Add this copy of Plutonium Metallurgy at Los Alamos, 1943-1945; to cart. $1,500.00, very good condition, Sold by Ground Zero Books, Ltd. rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Silver Spring, MD, UNITED STATES, published 1998 by Los Alamos Historical Society.
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Seller's Description:
Very good. The format is approximately 7 inches by 9 inches. Illustrated front cover. xii, 184, [2] pages. Footnotes. Formulae. Illustrations. Tabular Data. Notes and References. Additional General References. Attachments. Appendix Notes and References. Glossary. Index. EXTREMELY RARE. An account of one of the untold stories of the Manhattan project the metallurgy of plutonium and the making of the first plutonium bomb parts. Hammel brings to this work his personal recollections and the results of hundreds of hours of searching through archives at Los Alamos to provide a history of the early struggles of dealing with plutonium, the world's most complex element. He illustrates the immensity of the accomplishments of the chemists, metallurgists and engineers who worked side-by-side with physicists to accomplish one of the great achievements of the century. Edward F. “Ed” Hammel was an American chemist. Hammel had just completed his Ph.D. at Princeton University when he joined a Canadian heavy water project sponsored by the school in 1941. From 1941 to early 1944, Ed Hammel worked on heavy-water production and diffusion-barrier research for early Manhattan District work contracted to Princeton. In June of 1944, Hammel relocated to Los Alamos, where he would become one of the site's foremost experts on plutonium. Ed began work on remelting, alloying, and casting plutonium, the material having the code name “49”. For 25 years after the war, he was the group leader of the Low-Temperature Physics and Cryoengineering group. They worked to determine plutonium's physical properties, explored superconductivity, cryoengineering, calorimetry, and high pressure physics. He also gained scientific repute after the war for his work as part of the first team to liquefy pure helium. Edward Hammel wrote that "The raison d'etre for Plutonium Metallurgy at Los Alamos, 1943-1945 was an accidental discovery in 1993 of the fact that, of the approximately 150 chapters included in the Los Alamos Technical Series (written by Division and Group Leaders after World War II to chronicle in detail the wartime R&D carried out at the Laboratory), the only chapter never written was Chapter 1 of Volume X, titled Plutonium Metallurgy. the person assigned responsibility for preparing that history was y wartime Group Leader and my postwar Division Leader, Eric R. Jette. For him the transition from wartime to peacetime obligations at Los Alamos involved no interim period for reflections and writing. this book is an attempt to fill that historical gap. In addition to about one hundred contemporary references, the Attachments include copies of relevant memoranda and reports." Siegfried Hecker, former Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, reportedly commented that "Plutonium Metallurgy is a fascinating account of one of the untold stories of the Manhattan Project-the metallurgy of plutonium and the making of the first plutonium bomb parts. Ed Hammel brings to this work his personal recollections and the efforts of hundreds of hours of searching through the Manhattan Project archives at Los Alamos to bring you an authoritative history of the early struggles of dealing with plutonium, the world's most complex element."
