The Secret City: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee was born in 1943 as a top-secret part of the Manhattan Project, tasked with refining radioactive material for atomic bombs. A town was built in record time and became known as "The Secret City" because only those living there knew it existed. The population of 75,000 had no idea they were working on the atomic bomb until it was dropped on Japan in 1945.

After the second world war, ORNL became a leading nuclear and energy research facility and is currently the largest science and energy national laboratory in the Department of Energy system. ORNL has several of the world's top supercomputers, including Frontier, the world's fastest.

At ORNL, the same machines designed to create bombs that could kill more humans than ever before were turned to the production of medical isotopes that have saved millions of lives. ORNL represents everything that is terrifying, audacious and contradictory about nuclear science.

The X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge (1943–1963), the world’s first continuously operating nuclear reactor, was built to prove plutonium could be produced for the first atomic weapons. Later, it generated the first nuclear electricity and became the leading global source of radioisotopes for medicine, agriculture, and industry.

The MaNDi neutron diffractometer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory studies biological materials by scattering neutrons off samples to map atomic structures. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was used to investigate the SARS-CoV-2 protease, providing insights for new drug development.

The control room of the oldest nuclear reactor in the world, the X-10 Graphite Reactor

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The Secret City. Laboratory entrance at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. ORNL was born in 1943 as a top-secret part of the Manhattan Project, tasked with refining radioactive material for atomic bombs. A town was built in record time and became known as "The Secret City" because only those living there knew it existed. The population of 75,000 had no idea they were working on the atomic bomb until it was dropped on Japan in 1945. After the second world war, ORNL became a leading nuclear and energy research facility and currently has several of the world's top supercomputers, including Frontier, the world's fastest. Part of a long-term project I am working on called "How We Learned to Stop Worrying".@oakridgelab

The Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is the world’s most powerful spallation source, producing intense neutron beams for research. Its ion source (shown here) generates negative hydrogen ions, formed into a pulsed beam and accelerated to 2.5 million electron volts before entering a linear accelerator.

The High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is the most powerful reactor-based neutron source in the U.S. It produces medical isotopes, plutonium-238 for NASA missions, and stores spent fuel in pools where the blue glow—Cherenkov radiation—marks freshly irradiated fuel.

Control Room at The High Flux Isotope Reactor

Utility drain lines at ORNL

Part of the Spallation Neutron Source particle accelerator

At Oak Ridge’s Radiochemical Engineering Development Center, technicians use remote manipulators to handle actinium-225 inside a hot cell. The isotope is showing promise in clinical trials as a treatment for leukemia and glioblastoma.

Thomas Zacharia, former director of ORNL in front of Frontier, the fastest supercomputer in the world. Frontier is also the world’s first supercomputer to break the performance barrier known as exascale, a threshold of a quintillion calculations per second. If each person on Earth completed one calculation per second, it would take four years to do what Frontier can do in one second.

Corridor at ORNL

Hot cell at the Radiochemical Engineering Development Cente

Remotely operating arms in a hot cell at the Spallation Neutron Source

Frontier consists of 74 cabinets, each holding more than a mile of cable, and will be used to enable new scientific discoveries in areas such as climate, energy, and health.

Part of the Spallation Neutron Source particle accelerator

Part of the Spallation Neutron Source particle accelerator

Detector at the Spallation Neutron Source particle accelerator