A Visit to Argonne

A long time ago, when I was still a kid of some age I don’t remember with any accuracy, but it had to have been before high school, as part of some sort of organized program that was probably a summer sciencey thing of some kind, our class went to Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicagoland (not far from my home at the time) and we got to see a research reactor there. Now and then I remember this and wonder which reactor that was exactly.

I was looking at some Argonne history recently and tried to figure it out, and I think it had to have been Juggernaut. It was built in 1962 and shut down in 1970, and I wasn’t even born yet then, but it wasn’t dismantled until 2004. It would have had to have been idle for something over a decade if it was what I saw. My hazy memory is that they said it wasn’t being used anymore. They also said it contained graphite blocks reused from the very first (human made!) nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile 1. Juggernaut, indeed, contained graphite from CP-1. Memory is hazy after all these years, but I think this photo looks about right. I remember our teacher went up to the upper level to take a look at the top, but we could not because although the radiation level up there was very low the rules for exposing children to radiation for no good reason are very strict.

Lots of detail about Juggernaut: Design Summary Report On The Juggernaut Reactor

An old overview of operations of several reactors at Argonne: History of Argonne Reactor Operations