Wheat, Tennessee

The George Jones Memorial Baptist Church, also known as the "Wheat Church," is a historic church building at the former site of the community of Wheat in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States. It is the only structure remaining from Wheat, a rural Roane County community that was dissolved in 1942 when the United States government assumed ownership of the land for the Manhattan Project. Founded in 1854 as a United Baptist congregation by 26 members of the Sulphur Springs Church of Christ, it was established in Wheat in the northern part of Roane County. Originally named the "Mount Zion Baptist Church," it changed its name to "George Jones Memorial Baptist Church" in 1901, after a local minister who had donated most of the land for the community. In the same year, the congregation built a new building, which remains today.The church is considered a good example of a rural vernacular church building. It is a three-bay, rectangular plan brick building with wood cladding, a square bell tower, and a standing-seam metal roof. There are two rooms in its interior, an anteroom and the sanctuary, separated from one another by a waist-high partition. A 1½ acre cemetery is located west of the church.The George Jones church served not only as a religious facility, but also as a community gathering place for Wheat residents. When Wheat was vacated by the federal government in 1942 as part of the Manhattan Project, the George Jones Memorial Baptist Church was abandoned with the rest of the community. All other Wheat buildings have been demolished. As the only pre-1942 building remaining in what was once Wheat, the church is the location of annual reunions of former residents.The church is east of the K-25 site and a short distance north of State Route 58, from which it is visible. It is located on the old Wheat Road, a gravel road (accessible from Blair Road (SR 327)) that follows the historical roadbed of a one-time local thoroughfare. The church building and the road are owned and maintained by the U.S. Department of Energy. Motorized travel on the road is limited to government vehicles, but the road is open to pedestrians and bicycles as a public greenway trail.George Jones Memorial Baptist Church was one of six Oak Ridge properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992. This listing reflects its significance as the only existing physical remnant of the Wheat community, a physical representation of rural life in the area in the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century, and an example of vernacular church architecture.

Southern Appalachia Railway Museum is a railway museum headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee, United States.

Manhattan Project National Historical Park is a United States National Historical Park commemorating the Manhattan Project that is run jointly by the National Park Service and Department of Energy. The park consists of three units: one in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one in Los Alamos, New Mexico and one in Hanford, Washington. It was established on November 10, 2015 when Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz signed the memorandum of agreement that defined the roles that the two agencies had when managing the park.The Department of Energy had owned and managed most of the properties located within the three different sites. For over ten years, the DoE worked with the National Park Service and federal, state and local governments and agencies with the intention of turning places of importance into a National Historical Park. After several years of surveying the three sites and five other possible alternatives, the two agencies officially recommended a historical park be established in Hanford, Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. The Department of Energy would continue to manage and own the sites while the National Park Service would provide interpretive services, visitor centers and park rangers. After two unsuccessful attempts at passing a bill in Congress authorizing the park in 2012 and 2013, the House and Senate ultimately passed the bill in December 2014, with President Obama signing the National Defense Authorization Act shortly thereafter which authorized the Manhattan Project National Historical Park.

K-25 was the codename given by the Manhattan Project to the program to produce enriched uranium for atomic bombs using the gaseous diffusion method. Originally the codename for the product, over time it came to refer to the project, the production facility located at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the main gaseous diffusion building, and ultimately the site. When it was built in 1944, the four-story K-25 gaseous diffusion plant was the world's largest building, comprising over 5,264,000 square feet (489,000 m2) of floor space and a volume of 97,500,000 cubic feet (2,760,000 m3). Construction of the K-25 facility was undertaken by J. A. Jones Construction. At the height of construction, over 25,000 workers were employed on the site. Gaseous diffusion was but one of three enrichment technologies used by the Manhattan Project. Slightly enriched product from the S-50 thermal diffusion plant was fed into the K-25 gaseous diffusion plant. Its product in turn was fed into the Y-12 electromagnetic plant. The enriched uranium was used in the Little Boy atomic bomb used in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In 1946, the K-25 gaseous diffusion plant became capable of producing highly enriched product. After the war, four more gaseous diffusion plants named K-27, K-29, K-31 and K-33 were added to the site. The K-25 site was renamed the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant in 1955. Production of enriched uranium ended in 1964, and gaseous diffusion finally ceased on the site on 27 August 1985. The Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant was renamed the Oak Ridge K-25 Site in 1989, and the East Tennessee Technology Park in 1996. Demolition of all five gaseous diffusion plants was completed in February 2017.

