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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Trinity Test at 80: American Nuclear Society CEO Craig Piercy reflects on the Manhattan Project
By Craig H. Piercy, CEO and Executive Director of the American Nuclear Society
Eighty years ago today, at exactly 5:29:45 a.m. local time* on July 16, 1945, the United States Army detonated the world’s first nuclear bomb in the Jornada del Muerto desert of southern New Mexico. The searing flash and thunderous shockwave marked the culmination of the Manhattan Project, a secret, three-year national effort to harness nuclear fission and hasten the end of the Second World War.
The Trinity test, overseen by Manhattan Project director Major General Leslie Groves and Los Alamos Laboratory director Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, was the final act of that race to build the atomic bomb. Hoisted atop a 100-foot steel tower, the plutonium implosion device, known as the Gadget, unleashed a blast equal to 21,000 tons of TNT and temperatures hotter than the center of the Sun.
From ten miles away, observers wearing darkened welder goggles, looked on in stunned silence. “We knew the world would not be the same,” recalled Oppenheimer.
R. G. Alsmiller, Jr., J. Barish, R. T. Santoro, R. A. Lillie, J. M. Barnes, M. M. H. Ragheb
Nuclear Technology | Volume 48 | Number 3 | May 1980 | Pages 187-195
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT80-A32466
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Calculated dose rates in the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor test cell from induced activity have been obtained. The dose rates for the case of no neutral beam injector and when a neutral beam injector (with the resultant large penetration through the primary shield) is present are given separately. The photon transport calculations are carried out using Monte Carlo techniques, since this greatly facilitates the consideration of different pulse sequences and times after reactor shutdown. Dose rates are given for several different deuterium-tritium pulse sequences and for a variety of times after the reactor is turned off. At a few positions in the test cell, the contribution to the dose rates from individual residual nuclei is also presented. In general, it is found that the presence of the shielded neutral beam injector does not have a large effect on the dose rates in the test cell.
