Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant Tour for the Ambassador of Japan, His Excellency Nobuhiko Ushiba December 15, 1972

Staplebound. 17 pages, plus covers. Printed on one side only. Map. Illustrations. This report was issued on December 8, 1972, a week before the visit and can be assumed to be both a planning document and part of the foreign visitor security planning. Nobuhiko Ushiba (16 November 1909-31 December 1984) was a Japanese diplomat who served as Ambassador to Canada from 1961 to 1964, Ambassador to the United States from 1970 to 1973, and as Minister of State for External Economic Affairs from 1977 to 1979. The last was a position in the Cabinet of Japan. He received an appointment as first secretary at the Japanese Embassy in Berlin, and served there until the end of World War II (with a brief stint in the Japanese embassy in London just prior to the war). He was very close to General Hiroshi shima, Japan's ambassador to Nazi Germany. By at least 1939, he was helping to run a "bureaucratic intelligence service" which spied on Nazi Germany for the Japanese government. This document provides a step by step discussion of the visit itinerary with illustrations of major items to be seen. K-25 was the codename given by the Manhattan Project to the program to produce enriched uranium for atomic bombs using the gaseous diffusion method. Originally the codename for the product, over time it came to refer to the project, the production facility located at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the main gaseous diffusion building, and ultimately the site. When it was built in 1944, the four-story K-25 gaseous diffusion plant was the world's largest building, comprising over 1,640,000 square feet of floor space and a volume of 97,500,000 cubic feet. Gaseous diffusion is based on Graham's law, which states that the rate of effusion of a gas is inversely proportional to the square root of its molecular mass. The highly corrosive uranium hexafluoride (UF 6) was the only known compound of uranium sufficiently volatile to be used in this process. Before this could be done, the Special Alloyed Materials (SAM) Laboratories at Columbia University and the Kellex Corporation had to overcome formidable difficulties to develop a suitable barrier.…