U.S. NUCLEAR RESEARCH

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30482, 2 July 1964, Page 15

U.S. NUCLEAR RESEARCH

Los Alamos Work Described

Something of the work done in a place “where there is the highest level of adult education Of any community in the United States” was described by a visiting Fulbright scholar, Dr. T. P.. Cotter, at a meeting of the Canterbury branch of the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry. Dr. Cotter is a chemist working in the fields of nuclear propulsion and plasma physics at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, New- Mexico. The laboratory was established in 1945 when Dr. J. R. Oppenheimer was commissioned to discover how to assemble fissionable material into a weapon. The site was chosen because of its relative isolation and dry and sunny climate. Los Alamos now has a population of 13,000, 1200 being laboratory staff members. Work on weapons constitutes about half the work of the laboratory today. Dr. Cotter said there were unlimited workshop facilities. He showed a slide of a double-action press able to exert a force of 5000 tons, housed in a building of four storeys. He also showed a camera used for photographing nuclear detonations which operated at 15m frames a second—“for a very short time.”