Tuesday, March 5, 2013
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Have a safe day!

Tuesday, March 5

3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over

4 p.m.
Accelerator Physics and Technology Seminar - One West

Speaker: Valeri Lebedev, Fermilab
Title: Project-X Injector Experiment (PXIE)

Wednesday, March 6

3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over

4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - One West
Speaker: Marcello Mannelli, CERN
Title: New Detector Technologies for the LHC Experiments

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Secon Level 3

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Flags at full staff

Wilson Hall Cafe

Tuesday, March 5

- Breakfast: All-American breakfast
- Minnesota chicken and rice
- Carolina chopped-pork sandwich
- Beef stroganoff
- Smart cuisine: pork piccata
- California turkey panini
- Assorted pizza by the slice
- Taco salad

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, March 6
Lunch
- Grilled lemongrass beef and noodle salad
- Almond cake

Friday, March 8
Dinner
- Pasta carbonara
- Stuffed filet of sole with crab
- Sautéed spinach
- Pecan rum cake

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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Feature

Savvy smart meters save energy at Fermilab

Smart meters at Fermilab help conserve energy and reduce costs. Photo: Cedric Madison, FESS

The comfort of a warm home is often accompanied by uncomfortably high heating bills this time of year. Your bill is tallied by a meter that monitors how much energy you use each month, which then feeds the information to electric and gas companies. Now compare your home with the more than 400 buildings on Fermilab grounds, and imagine what kind of bill the lab must receive. Thankfully, Fermilab gets help from some of its meters.

Approximately 30 buildings at Fermilab are individually equipped with "smart meters," in addition to power feeders serving all facilities on site. These smart meters are similar to the meters at your home but have more capabilities. For instance, smart meters transfer their data to an online database. The data include both present and past energy consumption, which employees in FESS then use to project future energy costs, participate in power curtailment savings and develop conservation methods.

"Smart meters are essential to what we do," said FESS's Steve Krstulovich, the site energy manager. "They are the way we manage our power and save on energy costs."

Like most sophisticated technology, these smart meters cost more than the average, run-of-the-mill house meter. However, they pay for themselves in the long run, Krstulovich said. Smart meters generally allow one to reduce energy costs for their respective buildings by about 2 percent. At this rate, it takes up to 10 years for the smart meter to save the laboratory the amount of money for which it was purchased.

In addition to conserving energy, the smart meters also help FESS determine how much renewable, green energy the laboratory can use. Fermilab is required to purchase a certain amount of renewable energy each year, and the power feeder smart meters help Fermilab assess what portion of the total site power goes to which buildings.

In 2006, DOE established a memorandum for meter usage at all DOE sites. Regulations stated that all new buildings must receive smart meters—including NML, CMTF and IARC at Fermilab—and that some existing buildings must also receive them. The decision on which existing buildings to outfit depended on which were most cost-effective to equip. At Fermilab, these included Wilson Hall and the Industrial Buildings.

"We're proud to say that in September of last year we met our goals with DOE and fulfilled all metering commitments in the memorandum," Krstulovich said. "We continue to be conscientious of energy consumption and work hard to conserve as much as possible and reduce costs with the help of smart meters."

Jessica Orwig

In Brief

Updated movie theater now offers seven videos

Visitors to the movie theater on WH15 now can select from seven videos using a new push-button box. Closed captioning is available. Photo: Reidar Hahn

Fermilab's Visual Media Services group has updated the movie theater located in the northeast corner of the 15th floor of Wilson Hall. A newly installed push-button box allows employees and people giving tours to select one of seven videos. Closed captioning is available. The videos are 2 to 40 minutes long.

To make the theater more inviting, VMS had the old blinds removed.

"With today's high-definition screens, sunlight is less of an issue," said Jim Shultz, senior media specialist in the VMS group. "Now tour groups can even use the theater to look at the construction of the Illinois Accelerator Research Center."

The updated theater complements the new poster exhibits that were installed on the north and south crossovers in the last 12 months. Plans for further updates are in the works. If you have questions or suggestions, please send VMS an e-mail.

In the News

Ernest Moniz, MIT physicist, nominated as energy secretary

From The Washington Post, March 4, 2013

It’s tempting to think that President Obama picked Ernest Moniz on Monday to be his next energy secretary because Moniz’s long wavy mop of mostly-white hair might distract people who have been obsessed with Michelle Obama’s bangs.

