NUCLEAR FICTION NEWSLETTER, ISSUE 2

Radiation safety was a relatively new field during the Manhattan Project when my father was a twenty-three year old electronics technician, working with a group producing new radioactive isotopes. My father lived to be 87 and several years before his death in 2007, recorded this video recounting how he received an accidental dose of gamma rays. I use this story in my novel, Fission: A Novel of Atomic Heartbreak. In research for the novel, I read other first-person accounts of radiation dangers at Oak Ridge.

One of the tasks of the chemistry group headed by Dr. Charles Coryell was to produce a radioactive form of barium. In the run-up to the Trinity test of the plutonium bomb, the most difficult task was to invent a trigger that would start the nuclear chain reaction. The physicists at Los Alamos came up with an implosion trigger but needed a highly radioactive substance to test it. Dr. Coryell suggested that Oppenheimer use barium-140, an isotope that quickly decays into lanthanum-140, an even more radioactive substance.

Oak Ridge had built a special “hot lab” that allowed scientists to use remote control in working with these chemicals, but Los Alamos had no such resource. When the first tiny amount of lanthanum-140 arrived, in a convoy under armed guard, the Los Alamos people tried to work with it using a string and pulley system. They dropped the glass tubing containing the isotope and had to remove the entire floor of that room and bury it in a remote canyon.

When the Coryell group produced a much larger amount of this isotope (later known at Los Alamos by the nickname RaLa), they needed to dig out and destroy the blown glass tubes they had used initially, in order to create the new sample. Each of ten men on the team took about a two-minute turn at this dangerous task and Coryell told them, “Whatever my boys are taking, I’m going to take twice as much.” Sadly, Coryell died all too young of a rare type of sarcoma that was very probably radiation-related.

The Coryell group scientists were none too fond of the radiation safety officers who monitored their work. One of the group was the chemist, Dr. Lawrence Glendenin, co-discoverer of the element, Promethium. When working with a liquid radioactive isotope, he pipetted it with his mouth, which would not be a preferred method! He ended up with a mouthful of radioactive material. He had to repeatedly wash out his mouth for several hours, and to make an example of him, the radiation safety people had him do so in public. In researching my novel Fission, I have become good friends with Charles Coryell’s daughter, Julie. She knew more about this anecdote than I had heard.

In fact. Glendenin met his eventual wife when she was an onlooker at his punishment! My father told me they named that particular isotope: the Glendenin Cocktail. On another occasion, the radiation safety people praised Glendenin for having the cleanest radiation badge of the month. They asked him to lecture all the scientists on his methods. He got up on a podium and told them that every morning, he clipped his badges to his white coat and stood at the entrance of his lab. Then he took off his white coat and hung it up outside the door before going inside! The radiation safety guys were not pleased.

I had fun fleshing out these stories as part of my novel. If you are enjoying this look behind the writing curtain, please subscribe to this free newsletter. There is a lot to come before Fission: A Novel of Atomic Heartbreak is published in January, 2026 by SheWrites Press.