Ed Bucki retires

Ed Bucki

After 30 years as a Department of Energy employee working at Fermilab, Ed Bucki is retiring.

"Ed has been with the Site Office longer than anyone else by far," said Mark Bollinger, DOE Acting Site Office Manager. He will be dearly missed, especially for his reliability and consistency in looking out for the safety and health of all site employees."

Stop by his open house from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. today in the DOE Fermi Site Office, located on the sixth floor of Wilson Hall.

Wilson Hall building closed Saturday, June 5

The highrise building will be closed starting at 12:01 a.m. June 5 and re-open at 6 p.m. to accomodate generator upgrades. Crews must connect the power distribution from the new generator to the existing electrical switchgear, which is located in the basement of the highrise. To make the connection, the power must be shut off in Wilson Hall.

During this shutdown crews will also upgrade domestic water pump controllers by installing energy-efficient controllers. As a result, all restroom facilities will be closed during this outage.

Additionally, Facilities Engineering Services Section staff members will take advantage of the outage and perform preventive maintenance on electrical equipment throughout Wilson Hall.

If you have questions, please contact John Kent III at x4753.

Employees take time out for fitness

Visual Media Services employees walk around the Main Ring as part of Employee Health and Fitness Day on May 19. From left: Karen Seifrid, Cindy Arnold, Diana Canzone and Jim Shultz.

Superconductivity breakthrough could lead to more cost-effective technologies

From Interactions News Wire, May 24, 2010

Researchers from the Universities of Liverpool and Durham have fitted another piece into the superconductivity puzzle that could help in the quest to bring down the cost of technologies such as MRI scanners and some energy storage applications that rely on superconductors. The result is published online in the journal Nature (19th May 2010).

Using the ISIS and Diamond Facilities at the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, scientists have demonstrated how a new material made from metal atoms and buckyballs (tiny carbon-60 molecules shaped like a football) becomes a high temperature superconductor when it is squashed. The applied pressure shrinks the structure and overcomes the repulsion between the electrons, allowing them to pair up and travel through the material without resistance.

The Liverpool and Durham researchers made the new material supported by funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for a program investigating ways of creating higher temperature superconductors, to reduce some of the costs involved with keeping them at their optimum temperature and broaden their applications. An MRI scanner for example, contains person-sized superconductive magnet that needs to be kept inside a bath of liquid helium in order to regulate the superconductor's temperature at - 270 degrees Celcius. The ultimate aim is for a superconductor to operate at room temperature to eliminate the need for large and expensive cooling systems.

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