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The Secret City

Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA

© Alastair Philip Wiper

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee was established in 1943 as a top-secret component of the Manhattan Project, tasked with refining radioactive materials for atomic bombs. A town was built in record time and became known as "The Secret City" because only those living there knew it existed. The population of 75,000 had no idea they were working on the atomic bomb until it was dropped on Japan in 1945.

After the Second World War, ORNL became a leading nuclear and energy research facility and is currently the largest science and energy national laboratory in the Department of Energy system. ORNL has several of the world's top supercomputers, including Frontier, the world's fastest.

At ORNL, the same machines designed to create bombs that could kill more humans than ever before were turned to the production of medical isotopes that have saved millions of lives. ORNL represents everything terrifying, audacious and contradictory about nuclear science.

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