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The south tank farm under construction

Steve Stow dispels popular myths about Clinton Laboratory's liquid radioactive waste disposal in the 1940s.

Stow, a retired geoscientist and environmental spearhead at ORNL, explained recently to Friends of ORNL in his lecture, titled "And Some of the Cowboys Wore White Hats: Disposal of Liquid N...

Tom Row

Tom Row found himself as ORNL's point person for a controversial campaign in 1989, when "Tiger Teams" descended on DOE facilities with a mission to enforce regulations pertaining to environment, safety and health.

James Watkins, the secretary of Energy and retired Navy admiral who had been chief ...

Tower Shielding Facility

The Tower Shielding Facility is located on the perimeter of the Oak Ridge Reservation on a road blocked by a locked gate. It's still one of ORNL's more conspicuous landmarks because the two towers, from which a small nuclear reactor was at times suspended, can be glimpsed from nearby Interstate 40.
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Multigenerations at ORNL

Over its three-quarters of a century history ORNL has employed many people in the area. It stands to reason several families have contributed more than one member to the Lab's work force -- in some cases multiple generations of the same families. This year's 75th Anniversary planners asked staff mem...

Logbook entry, Nov. 4, 1943.

Sunday, Nov. 4, 2018, is the 75th anniversary of the Graphite Reactor, as it came to be known, reaching criticality for the first time on a morning in 1943. The Graphite Reactor is the first nuclear reactor facility built as such -- its predecessor, where the first controlled nuc...

ORNL Image

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,...

ORNL Image

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...