On December 2, 2016, U.S. Department of Energy Office of Legacy Management Acting Director Thomas Pauling, presented William Kistler \u201cBill\u201d Coors with the Energy Secretary\u2019s Appreciation Award in Golden, Colorado. The award recognizes\u00a0 Mr. Coors\u2019 historic role in providing critical insulators to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Manhattan Engineer District (also known as the Manhattan Project) during World War II.<\/p>\n
While Mr. Coors may be best known for his beer brewed in the Rocky Mountains,\u00a0 few know about his contribution to World War II and the Cold War. In\u00a0 January 1943, General\u00a0 Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, met\u00a0 with Y-12 Plant operators\u00a0 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and insisted that the first calutrons needed to be built and operational\u00a0 within 7 months. The enormous calutrons\u00a0 were needed for electromagnetically separating fissionable isotopes of uranium-235 from naturally occurring uranium, for use in atomic weapons. With such\u00a0 a tight schedule to build an untested technology, the Y-12 project experienced setbacks with insulators constantly breaking down due to the extremely high-voltage used by the calutrons.<\/p>\n
Searching for a solution, Richard Condit from the Berkeley Lawrence Radiation Laboratory telephoned Mr. Coors of the Coors Porcelain Company in Golden. The company had the experience, expertise, and capacity\u00a0 to make the desperately needed, large quantities\u00a0 of high-quality ceramic insulators capable of handling the tremendous electrical loads produced by the calutrons. Mr. Coors accepted the request and immediately got to work.<\/p>\n
Although Mr. Coors had no idea what his insulators were being used for, they arguably saved the Y-12 project from failure. By February 1944, Y-12 began sending uranium-235 to Los Alamos, New Mexico,\u00a0 to create the nation\u2019s first atomic weapons.<\/p>\n
Mr. Coors celebrated his 100th birthday in\u00a0 2016.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On December 2, 2016, U.S. Department of Energy Office of Legacy Management Acting Director Thomas Pauling, presented William…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":200587,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[75,84,83,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-212174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212174\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}