Community Guide - Oak Ridge
Knoxville, Tennessee - Real Estate Guide

With renovations, new facilities,
ORNL to increase hold on research world

Jeff Wadsworth, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has traveled the world and spent time at all the great research institutions, but he says there's no place he'd rather be than at ORNL.

There are plenty of reasons for his enthusiasm.

With a cadre of brand-new research facilities - soon to be topped by the opening of the $1.4 billion Spallation Neutron Source - and the lab's leadership in scientific computing and advanced materials and broad success in other areas, Wadsworth keeps busy counting his lucky stars.

The SNS is scheduled to begin operations sometime this summer.

The giant research complex, spread across 75 acres on Chestnut Ridge a couple of miles from the main ORNL campus, will reportedly be the world's top source of neutrons for experiments. Scientists will use pulses of neutron to explore the atomic essence of materials of all types. Once the kinks are worked out and equipment fully tested, the SNS is expected to annually attract a couple thousand scientists from around the world.

The Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, the first of the several nanoscience research facilities being funded by the Department of Energy, is already open for business. It is adjacent to the SNS office structure, and researchers at the nanoscience labs will able to take knowledge gained from SNS experiments and put it to use in engineering and testing the capabilities of advanced materials.

ORNL was built during the World War II Manhattan Project, but it's no longer showing its age - thanks to a $300 million modernization program during the past few years. There are at least a dozen new buildings, adding about 700,000 square feet of research and office space, as well as other enhancements to welcome visitors and boost the work of lab research staff.

One of the recent additions is the Oak Ridge Center for Advanced Studies, a think tank that is trying to bring researchers and policymakers together at one location to work out difficult science issues of the day. One of the first topics involved global climate change and the ability to better predict changes on a regional scale.

Paul Gilman, former science chief at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is the think tank's founding director.

The Oak Ridge lab is working with Cray Corp. to develop the world's fastest supercomputer for scientific uses, perhaps by the end of this year, and during the next several years, there are plans to build a machine capable of 1,000 trillion calculations per second (one petaflop).

While the SNS has attracted most of the news when it comes to neutron sciences, ORNL also is completing a series of upgrades at the High Flux Isotope Reactor. The ORNL facility is sometimes referred to as the lab's "other" billion-dollar machine. It is the world's most powerful research reactor, and it is used to perform experiments similar to - but different from - those to be done at the Spallation Neutron Source.

The University of Tennessee has been an ORNL collaborator for decades, but the university took on a new role a few years ago when it joined with Battelle to win the lab management contract. UT-Battelle recently signed a new five-year contract with the U.S. Department of Energy.

ORNL already is looking ahead for work in fiscal 2007, with a proposed budget of more than $1 billion.

Meanwhile, the other big federal plant in Oak Ridge, the Y-12 National Security Complex, also is undergoing a major modernization program.

A new $350 million storage complex for weapons-grade uranium is under construction. Completion is scheduled for early 2007, after which the plant will consolidate its uranium stocks in the high-security center. A conceptual plan is under way for a new warhead-manufacturing center at Y-12 that could ultimately cost about $1 billion to build and furnish with equipment.

Meanwhile, Lawler-Wood of Knoxville is the developer on a privately financed project at Y-12, building a giant new office complex for the plant's engineering and technical staff, as well as a new visitor center and museum at the plant's entrance on Scarboro Road.

BWXT, a partnership of BWX Technologies and Bechtel National, manages Y-12 for the federal government.