NEWS: 7/26 Public Celebration to Welcome the Muon g-2 Electromagnet to Fermilab

[UPDATE: The Muon g-2 Ring has arrived at Fermilab as of 4:07am Friday morning! Photo at left courtesy of Reider Hahn, as shown on Fermilab's Scribble feed.] After its long journey, the Muon g-2 electromagnet is in its last few miles of the #BigMove, and Fermilab is hosting a public celebration on Friday, July 26 to welcome the Ring's arrival. Fermilab officials released the following:

We're holding a party tomorrow to welcome the ring. If you plan to come, you should read this. Rain and thunderstorms are forecasted for tomorrow evening. The indoor portion of the muon g-2 event will occur regardless of the weather including hands-on science activities in Wilson Hall and scientists available to answer your questions (beginning at 5:30). The ring will move rain or shine and would be delayed only in the event of lightning. Check back here for updates and if you're planning to come out, bring your rain gear.

Here's a fascinating time-lapse video from Fermilab showing the July 24-25 overnight move in Illinois:



Naperville, IL Community Television, Channel 17 also featured video coverage of the Ring's arrival in nearby Lemont at http://www.nctv17.com/napervillenews17/article.php?id=2579 [Link via Fermilab]

Giant Electromagnet Starts Long Trip from Brookhaven to Fermilab

[UPDATE: Storms in the U.S. Northeast region will delay the start of the "Big Move"; details at the Chicago Tribune. The Delaware Online reports,

"Scientists will begin the move next Saturday, taking the magnet from its location on the 5,300-acre Brookhaven campus to the front gate — a distance of about 1.8 miles. The following day, they are expected to move the magnet south along the William Floyd Parkway for 6 miles to Smith Point Park on the Atlantic Ocean. From there, it will be loaded onto a barge and will proceed down the East Coast, around the tip of Florida and up the Mississippi, Illinois and Des Plaines rivers."

Over the next few weeks, you may be fortunate enough to see - but hopefully not be stuck in traffic behind - some eye-poppingly huge particle physics gear traveling down a highway near you. This week, the 50-foot diameter, 15-ton Muon g-2 ("gee minus two") electromagnet was inched out of its current location at Brookhaven National Laboratory on a custom-designed rig, starting a 3200-mile long journey over highways and sea to its new home in Chicago's western suburbs. [Video copyright Emmert International, who are handling the transport logistics of the "big move."]



You can monitor the Muon g-2's progress on this live interactive map, updated every few hours, from the Atlantic seaboard down around the tip of Florida, into the Gulf of Mexico, and finally up through Alabama and several Southern states, through St. Louis, to its final destination at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. Why go to such heroic efforts to relocate the Muon g-2? According to Lee Roberts of Boston University, spokesperson for the Muon g-2 experiment,

"It costs about 10 times less to move the magnet from Brookhaven to Illinois than it would to build a new one, so that's what we're going to do. It's an enormous effort from all sides, but it will be worth it."

Fermilab's website explains the details of the project, and the new research capabilities the equipment will provide:

"The muon, like its lighter sibling the electron, acts like a spinning magnet. The parameter known as "g" indicates how strong the magnet is and the rate of its gyration. The value of g is slightly larger than 2, hence the name of the experiment. This difference from 2 is caused by the presence of virtual particles that appear from the vacuum and then quickly disappear into it again....In measuring g-2 with high precision and comparing its value to the theoretical prediction, physicists will discover whether the experiment agrees with theory. Any deviation would point to as yet undiscovered subatomic particles that exist in nature."

More images and videos of the Muon g-2 Project and the "Big Move" can be found at Fermilab

• CNN: "Behold the moving magnet - scientists taking giant device on 3,200-mile trip"
• Nature World News: "Electromagnet Weighing 15 Tons Headed for a Difficult Journey"

Argonne National Laboratory Energy Showcase: Photo Slideshow

As promised, Part Two of our coverage of the Saturday, September 15th Argonne Energy Showcase open house event. Our video highlights can be seen in the first installment of our Energy Showcase posts. Here's our full Flickr slideshow of over 50 photos with captions. Top: "Now, That's Cold!" Argonne researcher explains the technology behind the ATLAS (Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System) facility, the world's first superconducting linear accelerator for heavy ions. The object on the table is a model section of ATLAS' "superconducting split-ring resonator."

