Oral History of Kenneth Redmond

ORAL HISTORY OF KENNETH REDMOND

Interviewed by Keith McDaniel

July 30, 2017

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MR. MCDANIEL:This is Keith McDaniel and today is, we decided today was July the 30th, 2017. I am at my studio here in Oak Ridge. Today my Center for Oak Ridge Oral History guest or subject is Mr. Kenneth Redmond. Ken, Kenny, thank you for coming by this afternoon.
MR. REDMOND: Thanks for having me.
MR. MCDANIEL:Sure. You're an old, I don't want to say old. Let me just put that again, you're a long time K-25er aren't you?
MR. REDMOND: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay we'll get to that, but before we do that why don't we start with something about you? Tell me where you were born and raised, something about your family.
MR. REDMOND: I was born in Knoxville at the old Fort Sanders Hospital.
MR. MCDANIEL:Is that right?
MR. REDMOND: As a matter of fact, I was one of nine baby boys that set a record.
MR. MCDANIEL:How'd you set a record?
MR. REDMOND: The first time Fort Sanders Hospital had ever had nine baby boys within a 24 hour period.
MR. MCDANIEL:Is that right?
MR. REDMOND: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL:What did your mother and father do?
MR. REDMOND: My mother was a Rosie the Riveter type. She operated an overhead crane at the Aluminum Company of America.
MR. MCDANIEL:Really?
MR. REDMOND: During the war, that's where she met my father. He had been a millwright since 1939.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, okay, out in Alcoa, right?
MR. REDMOND: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. REDMOND: When they married, he insisted she quit her job. He was kind of old fashioned that way.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah, kind of old fashioned that way a little bit.
MR. REDMOND: And ...
MR. MCDANIEL:So she did.
MR. REDMOND: Yeah and she, I have several pictures of her in the old days when she worked at the aluminum company.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh really?
MR. REDMOND:He stayed at the aluminum company until he was hurt in a car wreck in '73 and then he died 17 months later.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, really?
MR. REDMOND: He'd been there since 1939.
MR. MCDANIEL:Wow.
MR. REDMOND: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:Wow. Now did you have brothers and sisters?
MR. REDMOND: I've got a half-brother, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:So where did you grow up?
MR. REDMOND: In Karns. I grew up in the house that's right next door to the house I live in today.
MR. MCDANIEL:Is that right?
MR. REDMOND: Yeah. The land that I'm on right now, I've been on that land for 69 years.
MR. MCDANIEL:Really?
MR. REDMOND: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:Wow, so then your dad drove from Karns to Alcoa?
MR. REDMOND: Yes, worked straight 2:00 to 10:00 shift at Alcoa.
MR. MCDANIEL:Wow, well my goodness. You grew up in Karns, so you grew up in the shadow of Oak Ridge. We'll just say it's in the shadow of Oak Ridge.
MR. REDMOND: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL:Or Oak Ridge is in the shadow of Karns.
MR. REDMOND: Yeah, one or the other.
MR. MCDANIEL:One of the ways to do it. You're familiar with the area and familiar with all the things that happened here to a certain degree?
MR. REDMOND: Oh yeah and of course I read quite a few histories about the Manhattan Project, things that just,Now It Can Be Told. The City Behind the Fence.
MR. MCDANIEL:Right so you grew up in Karns, I guess you went to Karns High School?
MR. REDMOND: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay. When you were going to high school, did you have any idea about what you wanted to do with your life?
MR. REDMOND: Yeah, I wanted to do something in electronics.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. REDMOND: Soon as I graduated, I went to a school in Jacksonville, Florida. Massey Technical Institute.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah.
MR. REDMOND: I was there for a year, came back home and went to the Tennessee Institute of Electronics for another year. About that time, K-25 was hiring apprentices. I didn't know it at the time but they were getting ready for the big upgrade ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah.
MR. REDMOND: ... that was coming along in the mid '70s and they could get people who were trained in electronics but they also needed people who were trained in pneumatics and those were hard to find. So I went out there, I took an employment test and got hired on and ...
MR. MCDANIEL:What year was that?
MR. REDMOND: Summer of 1966.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay, alright.
MR. REDMOND: That's another little interesting piece, too, in my history.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. REDMOND: In about August, I guess, of '66 I got a letter from personnel at K-25 saying I was officially hired and all they had to do was wait for me to get my security clearance.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. REDMOND: Well, before my security clearance came through, I got a notice from Uncle Sam and I'd been drafted.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh my.
MR. REDMOND: I figured well there goes my job down the tubes.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah, sure.
MR. REDMOND: The second day after I went into the Army at Fort Campbell, they discovered something that my doctor had known all the time. I had high blood pressure and a systolic heart murmur.
