Idaho National Lab history

Immediate concern that the explosion could result in radioactive contamination of nearby towns was soon alleviated, as health physicians and NRTS management officials measured negligibly low levels of radiation beyond the immediate site of the reactor. It was the first reactor malfunction that resulted in fatalities at any atomic-related site since the AEC’s founding in 1947.

The Idaho National Laboratory (INL), an 890-square-mile section of desert in southeast Idaho, was established in 1949 as the National Reactor Testing Station.

Shortly past 1 a.m. on February 6, 1951, Argonne guards discovered reporter Paul Harvey near the 10-foot (3.0 m) perimeter fence, his coat tangled in the barbed wire.

In 1955, Argonne chemists co-discovered the elements einsteinium and fermium, elements 99 and 100 in the periodic table.

While designing a scanner for reactor fuel elements in 1957, Argonne physicist William Nelson Beck put his own arm inside the scanner and obtained one of the first ultrasound images of the human body.

On January 3, 1961 a steam explosion and meltdown at an NRTS reactor named “SL-1” (short for Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One) killed three Idaho Falls operators.

In 1962, laboratory chemists produced the first compound of the inert noble gas xenon, opening up a new field of chemical bonding research.

High-energy physics also made a leap forward when Argonne was chosen as the site of the 12.5 GeV Zero Gradient Synchrotron, a proton accelerator that opened in 1963.

In 1964, the ​“Janus” reactor opened to study the effects of neutron radiation on biological life, providing research for guidelines on safe exposure levels for workers at power plants, laboratories and hospitals.

Scientists at Argonne pioneered a technique to analyze the moon’s surface using alpha radiation, which launched aboard the Surveyor 5 in 1967 and later analyzed lunar samples from the Apollo 11 mission.

A bubble chamber allowed scientists to track the motions of subatomic particles as they zipped through the chamber; in 1970, they observed a fundamental particle called a neutrino in a hydrogen bubble chamber for the first time.

An estimated 790 people were eventually exposed to harmful doses of radiation throughout the explosion and subsequent cleanup (Maslin, 1984), but local residents did not seem to muster any considerable alarm that the laboratory posed a threat to their safety.

In 1987, the laboratory was the first to successfully demonstrate a pioneering technique called plasma wakefield acceleration, which accelerates particles in much shorter distances than conventional particle accelerators.

Naval students seeking to man these submarines trained in the Nuclear Power Training Unit at Idaho Falls up until 1995.

The Site�s name changed again in the spring of 1997 to the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory to reflect a major refocus of the laboratory, present and long term, toward engineering applications and environmental solutions for our nation.

In 1999, nuclear waste finally began to be transferred away from the laboratory to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico.

Immediate concern that the explosion could result in radioactive contamination of nearby towns was soon alleviated, as health physicians and NRTS management officials measured negligibly low levels of radiation beyond the immediate site of the reactor. It turned into a totally new way of doing business with reactors” (Stacy, 2000).

Sponsorship of the INL was formally transferred to the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology (NE) by Secretary Spencer Abraham in July, 2002.

The laboratory’s former western campus, Argonne-West, became the Idaho National Laboratory in 2005.

In 2012, the United States Department of Energy chose Argonne to lead the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), a DOE Innovation Hub that is situated at Argonne.