Y-12 National Security Complex

Y-12 is managed and operated under contract by Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS), which is composed of member companies Bechtel, Leidos, Orbital ATK, and SOC, with Booz Allen Hamilton as a teaming subcontractor.

[3] Y-12 is the World War II code name for the electromagnetic isotope separation plant producing enriched uranium at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as part of the Manhattan Project.

Because of a wartime shortage of copper, the massive electromagnetic coils were made with 14,700 tons of coinage silver from U.S. government vaults at West Point.

[4][5] Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols met with the Under Secretary of the Treasury, Daniel W. Bell, and requested between five and ten thousand tons of silver.

However, K-25 did not begin operating until March 1945 and fed slightly enriched uranium to Y-12's Beta Calutrons as the push to obtain enough uranium-235 for Little Boy came in the early summer of 1945.

Nichols compared unit production data and pointed out to physicist Ernest Lawrence that the young "hillbilly" girl operators were outproducing his doctorate-holding scientists.

In the incident, a solution of highly enriched uranium was mistakenly diverted into a steel drum, causing a fission reaction of 15–20 minutes duration.

[11][13] A chemical explosion injured several workers at the Y-12 facility on December 8, 1999, when NaK was cleaned up after an accidental spill, inappropriately treated with mineral oil, and inadvertently ignited when the surface coating of potassium superoxide was scratched by a metal tool.

Early efforts focused on securing material from the former Soviet Union;[18] recent activities have included recovery of highly enriched uranium from Chile.

[23] Since 1988, Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance has organized non-violent direct action protests at the Y-12 Complex, in an effort to close down the weapons plant.

Sister Mary Dennis Lentsch, a Catholic nun, has been arrested many times for protesting at the Oak Ridge facility.

[27] In July 2012, Megan Rice, an 82-year-old Catholic sister of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, and two military veterans, Gregory Boertje-Obed, and Michael Walli, entered the Y-12 complex.

[28] The anti-nuclear activists, who got past fences and disabled security sensors before dawn on July 28, spent several hours in the complex, spray-painted peace messages, and prayed and sang before they were stopped by guards.