MR. MCDANIEL:Really?
MR. REDMOND: They scared me half to death. This doctor told me, he said, "Son, just as soon as you get back home, you need to see a cardiologist." It took them two weeks to process my discharge papers. I came home and about a week after I came home, they called me from K-25, said,“Your security clearance has come through. When do you want to come out here?” I said,“How about Monday?”
MR. MCDANIEL:My goodness.
MR. REDMOND: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:So did you go see a cardiologist?
MR. REDMOND: No.
MR. MCDANIEL:No?
MR. REDMOND:Not then. No, but when I was 62-years-old I had a massive heart attack so then I saw a cardiologist.
MR. MCDANIEL:He was right, eventually, wasn't he?
MR. REDMOND: Eventually, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:You were two and a half weeks in the Army. That's about how long it took them to get your security clearance?
MR. REDMOND: Well, yeah, I think they had actually started on it in August and I had hired in on November 19th.
MR. MCDANIEL:Right, did they know that you had been called up for the service?
MR. REDMOND: No.
MR. MCDANIEL:They didn't?
MR. REDMOND: No.
MR. MCDANIEL:Because you hadn't started yet, had you?
MR. REDMOND: No.They had just told me that I was officially hired as soon as they could get me down there. In later years, now they started bringing people in before their clearance came in and they worked them down at the Power House without a clearance until the clearance came through.
MR. MCDANIEL:Right.
MR. REDMOND: Another funny thing about my hiring in down there. I came in on December the 19th, which was for all intents and purposes Christmas week.
MR. MCDANIEL:Sure.
MR. REDMOND: Most of the old geezers in the instruments shop, K-1035, got vacations around Christmas time.
MR. MCDANIEL:Right.
MR. REDMOND: I went in down there and I wondered. We only worked three days that week and I wondered, do these people ever do anything? All we did was eat. People had covered dishes they brought in, all this.
MR. MCDANIEL:Sure.
MR. REDMOND: I thought, "I'm going to like this job."
MR. MCDANIEL:How funny, that's kind of like my job I was telling you about before we started. My new job that I've got at Carson Newman. When I was interviewing, they were like well, this is the standard time you get off vacation and sick days, you know all these kinds of things. Your friends in the corporate field are going to be very envious of you, he says, because we get about two and a half weeks of paid leave at Christmas where, you know, because it's a school. They shut down the offices for that long during the holidays. Anyway, you started there in December ...
MR. REDMOND: Of '66.
MR. MCDANIEL:Of '66.
MR. REDMOND: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:Tell me about your hiring process, who did you interview with? Do you remember who that was or what happened?
MR. REDMOND: No, I don't remember. I do remember I had an old friend of the family. His name was Harry Wright.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. REDMOND: Everybody called him Red Wright. He'd been out there for years and years and he was a front line supervisor in the instrument shop.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. REDMOND: I think that he may have recommended me or something like that.
MR. MCDANIEL:Put in a good word for you.
MR. REDMOND: Yeah, he did. He put in a good word for me.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah.
MR. REDMOND: I think that had something to do with it.
MR. MCDANIEL:Probably. So what did you do when you first started working there? Tell me about your job. What were some of things you did?
MR. REDMOND: We went to school one day a week in the apprentice program and the rest of the time, for the entire time that I was an apprentice, I worked in the instrument shop at K-1035, except for a short time. There was a short time when the instrument department, oddly enough, ran out of money.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. REDMOND: And until the end of the fiscal year they dumped us in with the electrical apprentices.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. REDMOND: Here I got a tool pouch and I went out into what they called the "field." I went out into the gaseous diffusion plant.
MR. MCDANIEL:Right.
MR. REDMOND: I worked as an electrician apprentice except I still went to an instrument school.
MR. MCDANIEL:Now tell me the difference between an instrument and electrician apprentice. What were the two things that you studied?
MR. REDMOND: Well I think we all studied things like, they had like algebra refresher courses for people that had not had a lot of algebra.
MR. MCDANIEL:Right.
MR. REDMOND: We did, as an instrument mechanic apprentice they were heavily into pneumatic controls, okay. Because all of us had graduated from electronics schools ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Sure.
MR. REDMOND: ... but had never been exposed to pneumatics.
MR. MCDANIEL:What does that mean, pneumatic?
MR. REDMOND: We jokingly called it Hollow State.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. REDMOND: It's tubing mostly, copper tubing, and it controls a system using air pressure.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, is that right?
MR. REDMOND: Very precisely controlled air pressure.
MR. MCDANIEL:Sure.
