Originally disguised as a barn, a vault built in Oak Ridge was used to store enriched uranium for about a year following World War II. The guard tower next door was disguised as a silo. In the 1950s, after becoming a part of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s analytical chemistry group, the site — shown here as it appears now — came to be known as Katy’s Kitchen, after a division secretary who regularly visited there.
By Frank Munger (Contact)
Sunday, June 1, 2008
OAK RIDGE - In a town where nuclear history is always on display, Katy's Kitchen is a rare find.
You won't find it in tour guides of the Atomic City, and it's not available for public visits. But that only adds to the allure of this oddly named - and uniquely Oak Ridge - site.
Today the facility is part of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's environmental sciences program, a staging ground for eco-experiments and home to an enormous collection of bugs and other small creatures. However, for about a year following World War II, it was the government's secret hiding place for enriched uranium.
Even though the big war was won, the Cold War was just beginning. Oak Ridge's newly revealed role in producing U-235 had brought new attention and new security concerns. Additional arrangements were needed to protect the A-bomb commodities in East Tennessee.
In 1947, at a clandestine site midway between the Y-12 and X-10 production plants, top-secret work began on a heavily fortified bunker. Installation Dog, as the project was code-named, was designed for deception.
"The whole idea was to make it look like it was an abandoned barn," Luther Agee, an employee of the Atomic Energy Commission who designed the secret facility, said in a 1984 interview. Agee died in 2001.
A weathered-wood structure concealed the entrance to an underground vault, which had massive concrete walls reinforced with steel plates. Swinging doors and an extended roof allowed delivery vehicles to come and go without fanfare, and a "silo" was built next door as a guard tower. Armed protectors were on duty around the clock, stationed at the top of the silo behind bulletproof glass.
Electricity was surreptitiously provided to the site by stringing power lines from tree to tree. Alarms were placed in the woods to trap would-be spies, but the system occasionally proved too sensitive. Forest varmints, not realizing their old home was now off-limits, sometimes tripped the sensors, sending chills down the backs of security guards.
Agee, a 26-year-old draftsman at the time, was never sure why he got tapped for the project. Once he realized the top-secret nature of the work, it made him a nervous wreck.
"I was scared to death until they built it," he said. "But, you know, they built it and didn't have any trouble at all. I think I got one call to come out … and look at it. They were having a problem because there was so much reinforcing steel in that vault that they were having trouble getting the concrete in, too."
For about a year, from May 1948 to May 1949, Installation Dog housed the U-235 extracted from processes at the Oak Ridge K-25 plant before the material was shipped west to Los Alamos, N.M., for bomb-making. During that period, Agee and others with knowledge of the project had to take regular polygraph tests to make sure the secret was still a secret.
Even after the mission was moved elsewhere, the site was kept under wraps for several years in case it was needed again.
From A-bombs to creepy-crawlies
In the 1950s, the bunker became a part of ORNL's analytical chemistry group, which used the storage vault for studies of low-level radioactive materials. Because of the vault's room-in-a-room design, with massive concrete walls, the radiation measurements were largely free of interference from atomic fallout or nuclear sources at the laboratory.
During this period, the facility became known as Katy's Kitchen - a reference to Kathryn Odom, the division's secretary, who made regular visits to the work site and sometimes shared lunch with the chemists and other staff members.
Environmental scientists took over the facility in the 1970s. The old vault is now jam-packed with thousands of containers of waterborne critters, everything from crayfish to tiny aquatic insects, taken from streams on the federal reservation. It's part of a sampling program that documents DOE's compliance - or, in some cases, noncompliance - with discharge permits at the nuclear facilities and evaluates water-quality improvements.
There are groups of samples for every year since 1983. John Smith, a lab biologist who heads the sampling program, said decreasing levels of contamination found in the aquatic life can be used to validate the results of various cleanup programs that have taken place in Oak Ridge.
"If somebody has a question about something, I could find it. But it might take me awhile," Smith said as he showed visitors the crowded storage vault. Outside of emergency personnel, Smith has the only key to the facility (its enormous bank-vault door with combination lock was removed in the early 1990s).
Some samples are labeled "radioactive" because of nuclear pollutants, and they're all preserved in alcohol. The reinforced vault is one of the few places in Oak Ridge where so many vials of flammable liquid could be safely stored in the same location. The secure facility also allows the lab to meet the chain-of-custody requirements for the compliance samples.
The site today doesn't look much like it did 60 years ago.
The dirt path leading to the remote location is now a blacktop road. The barn facade was removed long ago, and a prefab metal building of fairly recent vintage has been attached to the original vault structure. The security silo is intact, although its wooden staves are gone. The only guards are the swarms of bees that now occupy this enduring piece of Oak Ridge history.
Senior writer Frank Munger may be reached at 865-342-6329.
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