As the trip progresses, and Nick shoots more photos of the labs, we’ll be changing the header on the top of the site. But since we don’t want anyone to miss the old headers, they’ll be collected on this page. Original resolution photos can be found by clicking on the images.
2. The loading face of the Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. One of the first nuclear reactors, it was used during WWII to process plutonium for the Manhattan Project, and was probably the first nuclear reaction to be successfully used for electrical power production. To operate the reactor, chunks of uranium were pushed through the holes in the face, not unlike the loading of an 18th century musket, until enough of the material was concentrated for the famous chain reaction to begin. Though currently turned off and essentially radiation-free, the reactor was never truly shut down. Today, it rests in “cooldown mode” – in principle be restarted at any time:
3. Detail of the momentum separator portion of the Recoil Mass Spectrometer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility. After passing a beam of particles through a mass separator and a momentum separator, physicists can isolate and study specific nuclear products.
4. A panoramic view of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Large Array, located on a mountain-ringed plateau 50 miles west of Socorro, New Mexico.
5. The 282 steel plates of the MINOS Near Detector, 350 feet below Fermilab. Neutrinos from the NuMI beamline are sent 450 miles through the earth to a Far Detector (which looks much like a larger version of this behemoth detector), located in the Soudan Mine in northern Minnesota.