MR. REDMOND: It always amazed me how these pneumatic instruments that were probably designed in the '30s, certainly installed in the '40s ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah.
MR. REDMOND: ... could control a pressure within a tenth of, well greater than that, within a hundredth of pound per square inch.
MR. MCDANIEL:Wow.
MR. REDMOND: Just utterly amazing to me. That system still fascinates me.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah, and it was air, it wasn't fluid, it wasn't a liquid. It was air.
MR. REDMOND: It was air, yeah, although technically air is a fluid.
MR. MCDANIEL:Right, well I understand, sure.
MR. REDMOND: Anyway, it was and everything about that place just fascinated me that had anything to do with the war. For instance, the industry standard everywhere in pneumatic control is three to 15 psi.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. REDMOND: That's the industry standard. Not at K-25.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. REDMOND: To, as they put it, to confuse the enemy, all of our instruments ran on three to 18 psi.
MR. MCDANIEL:Is that right?
MR. REDMOND: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. REDMOND: There were also, they had coded chemicals. I don't remember most of them, but I do remember that liquid nitrogen was L28.
MR. MCDANIEL:L28.
MR. REDMOND: All the old geezers out there in the shop still called it L28.
MR. MCDANIEL:Called it L28. And that's kind of like the hexafluoride, H, what was that called?
MR. REDMOND: UF6? Uranium hexafluoride?
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah. Uranium hexafluoride, UF6.
MR. REDMOND: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:Now is that a code word?
MR. REDMOND: No, that's the actual chemical compound.
MR. MCDANIEL:That's the actual chemical compound.
MR. REDMOND: Uranium hexafluoride.
MR. MCDANIEL:Right.Exactly.
MR. REDMOND: At room temperature it's a solid.
MR. MCDANIEL:A solid. What, so what were your first impressions of K-25? Had you ever been there before you started working there?
MR. REDMOND: No, and I was scared to death when I went in there.
MR. MCDANIEL:Were you?
MR. REDMOND: I came, oh God, let's go back even further, the day that I hired in. The first thing that you do is you go through a little physical? I remember the nurse handing me a clipboard and telling me to follow her and she mentioned that my blood pressure was a little high. All of a sudden, after that, I remember waking up on the floor with a bunch of people around me saying "What happened?"
MR. MCDANIEL:Really?
MR. REDMOND: One of the nurses, she told me later, one of the nurses said, "Are they going to hire him?" and she said, "If I can get him up off the floor long enough." The stress, I guess.
MR. MCDANIEL:I guess so.
MR. REDMOND: I've done that ever since.
MR. MCDANIEL:Really?
MR. REDMOND: I've done it before then, but I still do it and it's been a little worse since I had that heart attack.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah, I'm sure.
MR. REDMOND: I'm on medication right now that keeps, my resting heart rate is 49.
MR. MCDANIEL:Is that right?
MR. REDMOND: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:So you just passed out on them?
MR. REDMOND: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:You got nervous and passed out on them.
MR. REDMOND: She said that when that clipboard hit the floor it sounded like a gunshot.
MR. MCDANIEL:Is that right? That was me, let me turn mine off too.
MR. REDMOND: I meant to do mine too.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah, sorry about that. Alright.
MR. REDMOND: Yeah, when I came out of medical that day and I looked around that plant and I thought, I'm going to be lost. Because it's like a little city.
MR. MCDANIEL:It is and it was huge. It was a huge place.
MR. REDMOND: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL:I bet it took, now were you mainly in one building or one particular area?
MR. REDMOND: My first three years, except for when I was loaned out to the electricians, I was in K-1035, which was the instrument shop.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. REDMOND: When I was in electricians ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Now was that a different building than the U?
MR. REDMOND: Oh, yes.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay that's what I thought.
MR. REDMOND: K-25 is east of the U. I meant to bring my big old map.
MR. MCDANIEL:Did you say K-235?
MR. REDMOND: 1035.
MR. MCDANIEL:1035, okay.
MR. REDMOND: K-1035. If you got any idea about a K-1036, was a storage building and it was the next building north of us.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. REDMOND: Just east of us across the street was 1401, the big machine shop.
MR. MCDANIEL:Right.
MR. REDMOND: Matter of fact we used to go from 1035 over to the machine shop when they had a little canteen over there. We would go over there for breakfast.
MR. MCDANIEL:Is that right?
MR. REDMOND: Yeah.

MR. MCDANIEL:Well so you spent most of your first years there in K-1035.
MR. REDMOND: My first three.
MR. MCDANIEL:Your first three years, right. Was that how long your apprentice program lasted? Was it three years?
MR. REDMOND: Yes, we graduated in three years.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. REDMOND: I remember one of the things we did when I was loaned out to the electricians. We were in the process of pulling the old wire out that fed the motors in K-33, the big compressor motors.
