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"

"Exposure: Radiation Victims Speak Out" Web Series Reveals Personal Struggles, Triumphs

Over 20 years ago, the Hiroshima newspaper Chugoku Shimbun sent a team of reporters to 15 nations around the world to gather personal accounts of people affected by radiation - from reactor accidents, accidental contamination, to nuclear weapons manufacturing and testing. The interviews were initially published as a series of eight newspaper features titled "Sekai no Hibakusha," or "Hibakusha (figuratively, "atomic bomb survivors") Around the World." This monumental series won a Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association award in 1990, and was subsequently published in book form the following year. Executive Director of the Chugoku Shimbun Yukio Ogata explains,

"Largely as a result of the articles' success in bringing the public's attention to the dangers of radiation, a number of victims of radioactive contamination from areas as far-flung as Chernobyl and Bikini Atoll were able to participate in the world convention held in Hiroshima by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War in October 1989...[T]he convention heard details concerning the damage caused by nuclear testing in Kazakhstan, which until then had been shrouded in secrecy. In turn, this disclosure of widespread destruction of the environment prompted the Chugoku Shimbun to instigate the first-ever investigation of the testing area.

At the same time, the articles served to emphasize the role that Japan could play to help radiation victims around the world. The fact that the articles have prompted the exchange of information concerning the treatment of radiation victims in Japan to help those in a similar plight in other countries is a great source of satisfaction to us at the Chugoku Shimbun. We hope that, in the future, Japan will become known as an information center for radiation victims and the treatment of their illnesses."

In March 2013, the Hiroshima Peace Media Center re-released the entire series of 134 interviews free online as "EXPOSURE: Victims of Radiation Speak Out". From the English-language introduction by Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, Director of the Center on Violence and Human Survival at the CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice notes,

"There is compelling appropriateness in the project's being undertaken by concerned journalists from Hiroshima. From the time the bomb was dropped, the Chugoku Shimbun, as Hiroshima's leading newspaper, has been a prime source of information about the experiences and feelings of the people of that city over subsequent decades. Its editors and writers have taken on what I call a 'survivor mission' on behalf of the city's victims, a commitment to transforming the fear, conflict, and pain of the survivors into an active exploratory enterprise of profound significance.

Their contribution goes even beyond their descriptions of the human effects of radiation. In the way they have approached their study, they have demonstrated what I call a species mentality, a commitment that transcends immediate group or nationality and extends to all of humankind. They evoke in us a sense of shared fate, of universal susceptibility to a technology that knows no boundaries, geographical or temporal. We are all in this together, as potential victims and potential perpetrators as well.

Among the regions and incidents covered in these interviews are Chernobyl, the 1987 Goiânia Accident in Brazil, contamination from the Cold War weapons program at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation site in Washington State.

[Image courtesy Hiroshima Peace Media Center: "The mushroom cloud as seen from Kure, approximately 18 kilometers southeast of Hiroshima. This photo was taken by Masami Oki about 40 minutes after the bomb exploded."]

More:

• Peace Seeds: A virtual museum of photos, videos, essays and art by Hiroshima teens
• John Jay College Center on Terrorism: "Hiroshima in America," a book by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell

New Mitsubishi Videocamera Can "See" Radioactivity

Mitubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. of Japan announced it will begin marketing early next year the Astrocam 7000 HS, a new type of video camera that can show a superimposed display of radioactivity on its wide-angle 180-degree image, allowing cleanup crews and emergency responders to see "hot spots" in real time. The Asahi Shimbun reports,

"The portable camera, which will apply technology jointly developed with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), is designed to allow for more efficient clean-up of radioactive contamination, an issue of great concern in Japan because of the nuclear disaster last year. The camera will use technology now in place on observation equipment aboard the ASTRO-H X-ray astronomy satellite operated by JAXA.

Tadayuki Takahashi, a professor of space physics at JAXA and project manager of the ASTRO-X, said, "The camera can measure radiation in high places, such as on roofs, and will lead to more efficient decontamination of radiation." Using two types of semiconductor sensors, the direction and strength of gamma rays emitted by radioactive materials such as cesium are measured and brought to light as a superimposed image on the visible landscape."

Mitsubishi this week also announced another breakthrough in nuclear cleanup technology, an armored seat that would reduce heavy equipment operators' exposure to radiation by half, and theoretically allow workers to remain twice as long in hazardous areas before receiving maximum permitted radiation doses:

The seat material, including body armor parts (shoulders, arms, chest/abdominal area, thighs, neck), consists mainly of tungsten sheet, which offers excellent radiation shielding capability. Although the seat weighs a considerable 130 kilograms (kg), individual parts weigh less than 20kg and most of their weight is integrally supported by the seat, so the burden on the operator is minimal.

In addition, the operator can put on and remove the armor-like parts easily by opening/closing the front like a vest...these features provide a high rate of radiation shielding while simultaneously minimizing fatigue during continuous work and inconvenience to machine operation from wearing such shielding.

Here, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries demonstrates the Astrocam and explains its technology in this one-hour press conference video (in Japanese, no subtitles).



[Image of demonstration camera view courtesy of Asahi Shimbun Online] More on the Mitsubishi Astrocam 7000HS camera:

• Mitsubishi Heavy Machinery press release: Radiation-resistant armored seat
• Japan Times: "Mitsubishi Heavy develops camera for real-time visualization of radiation"
• eNikkei.com: "Mitsubishi Heavy's Camera Visualizes Radioactive Materials"
• Japan Daily Press: "Mitsubishi creates camera that can 'see' radiation, goes on sale in February"