Philip Abelson

Philip Abelson was an American physicist and chemist who developed the liquid thermal diffusion process for separating the fissile isotope uranium-235 from natural uranium. His method was built into the S-50 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during the Second World War, where it pre-enriched uranium feedstock that was then further concentrated by the Manhattan Project's other separation plants to produce the uranium used in the first atomic bomb. Earlier, in 1939, Abelson and the physicist Ross Gunn had proposed one of the first practical concepts for a nuclear-powered submarine at the Naval Research Laboratory, years before Hyman Rickover's program built the first one. Abelson later spent decades as editor of the journal Science, shaping American scientific publishing long after his wartime work on nuclear energy.