A recollection of what transpired the morning the Graphite Reactor reached criticality.
ORNL’s beginnings as an East Tennessee-located national laboratory have their roots in Chicago. That’s where the Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi (1938) and a host of physicists and engineers constructed CP-1, the first nuclear reactor: a “pile” of graphite blocks and control mechanisms in a disused squash court at Stagg Field on the University of Chicago campus.
A discussion of the history of the Manhattan Project, focusing largely on the project’s military director, Gen. Leslie B. Groves, and the scientific director, Robert Oppenheimer, keynoted ORNL’s observance of its 80th anniversary.
The Advanced Neutron Source was to be ORNL's next hallmark research reactor, but the project did not go forward. Instead, an accelerator-based neutron source was proposed.
As ORNL and its historic landmark Graphite Reactor mark their 80th year, another of the Lab's storied nuclear reactors is seeing a milestone birthday: The Oak Ridge Research Reactor, situated in the oldest part of the Lab campus, first went critical 65 years ago, in March 1958.
In the late 1940s, ORNL (known then as Clinton Laboratories) was making the conversion from its wartime mission to a center for scientific research and isotope production. If ORNL was going to endure, it needed robust and modern facilities.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Kai Bird recounted the effort to right a wrong committed against one of the science icons of the twentieth century — the revocation of the security clearance of Robert Oppenheimer.