The S-50 Project was the Manhattan Project's effort to produce enriched uranium by liquid thermal diffusion during World War II. It was one of three technologies for uranium enrichment pursued by the Manhattan Project. The liquid thermal diffusion process was not one of the enrichment technologies initially selected for use in the Manhattan Project, and was developed independently by Philip H. Abelson and other scientists at the United States Naval Research Laboratory. This was primarily due to doubts about the process's technical feasibility, but inter-service rivalry between the United States Army and United States Navy also played a part. Pilot plants were built at the Anacostia Naval Air Station and the Philadelphia Navy Yard, and a production facility at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This was the only production-scale liquid thermal diffusion plant ever built. It could not enrich uranium sufficiently for use in an atomic bomb, but it could provide slightly enriched feed for the Y-12 calutrons and the K-25 gaseous diffusion plants. It was estimated that the S-50 plant had sped up production of enriched uranium used in the Little Boy bomb employed in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by a week. The S-50 plant ceased production in September 1945, but it was reopened in May 1946, and used by the United States Army Air Forces Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft (NEPA) project. The plant was demolished in the late 1940s.

The Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project was a nuclear reactor project that aimed to build the USA's first large-scale demonstration breeder reactor plant. It was led by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (and a successor agency, the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), and subsequently the U.S. Department of Energy). The project was opposed by President Carter.The project was intended as a prototype and demonstration for building a class of such reactors, called Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactors (LMFBR), in the United States. The project was first authorized in 1970. After initial appropriations were provided in 1972, work continued until the U.S. Congress terminated funding on October 26, 1983. The project was seen to be "unnecessary and wasteful".

The Clinch River Nuclear Site (CRNS) is a project site owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). It was originally the site of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project. In February 2022, the site was announced as the first location of a small modular reactor as part of the TVA's New Nuclear Program, which was approved the same year.

The X-10 Graphite Reactor is a decommissioned nuclear reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Formerly known as the Clinton Pile and X-10 Pile, it was the world's second artificial nuclear reactor (after Enrico Fermi's Chicago Pile-1), and the first designed and built for continuous operation. It was built during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project. While Chicago Pile-1 demonstrated the feasibility of nuclear reactors, the Manhattan Project's goal of producing enough plutonium for atomic bombs required reactors a thousand times as powerful, along with facilities to chemically separate the plutonium bred in the reactors from uranium and fission products. An intermediate step was considered prudent. The next step for the plutonium project, codenamed X-10, was the construction of a semiworks where techniques and procedures could be developed and training conducted. The centerpiece of this was the X-10 Graphite Reactor. It was air-cooled, used nuclear graphite as a neutron moderator, and pure natural uranium in metal form for fuel. DuPont commenced construction of the plutonium semiworks at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge on February 2, 1943. The reactor went critical on November 4, 1943, and produced its first plutonium in early 1944. It supplied the Los Alamos Laboratory with its first significant amounts of plutonium, and its first reactor-bred product. Studies of these samples heavily influenced bomb design. The reactor and chemical separation plant provided invaluable experience for engineers, technicians, reactor operators, and safety officials who then moved on to the Hanford site. X-10 operated as a plutonium production plant until January 1945, when it was turned over to research activities, and the production of radioactive isotopes for scientific, medical, industrial and agricultural uses. It was shut down in 1963 and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965.

The Fission Product Pilot Plant, building 3515 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), was built in 1948 to extract radioactive isotopes from liquid radioactive waste. It was formerly known as the 'ruthenium-106 tank arrangement'. It is a relatively small facility; the task of extracting radioactive isotopes later took place at a number of specialised buildings nearby. References differ as to when the plant was built; 'radioactive waste management at ORNL' says that it was completed in 1957, the 1955 Annual Report has engineering drawings indicating that the building was fully designed in 1955, but other references suggest that there was a building on the site in 1948.

The Multiprogram Research Facility (MRF, also known as Building 5300) is a facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It is used by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) to design and build supercomputers for cryptanalysis and other classified projects. It houses the classified component program of the High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) project sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) is funded by the National Science Foundation and managed by the University of Tennessee. NICS was home to Kraken, the most powerful computer in the world managed by academia. The NICS petascale scientific computing environment is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), home to the world's most powerful computing complex. The mission of NICS, a member of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE - formerly TeraGrid), is to enable the scientific discoveries of researchers nationwide by providing leading-edge computational resources, together with support for their effective use, and leveraging extensive partnership opportunities.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a federally funded research and development center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1943, the laboratory is now sponsored by the United States Department of Energy and administered by UT–Battelle, LLC.Established in 1943, ORNL is the largest science and energy national laboratory in the Department of Energy system (by size) and third largest by annual budget. It is located in the Roane County section of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Its scientific programs focus on materials, nuclear science, neutron science, energy, high-performance computing, environmental science, systems biology and national security, sometimes in partnership with the state of Tennessee, universities and other industries. ORNL has several of the world's top supercomputers, including Frontier, ranked by the TOP500 as the world's most powerful. The lab is a leading neutron and nuclear power research facility that includes the Spallation Neutron Source, the High Flux Isotope Reactor, and the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences. Commissioned in 1944, the USS Oak Ridge is named after Oak Ridge National Laboratory.