"Plan of Layer 32" By an unknown engineer, 1942
Pencil on photo-reproductive print on paper
22 1/2" x 16 1/2" National Archives and Records Administration -- Great Lakes Region
(Chicago), Records of the Atomic Energy Commission
World's First Nuclear Reactor Eight months after the United States entered World
War II, the Federal Government launched the Manhattan Project, an all-out,
highly secret effort to build an atomic bomb. The task was to translate
the vast energy released by nuclear fission into a weapon of unprecedented
power. On December 2, 1942, a group of physicists working under top-secret
conditions in a laboratory at the University of Chicago took a crucial
step toward this goal; they created the world's first controlled, self-sustaining
nuclear reaction. The drawing displayed here depicts the construction
of the world's first nuclear reactor, constructed of graphite and uranium
bricks and wooden timbers in the precise arrangement necessary to start
and regulate a nuclear chain reaction. It also shows the placement of
cadmium rods into the reactor in order to prevent the reaction from accelerating
out of control with catastrophic results.