MR. MCDANIEL:Right.
MR. REDMOND: We pulled the new wire in so that they could put in more powerful electric motors. The old wire that came out was three wires about that big around because they were, it was three phase of course.
MR. MCDANIEL:Sure.
MR. REDMOND: In order to get more current capability within the same conduit ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Right.
MR. REDMOND: ... they put six smaller wires. My job, being an electrical apprentice, was to smear this lubricant on those wires as they had an air tugger pull the new wires in.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah.
MR. REDMOND: I had that stuff all over me.
MR. MCDANIEL:I bet.
MR. REDMOND: They used to tease us about being apprentices, what they called a grunt.
MR. MCDANIEL:Right.
MR. REDMOND: They told us, they said six trainees are equal to a mule. I've remembered that all these years.
MR. MCDANIEL:How funny.
MR. REDMOND: That's the equivalent. Six trainees is equal to a mule.
MR. MCDANIEL:Equal to a mule. Now give, for people who don't know, K-33 what was ... now the big U had the cascade.
MR. REDMOND: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL:Alright, okay it had, that's where they enriched their uranium, okay.
MR. REDMOND: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL:Now, what was in K-33? Was that an additional?
MR. REDMOND:Same thing, essentially, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:That's what I was thinking.
MR. REDMOND: That entire process was in series just like a bunch of cheap Christmas tree lights.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah.
MR. REDMOND: You put the feed material, oddly enough most of the time it came in K-33, and then it circulated around. Now by the time I hired in, the enrichment process in K-25 was over. They shut it down in '64.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh is that right?
MR. REDMOND: There were three units, I think, two, maybe three units that were still running in the U and one of them was K-311-1. It was in the far southeast corner of the K-25 U.
MR. MCDANIEL:Right.
MR. REDMOND: It was used strictly as what they called a purge cascade.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. REDMOND: That's where gasses that leaked into the system, since the whole thing ran below atmosphere. Gasses that leaked in were purged out.
MR. MCDANIEL:Right.
MR. REDMOND: At 311-1 and, I think, 310-3, which was the next one over.
MR. MCDANIEL:K-33 basically did the same thing as, it was built later than the U.
MR. REDMOND: Yes, '54.
MR. MCDANIEL:Then there was a K-27 is that correct?
MR. REDMOND: K-27 was built very soon after K-25.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay.
MR. REDMOND: The equipment in it was almost identical. They made some small changes in the instrumentation.
MR. MCDANIEL:Right.
MR. REDMOND: In K-25 building, the pressure transmitters that ran up to the control system were actually inside the cell.
MR. MCDANIEL:Right.
MR. REDMOND: They depended on the cell heat to keep the process gas in the transmitters as a gas.
MR. MCDANIEL:Sure.
MR. REDMOND: In K-27, they changed all of that. They put the transmitters in a heating cabinet on the operating floor ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Right.
MR. REDMOND:... so that it was nowhere near as hazardous for people to service the thing.
MR. MCDANIEL:Sure, exactly, but it was basically the same type of thing. It was, same idea.
MR. REDMOND: Same idea, pretty much the same equipment.
MR. MCDANIEL:Now when you started there in '66, in the late 60s I guess, were they still enriching in K-33?
MR. REDMOND: Oh yes, in K-33, they were still enriching up until they shut it down in '85.
MR. MCDANIEL:'85, that's what I was thinking. What they were enriching for was, most of the times it was for power, for nuclear power plants, yeah.
MR. REDMOND: Yes, nuclear power. K-25 had absolutely huge equipment. As a matter of fact one diffuser, or what they called converter, would not fit in this room.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah.
MR. REDMOND: One of the compressors would maybe fit in this room.
MR. MCDANIEL:Right.
MR. REDMOND: As you went down the cascade and you enriched the uranium a little more, the equipment got smaller.
MR. MCDANIEL:Smaller.
MR. REDMOND: In the U that was more important because it enriched to a higher degree in the U. I don't think it was really all that important in the cascade later on because of the fact that we didn't do that high an enrichment.
MR. MCDANIEL:Sure, but early on they did. They were enriching weapons grade uranium.
MR. REDMOND: Yes. In the low enrichment part of the U, you would have, your compressors would be operated by an electric motor maybe so big around.
MR. MCDANIEL:Yeah.
MR. REDMOND: By the time you got around to the high enrichment side of the U, you had little motors about like a washing machine motor, smaller compressors. All of it was smaller.
MR. MCDANIEL:Sure, right, sure.
MR. REDMOND: Because you didn't want to risk getting a critical mass.