Oak Ridge, Tennessee/oakridge182
Previous | Home | Next"Where America's Radioisotope production began in 1945.
Three rooms are stacked on the South Face (the south side) of the Graphite Reactor. you are entering the middle-level room. These rooms were used for inserting chemical elements into the reactor to irradiate them -- or expose them to intense radiation to produce radioactive isotope, which are called radioisotopes.
Radioisotopes are produced by bombarding chemical elements with neutrons form the nuclear chain reactions or fissioning -- that occur inside a nuclear reactor. Radioisotopes are used in various applications for medical, industrial, agricultural, military, space, and scientific research.
The 4-inch-by-4-inch holes in the Graphite Reactor's south Face accommodated special carriers that were inserted through the 7-foot thick concrete wall into the reactor's core."
(See next photo).