But Moniz, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also lends Obama’s Cabinet scientific heft and brings prior Washington experience. At MIT, he has directed the school’s Energy Initiative, where he oversaw reports on almost every aspect of energy. And he has been a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Read more
In the News

Dark Energy Camera could reshape Einstein cosmology

From Forbes, Feb. 28, 2013

Late last Friday, on the first cloudy night in a week of clear weather, Dark Energy Survey science team member James Annis took time out from his role in the $35 million project’s commissioning to answer a few questions from the Blanco 4-meter telescope.

By night, the route up to the Blanco. atop Chile’s Cerro Tololo mountain, winds around some of the most desolate-looking stretches of two-lane blacktop imaginable.

Read more
Director's Corner

ICFA meeting

Fermilab Director
Pier Oddone

The International Committee on Future Accelerators that I chair met at the TRIUMF laboratory in Vancouver, Canada on February 21st and 22nd. ICFA meets twice a year, with the directors of all the world’s principal accelerator laboratories joining for the winter meeting. This particular meeting was very well attended because it marked a special occasion: the official joining of the International Linear Collider and Compact Linear Collider efforts into the new Linear Collider Board. All senior leaders in the new Linear Collider organization have been appointed and will guide continuing work on the two projects over the next few years.

The ICFA meeting also celebrated another major linear collider milestone: the completion of the technical design report (TDR) for the ILC. Caltech’s Barry Barish led the worldwide, multi-year ILC Global Design Effort that culminated in the TDR. The report received good marks from a recent project advisory committee review. Another panel of global experts, led by SLAC’s Norbert Holtkamp, reviewed one particular aspect of the ILC contained in the TDR: the project’s estimated cost. The cost contained in the TDR for a 500 GeV ILC is in line with that presented in 2007 at the completion of the Reference Design Report. The methodology for estimating the cost is quite intricate and is similar to that established for other international projects. The resulting cost estimate was discussed by Barry Barish at a press conference in Vancouver held to announce the transition to the new linear collider organization.

Our Japanese colleagues are very interested in hosting the ILC in Japan as a global project. Demonstrating the strong interest by their country in the project, more than a dozen Japanese reporters remotely attended the press conference.

Another major topic of discussion at the ICFA meeting was the draft of the European Strategy for Particle Physics. It is impressive to see the efforts and plans both in Europe and in Asia at a time when our ambitions in the US are colliding with strong budget pressures. Even in the face of uncertainty we must continue to aim high in our quest to build a world-leading Intensity Frontier program, and work to bring our international colleagues on board while we continue to collaborate on projects in Europe and Asia.

Photo of the Day

Hello, deer

A deer peeks from behind snow-laden branches in the woods near Site 38. Photo: Sue Quarto, FESS
Construction Update

Installing exterior enclosure at IARC OTE Building

Workers install the IARC Office, Technical and Education Building's exterior enclosure. Photo: Cindy Arnold

The exterior enclosure of the IARC OTE building is well under way. As the office ribbon windows and corrugated metal panels adjacent to the two-story glass curtain wall are installed, the overall look of the building begins to emerge. Inside the building the lunch room third-floor balcony can be seen. The serpentine wall in the foreground shows the outdoor eating area.

Special Announcement

Webcast of Higgs boson updates

Scientists are presenting the latest discoveries in particle physics this week and next during the Rencontres de Moriond, an annual scientific conference in the Italian Alps. Two sessions with talks on the latest results on the Higgs-like boson discovered last year can be viewed live tonight and later tomorrow in separate webcasts scheduled from 1:30 a.m. to 5 a.m. CST and from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. CST March 6.

Announcements

Today's New Announcements

Stress management: Enhancing your coping skills - March 6

Walk 2 Run - begins March 7

Barn dance - March 10

Extended network outage at Wilson Hall - March 10

FMLA (Family Medical Leave Act) seminar - March 12

Butts and Guts class - begins March 6

Muscle toning class - begins March 7

Deadline for UChicago Tuition Remission Program - March 7

Fermilab Chamber Series: Arianna String Quartet - March 10

Fermilab Lecture Series: The Believers (documentary) - March 15

Fermilab Arts & Lecture Series: ScrapArtsMusic - March 23

DOEGrids certificates to be decommissioned - March 23

Nominations open for 2013 Tollestrup Award - through April 1

2013 FRA scholarship applications accepted until April 1

Writing for Results: E-mail and More - May 3

Interpersonal Communication Skills course offered in May

Fermilab Management Practices courses now available for registration

Scottish country dancing meets Tuesday evenings in Kuhn Barn

Indoor soccer

Employee discounts