06-03  Roy W. Greenlee

Manhattan Project Responsibilities:

AT MET LAB: Research to provide plutonium separation process for irradiated uranium coming from Hanford reactors.

AT OAK RIDGE, Site K-26, Fercleve Corporation. Engineering development work to redesign 50 FT-tall liquid thermal diffusion columns for enrichment of the U-235 content of liquified uranium hexafluoride.

Manhattan Project Specialty:

Process research, first at Met. Lab as a chemist and later at Oak Ridge as an engineer with Barnett Dodge of Yale(K-26,Oak Ridge), for improvement of the liquid thermal diffusion process.

Manhattan Project Contribution::

A. Credited with better value for Pu 239 half life than that previously measured (April 11,1945). B. Credited with obtaining the FIRST value ever obtained for the half life of Pu 240 at 6650 years (April 11, 1945) C. Redesigned and built 18 improved thermal diffusion columns, in an extension research activity under B. Dodge (Yale), carried out at the Continental Gin Company in Birmingham, Alabama.

Favorite Manhattan Project Stories:

Most interesting experience was a brief debate I undertook with a man whose background on the project and in the atomic field, I hardly appreciated, namely Dr. Leo Szilard. He called a meeting of scientists hping for our signatures on a petition to President Truman not to use the bomb in warfare. I argued that it would end the war and save many lives (including those of many of my friends then in the Pacific theatre. Most of us walked out without signing the petition.

Biography:

I was born in West Virginia, nr. Charleston, where the technology of the "chemical valley" influenced me to choose chemistry as a profession. After preliminary studies at Kanawha and Morris Harvey colleges, and a year as a Dupont analyst, I graduated from Ohio State and spent two years as a Graduate Reasearch Fellow there, before being recommended (Dec. 1943) to and accepted by Dr. Seaborg for work at Met. Lab., U. of Chicago. As mentioned elsewhere, I worked there mainly on plutonium separation process research, but with process design finished, I was able to do special work in which I determined the half life of Pu-240 for the first time. A few months later, I put on my engineer costume and worked froom Oak Ridge to redesign columns for liquid thermal separation of U-235. Since leaving the project late in 1945, I have done research at Battelle Institute (many projects) and at Petrolite Corporation (St. Louis), on many subjects related to petroleum, and finally evolved a special overbased Mg additive in which up to 40% MgO is stably dispersed in an oil medium [This product makes possible the use of vanadium contaminated oils (including residual oils) to be safely useful as gas turbine fuels. I was Secretary of ASTM D2E for 10 years before my retirement in 1991.