Photoessay #1243 - Oak Ridge National Lab

These two shots really don't do this outing justice but ...

Originally our 24 hour stop in Knoxville revolved around some kind of visit with Dennis' sister. However I was not sure at all that would work out (and it didn't). I tried to give the short visit some other kind of anchor. Hey, Oak Ridge is right near Knoxville, indeed in the right direction. I spent much of my first year there as a baby. My father attended 'reactor school' at Oak Ridge National Lab. The 'secret city' as part of the Manhattan project where, in a very short time, the military created a huge scientific complex building the capability to make the atomic bombs. A huge undertaking accomplished in an extremely short time. At its height, 75,000 people lived and worked near the 'plant' (as my father would have said). They invented the whole city, there was just a few scattered settlements. They built the facility and a city to go with it. After the war, no universities were set up to teach nuclear engineering. So a school was established at Oak Ridge, universities and companies sent their best and brightest engineers to learn this crucial new technology. My father attended, sent by his company Aerojet.

I hadn't intended for the Tennessee segment to center around my father at Oak Ridge. But I contacted the staff member in charge of tours. Usually they give them during the summer but he agreed to give us a tour. Optimistically, I gave my sister in law and her partner's name, thought they might like to come too. Turns out that we got a 90 minute tour, just the two of us. We got to hear a presentation from a staff member from the Computation Center (pictured) next to a huge computer room that houses some of the biggest most powerful computers in the world (you can see them in the background). Fred said that the building used for the reactor school had been torn down in the 1970s. He took us by the site (second shot) and talked about some of the things going on there at the time.

Who knew that this would be the advanced science trip? We learned about Spallation and saw the site of the original graphite reactor which is being restored. Clearly a lot of money has gone into this place these last ten years (big beautiful new buildings).

Now we're in Ann Arbor, hooked up with Ilana and her boyfriend Matt who's visiting plus her two roommates.