Employees repurpose former beamline enclosure
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Some members of the team that dismantled the beamline enclosures stand next to one of the newly cleared areas. |
Fermilab employees recently took the mantra "reduce, reuse, recycle" beyond the cafeteria to carry out a project that will save the laboratory time, resources and tens of thousands of dollars.
Over the past five months, a band of employees from the Particle Physics and Accelerator divisions, along with Business Services, completely dismantled two enclosures made of shielding block. The enclosures, built in the mid 1980s, surrounded a beamline that has not been used since the 1990s.
Experiments at New Muon Lab and the former site of the KTeV experiment, now called NM4, will reuse about a third of the blocks. This will save the two collaborations a large portion of the about $70,000 they would have had to spend to buy new shielding. Both agreed to contribute up to $25,000 to help with the moving process. The dismantling group needed to hire a contractor with a crane large enough to lift the 24-foot-long rectangular blocks and arrange them in stacks they could move with a forklift.
The rest of the shielding will go into storage for use in future experiments.
Removing the enclosures lifts an ongoing burden for building managers. To keep the structures safe to access, they conducted regular checks of the emergency lights, telephones and heat, said Karen Kephart, assistant head for technical support in PPD. The leaky enclosures often needed repairs. But until this year, they were unable to find the funds to take them apart, so they continued maintenance.
The group that performed the dismantling worked during downtime between higher priority projects, said Dwight Featherston, the senior operations specialist who managed the project.
"This is an additional load they took on," Featherston said. "They still had to take care of all their regular responsibilities. I think they felt sorry for me because I couldn't take care of it myself. We've got a bunch of good people."
-- Kathryn Grim
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The team clears some of the magnets left in an enclosure. |
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