February 29 may only come around once every four years but the date is still important in the history of the Savannah River Site.
The Savannah River Site's connection to Feb. 29 is Ernest Lawrence, a physicist at the University of California Berkeley, that helped develop the nuclear weapons the United States used in World War II.
And it was on Feb. 29, 1940 that Carl Wallerstedt, the Swedish general counsel, presented Ernest Lawrence with the Nobel Prize for Physics on Feb. 29, 1940 in San Francisco.
The Nobel Prizes are generally awarded in Sweden but Lawrence's ceremony was moved to California due to World War II.
The Nobel Committee awarded the prize to Lawrence for his invention of the cyclotron.
A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator. Particle accelerators are used to propel charged particles, like protons, to very high speeds. In the 1930s, physicists used cyclotrons to launch protons at the nucleus of various atoms to learn about the force holding the nucleus together.
In late 1940, Glenn Seaborg and Emilio Segrè used a cyclotron in Lawrence's lab – It was called the Radiation Lab then and is now known as the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – to create plutonium.
The United States dropped the plutonium based Fat Man on Nagasaki, Japan which facilitated the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.
Lawrence also developed a method used to separate uranium 235 from the far more common uranium 238. And the United States dropped the first nuclear weapon, the uranium 235-based Little Boy, on Hiroshima, Japan Aug. 6, 1945.
After World War II ended, the United States didn't pursue development of nuclear weapons but that changed Aug. 29, 1949 when the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear weapon years ahead of predictions.
President Harry Truman responded by issuing an executive order to develop the hydrogen bomb.
Hydrogen bombs differ from the first nuclear weapons because they also feature the nuclear fusion – atoms coming together to form heavier elements – of tritium, an isotope of hydrogen.
In order to develop hydrogen bombs, materials were needed and the Atomic Energy Commission, a forerunner of the Department of Energy, and DuPont selected a 310-square mile area of South Carolina to create a place to produce both plutonium and tritium.
That area is now called the Savannah River Site.
