Oak Ridge National Laboratory Technical Tour

Tour some of the premier facilities located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  Visits to the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), the Graphite Reactor Historical Site and the High Flux Isotope Reactor are planned on Thursday afternoon, April 9, 2009. Transportation to ORNL will leave the hotel at 1PM and return at 4:30PM. The tour is open to those registered for the conference but all participants must be cleared for site access.  Therefore, advance registration is required.  The minimal charge for this event includes transportation costs. After registering for this tour, please email the following information to  Hanna Shapira <hshapira@techno-info.com> with a copy to Linda Dockery <dockerylb@ornl.gov>: Full name, Address, Date of Birth, Location of Birth, and Citizenship. This will enable timely processing of site access clearance requests.

Spallation Neutron Source: SNS is an accelerator-based neutron source in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. When at full power, this one-of-a-kind facility will provide the most intense pulsed neutron beams in the world for scientific research and industrial development. SNS was built by a partnership of six U.S Department of Energy laboratories. Along with its sister facility, the High Flux Isotope Reactor, SNS makes Oak Ridge a mecca for neutron-scattering research.

The Graphite Reactor: A Historic Landmark at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In the early, desperate days of U.S. involvement in World War II, American scientists began to fear that the German discovery of uranium fission in 1939 might enable the Nazis to develop a super bomb. Afraid of losing this crucial race, the United States launched the top-secret, top-priority Manhattan Project. The plan was to create two atomic weapons--one fueled by plutonium, the other by enriched uranium. Hanford, Washington, was selected as the site for plutonium production, but before large reactors could be built there, a pilot plant was necessary to prove the feasibility of scaling up from laboratory experiments. A secluded, rural area near Clinton, Tennessee, was chosen both for the full-scale production of enriched uranium and for the pilot-scale production of plutonium. The Graphite Reactor, designed for this second purpose, was built in only 11 months. Its job was to show that plutonium could be extracted from irradiated uranium slugs, and its first major challenge was to produce a self-sustaining chain reaction. Workers began loading uranium into the reactor during the afternoon of Nov. 3, 1943, and progress was swift. Before dawn on Nov. 4, Enrico Fermi was summoned from a nearby guest house. The reactor "went critical" at 5 a.m.; less than two months later, it was producing a third of a ton of irradiated uranium a day. Two months after that, Oak Ridge chemists produced the world's first few grams of plutonium. During the 20 years the Graphite Reactor operated--from 1943 to 1963--it continued its pioneering role. It produced the first electricity from nuclear energy. It was the first reactor used to study the nature of matter and the health hazards of radioactivity. And for years after the war, it was the world's foremost source of radioisotopes for medicine, agriculture, industry, and other purposes.

High Flux Isotope Reactor: The 85-megawatt High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) provides one of the highest steady-state neutron fluxes of any of the world's research reactors. Since it began full-power operations in 1966, the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has been one of the world's most powerful research reactors. The major use of the HFIR is for neutron-scattering experiments to reveal the structure and dynamics of a very wide range of materials. The neutron-scattering instruments installed on the horizontal beam tubes are used in fundamental studies of materials of interest to solid-state physicists, chemists, biologists, polymer scientists, metallurgists, and colloid scientists. These instruments are open to use by university and industrial researchers on the basis of scientific merit. One of the original primary purposes of the HFIR is the production of californium-252 and other transuranium isotopes for research, industrial, and medical applications. These materials are produced in the flux trap in the center of the HFIR fuel element where a working thermal-neutron flux of 2.0 x 1015 neutrons/(cm_·s) is available to irradiate the target material. Additional irradiation facilities are also provided in the beryllium reflector. Beyond its contributions to isotope production, the HFIR also provides for a variety of irradiation tests and experiments that benefit from the exceptionally high neutron flux available. In the fuel element flux trap, a hydraulic rabbit tube provides access to the high thermal-neutron flux in the reactor for short-term irradiations, and other positions are ideal for fast-neutron irradiation-damage studies. A modification of the flux trap experiment facilities in 1986 has provided two locations in the maximum flux region that can accommodate instrumented capsules and engineering loops. The beryllium reflector contains numerous experimental facilities with thermal-neutron fluxes up to 1.0 x 1015 neutrons/(cm_·s). These facilities can accommodate static experimental capsules, complex fuel-testing engineering loops, and special experimental isotope irradiations.

Registration Deadline: March 2
Cost: $18 (includes transportation)
Full refund for registrant if site access clearance denied