History
Suggested in 1919, the centrifugal process was first successfully performed in 1934. Jesse Beams and coworkers at the University of Virginia developed the process by separating two chlorine isotopes through a vacuum ultracentrifuge. It was one of the initial isotopic separation means pursued during the Manhattan Project, but research was discontinued in 1944 as it was felt that the method would not produce results by the end of the war, and that other means of uranium enrichment (gaseous diffusion and electromagnetic separation) had a better chance of success in the short term. However this method was successfully used in the Soviet nuclear program, making the Soviet Union the most effective supplier of enriched uranium.
In the long term, especially with the development of the Zippe-type centrifuge, the gas centrifuge has become a very economical mode of separation, using considerably less energy than other methods and having numerous other advantages. Enrichment by centrifuge has been used in particular by Abdul Qadeer Khan in Pakistan, and the method was smuggled to at least three different countries by the end of the 20th century.
Read more about this topic: Gas Centrifuge
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Spain is an overflow of sombreness ... a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)