Center: "Hot or Not?" This very popular FLIR imaging exhibit in the Nuclear Energy building allowed visitors to see live video of themselves in the room with color-coded temperature gradients. As you can see, some people are literally hotter than others. A similar station set up in the Advanced Photon Source (401) complex let visitors take home a snapshot printout of their FLIR scans.

For even more images, visit Argonne National Lab's official Flickr photostream.

Bottom: "Clean and Green" One of the several advanced hybrid electric vehicles in the Sustainable Energy Tent. Some of the other new technologies on display were demonstrations of biofuel generation using fermented waste, vehicle charging stations, and an area where visitors could ride the "Energy Bike" to see how much pedaling they have to do to light up a conventional incandescent light bulb, versus the effort needed to make LED and compact fluorescent devices glow. As we can vouch, it takes a lot less legwork to make those clean and green LED's shine!

Atomic Age II Fukushima Symposium, May 5th, 2012

RadioActive! readers near Chicago: the University of Chicago, the birthplace of the first controlled nuclear chain reaction, hosts Atomic Age Symposium II - Fukushima, this Saturday, May 5th.

[K]eynote speakers are Hiroaki Koide of the Kyoto University Reactor Research Institute, who has been speaking out against nuclear power for over 40 years; and Ruiko Muto, an anti-nuclear activist based in Fukushima and a member of a citizens’ group, Hairo [Reactor Decommission] Action Fukushima. Robert Rosner, Astronomy & Astrophysics & Physics, University of Chicago (former Director of the Argonne National Laboratory) will share his stance on nuclear energy via a videotaped message. Ruiko Muto’s speech will be followed by Bobbie Paul, Executive Director of Georgia WAND—Women’s Action for New Directions, Jeffrey Patterson (MD, Board Member and Past President of Physicians for Social Responsibility), and Dean Wilkie, a retired nuclear plant operator and manager who, with Nancy Foust, an online media expert, has collaborated on the Simply Info website to provide detailed information about Fukushima.

This will be an all-day symposium investigating the multiple dimensions of the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster through discussion by experts from Japan and the US, Saturday, May 5, 2012: 8:45am–6:00pm. This event is free and open to the public. Continental breakfast and lunch will be provided. For full information and details, visit http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/atomicage/aboutsymposium/ or call 773-702-8647.

Radiation Readings at Plot M Well in Red Gate Woods

Recently, we took a field trip [with a SPER Scientific portable radiation monitor in tow] to Red Gate Woods near Willow Springs, IL, home of the Plot M nuclear disposal site. The area is open to the public but a bit hard to find, located off a small side trail in the forest preserve. While radiation readings at the Plot M stone monument were essentially background-level, one of the numerous test well caps (kept padlocked) did appear to have higher than normal radiation counts, averaging about 0.1-0.3 mR/hr as seen from this short video clip.

Illinois: "Nuclear America"?

With half the state's electricity generated at nuclear power plants, Illinois qualifies as "highly dependent" on this form of energy; and with 11 currently operating commercial reactors, it's tied in first place with Pennsylvania for the "Most Nuclear Plants." Not on the list? The now-decommissioned Zion 1 and 2 Nuclear Plant near Gurnee, IL, or the decommissioned Dresden 1 plant in Morris. from the NRC's Decommissioned Plants Section:

Zion Units 1 and 2 were permanently shut down on February 13, 1998. The fuel was transferred to the spent fuel pool, and the owner submitted the certification of fuel transfer on March 9, 1998. A public meeting was held on June 1, 1998, to inform the public of the shutdown plans. The owner has converted the turbine-generators into synchronous condensers and have isolated the spent fuel pool within a fuel building "nuclear island." The plant has been placed in SAFSTOR, where it will remain until about 2013 when the decommissioning trust fund will be sufficient to conduct DECON activities. The owner will retain the spent fuel until it is accepted by the Department of Energy. The owner submitted the post-shutdown decommissioning activities report (PSDAR), site-specific cost estimate, and fuel management plan on February 14, 2000. A public meeting to discuss the PSDAR was held on April 26, 2000.

Zion may be out of service, but the Village of Gurnee maintains a webpage detailing the emergency evacuation procedure in event of an accident at the plant.