Monday, Aug. 25, 1947

The Atom's Job

At Brookhaven, L.I., a dragline excavator manned by a nuclear physicist broke ground last week for the first chain-reacting pile to be built in the U.S. in peacetime.* Financed by a $10 million Government appropriation, it will be the heart of the great Brookhaven National Laboratory, to be built by the U.S. as a common experiment center for the nuclear scientists of Eastern universities. Other atomic giants will soon cluster around it: cyclotrons, synchrotrons, a Van de Graaff electrostatic generator--all the monstrous machines of the Atomic Age.

Brookhaven's pile is designed primarily for research; it will produce little or no explosive plutonium. From its graphite and uranium interior will come a more plentiful supply of the radioactive isotopes which are already transforming U.S. science. Through its thick shield will shoot the neutrons which are powerful research tools. An elaborate "hot laboratory" will study the dangerous substances and radiations coming from the pile.

At last week's ground-breaking cere, mony there was some talk of peacetime research, the aspect of nuclear physics that interests scientists most. Everyone present knew some of the things that atomic science offers to humanity: new medical advances, a deeper understanding of biology, perhaps unlimited energy to do the world's heavy work. But it may be a very long time before science can get busy on such matters. Commissioner Sumner T. Pike of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission did not sound very encouraging about it. Peaceful applications of nuclear science, he said, have "an A-2 priority." They will continue to have a secondary rating until there is international agreement on control of atomic activities. For the present, "our principal job on the commission is to provide bombs, and I am afraid it will be for a long time."

*Britain's first pile, at Harwell near Oxford, began operation last week. Officially it is a "gleep" (graphite low energy experimental pile).

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