Science: Workshop

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The 6,000-acre site on Long Island which used to be Camp Upton, a vast World War II reception center, is now mostly a collection of slatternly abandoned barracks. But its flatlands have a new destiny: on them will grow a monster of the atomic age—a workshop for the strange, powerful, ominous machines of modern nuclear physics.

At Camp Upton the U.S. Government, through the Atomic Energy Commission, last week formally began a project called Brookhaven National Laboratory, which will eventually cost about $50,000,000. Nine major Eastern universities will jointly administer the laboratory, which will have a permanent staff of 300 scientists and 2,000 other personnel. Visiting scientists will come to Brookhaven to use the costly equipment.

Building will be started this spring.

Stockpiles of materials (such as super-pure graphite bricks for uranium piles) have been assembled. Plans for the great machines are already far advanced. There will be assorted cyclotrons, a synchrocyclotron, and other vast "accelerators" which are too newly designed to have names. Their powers will range to one billion volts.

There will also be two chain-reacting piles: one of low power like the pile now operating at Oak Ridge, Tenn.; the other hundreds of times stronger.

Scientists connected with Brookhaven are careful to say that the laboratory will not develop new atomic explosives, but will concentrate on making nuclear physics benefit humanity. But the project will do no harm to the national war potential. Atomic secrets (if any still exist) may yet leak or be rediscovered abroad. The job of Brookhaven and other U.S.-sponsored laboratories is to develop atomic know-how so fast that the U.S. lead cannot be overtaken.