Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Took a tour of Oak Ridge National Lab today. : 

A combination of good fortune and pro-activity-ness on my part to contact the tour leader landed me in a group of undergraduate Physics students from the local university in Tennessee.

My visitor's badge was SPECIAL. I wanted to push people out of my way, holding up my special badge.

(It really said SPECIAL EVENT)

"Jonathan Bao. I'm with the Society of Physics. See this here, it means I'm special. Make way please, let me through." LOL.

The lady who led the tour was an awesome hostess. She told us cool facts about the modern operation as well as the history of the lab.

See below for pictures and info about the facility, current operations and history!

Some facts (not-so-much at a glance) about Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL)

• Created in 1943, during WWI, as part of the Manhattan Project. Its purpose was to run a graphite nuclear reactor to convert Uranium into Plutonium for use in developing nuclear bombs later dropped on Hiroshima. The old reactor has been demolished since then.





A recreation of Uranium loading at the old graphite reactor

Log entry on the day the reactor successfully began operation

• Houses a modern reactor called Y-12 that produces and maintains the country's supply of nuclear fuel.


• Houses TITAN, a supercomputer ranked #2 in the world by computational speed at 17.59 petaflops (10 ^15 calculations per second).





TITAN



• The lab is Department of Energy (DOE) funded. The vast majority of work done at ORNL are open to the world. Use of the supercomputer, facilities, and materials are free, so long as the results of the research are published in a peer-review journal. Grants for use of the lab are awarded by an external peer-review committee.


• Oak Ridge has two facilities that provide neutrons for scattering experiments: A pulsed beam linac (linear accelerator) called the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) and a reactor called High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) that can produce cold neutrons.

A diagram of the beam at the SNS facility

High Flux Isotope Reactor

Control Room at HFIR.
The equipment behind the panel is modern, but the retro exterior was preserved