Monday, June 23, 2014
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Have a safe day!

Monday, June 23

2 p.m.
Particle Astrophysics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Chris Weaver, University of Wisconsin
Title: Evidence for High-Energy Astrophysical Muon Neutrinos with IceCube

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

4 p.m.
All Experimenters' Meeting - Curia II

Tuesday, June 24

Noon
Undergraduate Lecture Series - One West
Speaker: AndrĂ© de GouvĂȘa, Northwestern University
Title: Exploring the Unknown

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

THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY

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Wilson Hall Cafe

Monday, June 23

- Breakfast: eggs benedict
- Breakfast: sausage, egg and cheese croissant
- Sloppy joe
- Smart cuisine: teriyaki pork stir fry
- Chicken curry
- Oven-roasted veggie wrap
- Taco salad
- Vegetarian cream of spinach
- Texas-style chili
- Assorted pizza by the slice

Wilson Hall Cafe menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, June 25
Lunch
- Rotini, summer squash and prosciutto salad with rosemary dressing
- Fresh blueberry and vanilla yogurt parfait

Friday, June 27
Dinner
Closed

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Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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Feature

IARC construction prepares buildings for 2015 occupancy

Now that the IARC Office, Technical and Education Building has received beneficial occupancy, Fermilab can begin outfitting the interior. Photo: Reidar Hahn

Fermilab teams are hard at work preparing the spaces that will foster accelerator innovation and collaboration with private industry partners. Those spaces compose the Illinois Accelerator Research Center, which should be up and running by this time next year.

The center's two buildings, the Heavy Assembly Building (HAB) and the Office, Technical and Education Building, are still in various stages of construction.

The OTE building was funded by a grant from the State of Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. Fermilab recently reached a major milestone when it received beneficial occupancy, which means that OTE was turned over by the construction subcontractor Barton Malow to Fermilab. This allowed completion of the terms of the state grant, and the Facilities Engineering Services Section can now begin outfitting the building's interior.

Near future work, under the supervision of IARC OTE Project Manager Rhonda Merchut, will consist of partitioning the space into offices, installing computer networks and voice-over-internet equipment, and installing card readers for intellectual property control. Since the networks are installed underneath the OTE's raised floors and the interior is still under construction, the building remains locked, and there is no public access.

"The Office, Technical and Education Building holds office space for private industry to use in the short term to collaborate with our scientists and engineers," Merchut said.

Once IARC is fully operational, access to the OTE and the HAB will be limited because of the nature of the work done there. Merchut expects that the OTE will be dedicated and occupied by the spring of 2015.

Work on the HAB is transforming the space formerly used by the CDF collaboration into an area that can best support the IARC mission. The building is undergoing life safety upgrades, such as pressurizing stairs and replacing fire detection systems to bring the building up to the current code standards. The high-bay area (the space with the big crane), which will be used to put together accelerators for industrial use, will get new ventilation systems, crane controls, refurbished electrical and cooling infrastructure, lights, and paint. A portion of the exterior of the building will also be updated. Crews will install new wall panels and south-facing windows around the office support bay.

"We're trying to make it a more pleasant and energy-efficient space," said FESS's Steve Dixon, who is heading the refurbishment of the HAB.

In parallel to the construction, the IARC management team, led by IARC Director Bob Kephart, is working to complete a business model that would allow the laboratory to more efficiently interact with private companies.

"There is already a lot of interest from industry to do business with us," said IARC General Manager Charlie Cooper. Some of the areas of interest include accelerators applications for energy and environment, accelerator-driven industrial chemistry, and reactor-free creation of medical isotopes.

Cooper is looking forward to the industry partnerships that IARC will foster. He believes these partnerships will have a significant impact on the local area and the laboratory.

"IARC is a way for the importance of Fermilab to become more recognizable to the taxpayer and a way for the laboratory to capitalize on one of its strengths," he said.

Rhianna Wisniewski

In the News

Assessing Fukushima damage without eyes on the inside

From The New York Times, June 17, 2014

A particle that barely ranks as a footnote in a physics text may be about to lift the cleanup of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in Japan over a crucial obstacle.

Inside the complex, there are three wrecked reactor cores, twisted masses of hundreds of tons of highly radioactive uranium, plutonium, cesium and strontium. After the meltdown, which followed a tsunami and earthquake in 2011, most of the material in the plant's reactors resolidified, in difficult shapes and in confined spaces, wrapped around and through the structural parts of the reactors and the buildings.

Read more

Tip of the Week: Sustainability

Looking at life cycles

Your Styrofoam coffee cup might get 10 minutes of use, but its life cycle is centuries long. Photo: Jyoti Das

Have you ever wondered how your coffee cup got made or what exactly happens to it when you throw it in the trash? It is not instinctive to think about the flows of material, energy and water that are required in making a coffee cup, but if you have, you were thinking of some of the steps in its life cycle.

You may have heard the term life cycle analysis or cradle-to-grave analysis. When companies try to sell their products as green, sustainability professionals create detailed life cycle analyses to evaluate the environmental impacts in these products' life cycles.

Extracting raw materials from the earth is the first step in a product's life cycle. This could include metals, minerals or water. Every step of the raw material extraction can be measured, such as assessing how many tons of carbon were emitted in the extraction of the raw material to a manufacturing facility. This is often the most resource-intensive step. For instance, the initial aluminum extraction involved in producing a soda can requires so much energy, recycling one aluminum can save enough energy to run a TV for three hours. (Yet Americans recycle less than half the soda cans they consume.)

The next step is the manufacture of the materials or components that go into the product. Then come the product's production, packaging, shipping, customer use, maintenance and end-of-life disposal. When product designers are able to see the life cycle of a product, they can address the stage of production in which the most energy is being used or substitute materials that have less harmful impacts.

Back to your coffee cup: Do you use your own mug when you can? Or do you use a Styrofoam cup once and then toss it in the trash? Styrofoam or polystyrene is made of benzene from coal, styrene from petroleum and ethylene. It does not biodegrade: The cup will dissolve in about 500 years, but the chemicals will still be in the ecosystem. In the United States, about 25 billion cups are thrown away each year, and that's only the Styrofoam found in cups, not other packaging or food containers. Styrofoam consumes more than 25 percent of landfill space. It is not recyclable by municipalities. Some companies such as Dart Container Corporation will take clean Styrofoam to manufacture other plastic products.

So why is Styrofoam used? It is usually the cheapest choice, is very lightweight and works better insulating food or drinks than other alternatives.

By considering the life cycle of the products we use, all of us as consumers can make greener choices, which are less costly for the Earth.

Katie Kosirog

Photo of the Day

Five on four wheels

On Daughters and Sons to Work Day, five vehicles formed a ring around the front lawn of Wilson Hall. Counter-clockwise from top left: Edward Tufte's Interplanetary Explorer, the Fermilab ambulance, the Fermilab firetruck, the Fermilab battalion chief's vehicle and the Feynman van. Photo: Ken Schumacher, SCD
Announcements

Today's New Announcements

Register for the C++ Fermilab software school - Aug. 4-8

Study of Genesis through Ancient Eyes begins June 24

Sitewide domestic hydrant flushing - June 28-29

New updates available for Mac computers

FermiWorks training for managers

Yoga classes on Mondays or Thursdays

Scottish country dancing meets Tuesdays in Ramsey Auditorium

International folk dancing meets Thursdays in Ramsey Auditorium

Outdoor soccer