alanw
Well-known member
Reading Otto Frisch's biography "What Little I Remember", I came across this description of him visiting Blue John Cavern, whither a Manchester Hospital's radium supply had been moved for safe keeping, in order to get some radon gas, a decay product of the radium, for his research into separating out the uranium 235 isotope using heat and gravity.
This was shortly after he and Rudolf Peierls had published their memorandum on the feasibility of an air droppable atomic bomb.
"At my request Oliphant arranged for me to get some radon from a hospital in Manchester; the radium had been removed to safety, deep below ground in the Blue John Cavern in Derbyshire, a well known tourist attraction in peace time.
So one day I went by train to Manchester and was taken from the hospital by car to the cave. Down I went over slippery ladders and through narrow, muddy passages to a slightly larger cavity where, incongruously, there was a laboratory table with a lot of glassware on it, bulbs and tubes and stopcocks, rather like the equipment I had used in Hamburg. That was the plant for ?milking? the radium, for extracting the radon and compressing it into a small glass capillary, no longer than half an inch.
At Oliphant?s request the radium had not been milked for a whole week so that a large amount of radon had accumulated. Less than an hour later, when the local technician had done the work for me, I walked out with my little suitcase containing a heavy block of lead at the centre of which was this tiny capsule full of radon, equivalent in radiation to about three-quarters of a gram of radium.
Any safety officer would shudder at the thought that I walked out with that thing, protected by only a couple of inches of lead, and that I travelled within a few inches of that radiation source first by car and then by train. Today that would be considered an unacceptable radiation hazard both to myself and to other people in the compartment."
I wonder if there is any record of where in the system the "laboratory" was?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Robert_Frisch
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GcBhQgAACAAJ&source=gbs_book_other_versions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisch%E2%80%93Peierls_memorandum
This was shortly after he and Rudolf Peierls had published their memorandum on the feasibility of an air droppable atomic bomb.
"At my request Oliphant arranged for me to get some radon from a hospital in Manchester; the radium had been removed to safety, deep below ground in the Blue John Cavern in Derbyshire, a well known tourist attraction in peace time.
So one day I went by train to Manchester and was taken from the hospital by car to the cave. Down I went over slippery ladders and through narrow, muddy passages to a slightly larger cavity where, incongruously, there was a laboratory table with a lot of glassware on it, bulbs and tubes and stopcocks, rather like the equipment I had used in Hamburg. That was the plant for ?milking? the radium, for extracting the radon and compressing it into a small glass capillary, no longer than half an inch.
At Oliphant?s request the radium had not been milked for a whole week so that a large amount of radon had accumulated. Less than an hour later, when the local technician had done the work for me, I walked out with my little suitcase containing a heavy block of lead at the centre of which was this tiny capsule full of radon, equivalent in radiation to about three-quarters of a gram of radium.
Any safety officer would shudder at the thought that I walked out with that thing, protected by only a couple of inches of lead, and that I travelled within a few inches of that radiation source first by car and then by train. Today that would be considered an unacceptable radiation hazard both to myself and to other people in the compartment."
I wonder if there is any record of where in the system the "laboratory" was?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Robert_Frisch
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GcBhQgAACAAJ&source=gbs_book_other_versions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisch%E2%80%93Peierls_memorandum
