[11] For advice on assembling the laboratory's Chemistry Division, Compton, a physicist, turned to Herbert McCoy,[12] who had considerable experience with isotopes and radioactive elements.
[14] Owing to a lack of space at the University of Chicago, Spedding proposed to organize part of the Chemistry Division at Iowa State College, where he had colleagues who were willing to help.
[19][20] Spedding was fortunate in having the full support of Charles E. Friley, the president of Iowa State College, even though the nature of the work could not at first be disclosed to him while security checks were being undertaken.
Some 1,200 short tons (1,100 t) of high-grade ore from the Belgian Congo was in storage in a warehouse at Port Richmond on Staten Island.
The Eldorado company also operated a refinery at Port Hope, Ontario, where Canadian and Belgian ore was refined.
[24] The major problem was impurities in the uranium oxide, which could act as neutron poisons and prevent a nuclear chain reaction.
[25][26][27] Peter P. Alexander, at Metal Hydrides Incorporated, gave in 1938 the first indications that the melting point of uranium was "as low as 1,100 °C (2,010 °F) and even somewhat lower".
Scaling this process up for industrial production was a dangerous proposition; ether was explosive, and a factory using large quantities was likely to blow up or burn down.
[32] Uranium oxide was reacted with potassium fluoride in large vats on the roof of Westinghouse's plant in Bloomfield, New Jersey.
But Edward Creutz, the head of the Metallurgical Laboratory's group responsible for fabricating the uranium, wanted a metal sphere the size of an orange for his experiments.
Unfortunately, the calcium hydride contained unacceptable amounts of boron, a neutron poison, making the metal unsuitable for use in a reactor.
Some months would pass before Clement J. Rodden from the National Bureau of Standards and Union Carbide figured out a means to produce sufficiently pure calcium hydride.
While most of the neighboring elements on the periodic table can be reduced to form pure metal and slag, uranium did not behave this way.
[39] On 24 September 1942, Wilhelm took the ingot to Spedding at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago and presented it to Compton, whose first reaction was of disbelief.
The building was handed over to the Ames Project, and the wooden floor replaced with a concrete one, much to the disappointment of the university architect, who had been trying for some years to get the place torn down.
The owner, Bill Maitland, had once made gardening tools, but could no longer obtain the metal he needed due to wartime rationing.
[40] The Ames Project supplied two tons of uranium metal to the Metallurgical Laboratory for the construction of Chicago Pile-1, the world's first nuclear reactor, which achieved criticality on 2 December 1942.
[40] The Ames Project would later supply over 90 percent of the uranium for the X-10 Graphite Reactor at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
The uranium tetrafluoride, known as green salt because of its characteristic color, was supplied by Mallinckrodt, DuPont and Harshaw Chemical,[45] and was ground up on arrival, as was the magnesium.
Uranium turnings were washed, dried, passed through a magnet to remove iron impurities, and pressed into briquettes.
[49] Beginning in 1942, along with uranium production operations, the Ames Project conducted a variety of metallurgical research related to the separation and purification of thorium, beryllium and rare-earth metals, such as cerium.
[55] The Ames Project began working on a production process in December 1943, reducing beryllium fluoride in a bomb with metallic magnesium and a sulphur booster.
The process worked, but the high temperatures and pressures created by the magnesium sulphide meant that it was potentially explosive.
The Ames Laboratory produced 437 pounds (198 kg) of extremely (more than 99%) pure cerium by August 1945, when production ended.
So too was bismuth, because of its low neutron capture cross section, so the Ames Project produced and tested uranium-bismuth alloys.
Tests were also carried out with alloys of uranium with beryllium, calcium, cobalt, magnesium, manganese and thorium, which were being produced or in use elsewhere in the Ames Project.
[61] The latter of was particular interest because at one point the Los Alamos Laboratory considered using it in an atomic bomb instead of metallic uranium, but the idea was found to be inefficient, and was shelved.
This was operated as a pilot plant that produced kilogram quantities, before being turned over to the Manhattan Project's SAM Laboratories for implementation on an industrial scale at Oak Ridge.
[65] The award came in the form of a banner sporting four white stars, representing two and a half years of service to the war effort.
The laboratory remained on the Iowa State College campus, and its faculty and graduate students made up most of the staff.