Secret City: Oak Ridge's "Elza Gate" Opening

This reenactment, commemorating the 60th anniversary of the 1949 "opening" of the 'Secret City', took place the morning of March 21st, 2009 at the site of the historic Elza Gate. City Historian Bill Wilcox, playing the role of George T. Felbeck (the 1943-1945 head of K-25 for Carbide), places the call to initiate a pulse from the Graphite Reactor that would burn the ribbon. While this video has a forty-second lull (from 0:22 to about 0:59), the 10,000 observers in 1949 had to wait a full three minutes while the capacitors were charged from the world's first nuclear reactor (located some ten miles away in Bethel Valley, the present-day site of the Oak Ridge National Lab).

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