Science: 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;...

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