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The Atom Smashers

As the atomic age dawned, scientists began pushing back the frontiers of nuclear science at Brookhaven National Lab

By Earl Lane | Washington Bureau

Construction of a nuclear reactor was the main reason the lab was created; Brookhaven helped give birth to the field of nuclear medicine. The dome replaced the original, decommissioned in '68. (Newsday Photo, 1997/John H. Cornell Jr.)

IN 1946, when Norman Ramsey first visited the drab Army camp in central Long Island that had been selected as the location for a new atomic research lab, he was deeply disappointed.

Ramsey, a Columbia University physicist who headed the site selection committee, knew the former Camp Upton -- with its muddy roads, wooden barracks, temporary shacks and prisoner-of-war stockade -- would not appeal to the university scientists who soon would be recruited for the new lab.

At the suggestion of his wife, Ramsey compensated by choosing what he called a "delightfully misleading" name for the place: Brookhaven Laboratory. With its allusions to "quiet, shady streams," he recalled later, the name "might make the laboratory site sound more attractive to potential new recruits than it actually was."

As it turned out, the site among the scrub oak and pitch pine soon was populated by hundreds of researchers more concerned about building a new research facility from scratch than being comfortable. Many had ties to prestigious universities -- including Columbia, Cornell, Princeton and MIT -- that had banded together to bring a government-funded atomic research facility to the Northeast.

Before World War II, Columbia had been at the forefront of nuclear science. Experiments in the basement of the school's Pupin Hall had led to the first artificial splitting of the atom on American soil. The Manhattan Project, the wartime effort to build the atom bomb, was born in New York City but soon set up shop in Chicago and then Los Alamos, N.M. Some Columbia stars, including Enrico Fermi and Harold Urey, moved west with the project and did not return.

Other wartime nuclear labs were established at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Berkeley, Calif. After the war, physicists in the New York area -- who accounted for one-fifth of the members of the American Physical Society -- realized that they had no world-class research facility for studying the atom. I.I. Rabi, an eminent Columbia physicist, was particularly upset that his school's wartime contributions had led to a loss of faculty and facilities.

Rabi was a driving force in the effort to persuade the Manhattan District of the Army Corps of Engineers (which ran the wartime A-bomb project) to establish a new peacetime lab in the New York region.

When word of the effort spread to Boston, physicists from that area tried to lure the facility closer to their home campuses. Of the 17 sites initially proposed, all but the former Camp Upton near Yaphank proved unsuitable or unavailable.

The executive committee for the new lab ratified Ramsey's proposed name on Sept. 9, 1946. The contract officially creating Brookhaven National Laboratory was signed on Jan. 31, 1947.

"The whole fact of putting together a lab in 10 months from nothing is an enormous feat," said Robert Crease, the laboratory's historian and a professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

The war effort had shown that physicists, mathematicians, chemists and other scientists could work together to accomplish goals not possible at a single university. Brookhaven's founders hoped that their facility would show that such collaboration could work in peacetime as well.

In the early days, "it was expected that people from all the departments would go to the colloquia in chemistry, physics and biology," said Ernest Courant, a physicist who first visited the lab in 1947 as a postdoctoral student and joined the staff in 1948.

As the disciplines became more specialized, he said, such general-purpose meetings became impractical. But the collegial spirit remained as the Brookhaven work force expanded rapidly during the 1950s.

By the mid-1960s, there were 3,000 employees at the lab, and it had become a showcase for the construction of nuclear reactors, particle accelerators and other frontier research machines that were too costly for individual unversities to build.

It also became a major employer and civic presence on Long Island, a presence few had questioned until recently, when a leak of radioactive tritium from the spent fuel pool of the lab's main reactor triggered community concern and questions by federal officials, and eventually led to the dismissal of the contractor -- Associated Universities Inc. -- that had run the facility during its first half century.

Misgivings about Brookhaven -- often misguided -- have dogged the laboratory from the outset. According to Ramsey, the first complaint about radiation damage to outsiders occurred even before the site was officially occupied. After many months of disuse, the central heating plant at the former Camp Upton was started up, and smoke emerged from the chimney. A nearby resident called to complain that smoke from the laboratory's "atomic furnace" was aggravating her arthritis.

As suburban growth enveloped the formerly isolated laboratory, Brookhaven's waste-disposal practices and day-to-day operations came under increased scrutiny by community activists and local officials. The laboratory's administrators and scientists now say they must pay as much attention to environmental quality as to the quality of the research being pursued.

"We are more aware that we cannot continue just in isolation," said Courant, who retired in 1990 but still comes to the lab regularly as a consultant. "Part of our job has to be to keep the public informed," he said of activities at the laboratory.

But as Brookhaven struggles to regain the confidence of its neighbors, the laboratory's role in the history of American science seems secure. According to Crease, Brookhaven set the pattern for the development of other government-funded, multipurpose research laboratories. Scientists from across the nation and around the globe visit Brookhaven to use its research machines.

Brookhaven made its reputation in high-energy physics, with studies carried out at the laboratory leading to four Nobel Prizes in physics. But the lab also helped give birth to the field of nuclear medicine, with isotopes developed at the lab now mainstays in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. The lab also became a repository for information on the design and safety of nuclear reactors.