a quasi vacation. I google mapped AMSE and we hit the road. When we got there, it was in a different location, tacked on to the end of a shopping mall, and according to the map the previous location is now an apartment complex. (Evidently the old location was closed in 2018.) I thought "this isn't right" so I googled Manhattan Project and found the Manhattan Project National Historical Park and Children's Museum a few miles away. The Children's Museum has the prefab house, but it's being refurbished right now and not accessible. One of the National Park guys told us that AMSE is now devoted to modern energy related stuff and if we wanted to see actual Manhattan Project info, we needed to head to the K-25 History Center, about 10 miles away, so off we went again.
The K-25 center had some of the displays that had been at AMSE regarding construction of the city but it was focused primarily on the K-25 (hence the name) gaseous diffusion facility and process. Very interesting and informative, but it only included a small fraction of what the old AMSE had. It was a still worthwhile trip but quite a letdown from what we were expecting and what we had told Elijah he was going to see. Granted we got there fairly late in the day, but there were only like 2 other visitors while we were there.
All this is kvetching is mostly because I'm bumfuzzled that something so important to our country's history could be piecemealed and given so little floor space. Given what the Smithsonian has at so many other museums, (I especially love Air and Space) I would think they could put together an impressive Oak Ridge/ Manhattan Project museum. Maybe it's just too politically incorrect anymore, although we're probably closer to the nuclear brink now than at any time since the end of the cold war. More likely it's just not anyone's priority.
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Originally Posted by JTQ
