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.
The Conference Center Pond, as it is now called, provides the Laboratory’s main campus with a scenic water feature. The pond’s beginning goes back to the summer of 1961, and its creation was essentially a practical matter.
ORNL researcher Frances Pleasonton was instrumental in some of the earliest explorations of the properties of the neutron.
The ORNL biochemist and civic leader proposed that President Eisenhower’s 1953 executive order to desegregate Army base schools include those under the Atomic Energy Commission, as well.
Others claim credit for generating the first electricity through nuclear power, but it happened at ORNL first, a few years after the accomplishment of the Manhattan Project mission at X-10 and the end of World War II. Einstein's famous letter to FDR mentioned "vast amounts of power" from uranium,...
The presidential primaries preceding the Election of 1992 were just cranking up when word came the incumbent, George H.W. Bush, would come to ORNL on Feb. 19 for the signing of a cooperative R&D agreement between the Laboratory, Y-12 and Coors Structural Ceramics Company.
Word of the impendin...