Well, as long as we're on history......
.........Oak Ridge (the nuclear facility), didn't exist before WWII. It was built as a uranium enrichment facility for the Manhattan Project. Hard to imagine the secrecy when some of the largest structures ever built were coming out of the ground, but secret it was. I've read Oak Ridge didn't even appear on conventional highway maps until many years after WWII.
Oddly enough, the sampling field work I was doing was for a program named NURE: the National Uranium Resource Evaluation program, a Federal Dept of Energy program to collect stream sediment and well water samples on a tight spacing nationwide. Most of the sampling was done by college students and young geology graduates in their street vehicles. Certain knarly areas, like Campbell Co, TN, were passed over and sampled by those with 4WD and a particularly adventurous outlook (like me). Samplers carried a plethora of DOE letters, ID cards, etc, in order to assuage the locals who might otherwise think we were looking for stills, dope farms, or whatever. We were trained to spend a day or two in each new county by going from general store to general store just chewing the fat with the locals and letting them know we were on the up and up. Worked pretty well, as we were were but rarely chased away at gunpoint. The NURE ended suddenly in March 1979, when an event at Three Mile Island, PA tended to cool the nuclear power industry a bit.
In the Windrock area, I personally sampled near the OGDP (Oakridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant) and the Brushy Mountain State Prison, the then-current home of one James Earl Ray. In each case, I saw weapons brandished by Federal and TN state employees, who were not the least bit impressed by all of my DOE letters of introduction. I wonder if the fact that I had shoulder-length hair and Allman Brothers and Little Feat blasting from the 8-track in the Scout had anything to do with their skepticism?
Foy
