Tag Archives: Snapshots

Atomic Snapshot: Weldon Spring

Weldon Springs Interpretive Site
Weldon Springs Interpretive Site

About 30 miles west of St. Louis, Missouri, is the Weldon Spring Site and Interpretive Center operated by the Office of Legacy Management of the U.S. Department of Energy.

TNT in St. Charles County
Weldon Spring Site display

The U.S. government acquired 17,232 acres of rural land, displacing 576 residents and three towns to establish the Weldon Spring Ordnance Works supporting World War II efforts for manufacturing TNT and DNT. From 1956 – 1967, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission constructed the Weldon Spring Uranium Feed Materials Plant to convert uranium ore concentrates to pure uranium oxides and compounds. Obviously, by 1987, with production ceasing, the DOE was left with a massive Superfund cleanup site.

Weldon Spring disposal cell stairway
Weldon Spring panoramic view
Weldon Spring Disposal Cell

The outstanding feature of the Weldon Spring Site is the 41 acre, 75 foot tall engineered disposal cell structure designed to contain the site’s waste. Now a public park with walking trails, bird watching, mountain biking, and native, restored prairie, the disposal cell stairway takes you to the top of the mound with a panoramic view of the area with historical markers.

Atomic Snapshots: Peacekeeper Rail Garrison

On the edge of the National Museum of the United States Air Force, quite a distance from the museum, itself, you’ll see a red-orange rail car that seems out of place.

Part of the Peacekeeper Rail Garrison, this disguised and modified boxcar was designed to transport and launch Peacekeeper ICBMs which would be deployed on the nation’s rail network to avoid being targeted on a first strike.

Authorized in 1986 by President Reagan, the planning and testing occurred over the next several years, with operational delivery expected in December 1992. However, the program was cancelled in 1991 because of the end of the Cold War. Following termination, the prototype rail garrison car was delivered to the museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, in 1994 for public display.

Atomic Snapshots: Eads Hall

In Eads Hall at Washington University in St. Louis, you’ll find a grouping of plaques and information in the first floor hallway. The building housed the Department of Physics where Arthur Compton demonstrated the particle concept of electromagnetic radiation, proving Einstein’s proposal that light was both a wave and particle. The Compton Effect garnered him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927.

Arthur Compton went on to direct the Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) at the University of Chicago, a vital link in the Manhattan Project, which supported the development, construction, and operation of the reactors at Hanford and enrichment activities at Oak Ridge.

The grouping consists of an informational plaque, an historic marker, a photograph, the sketched experiment of the scattering of X-rays, and a description of his Nobel Prize winning experiment.