Project with ORNL helps Hardin Valley senior earn Boy Scouts award
Through a project with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Hardin Valley Academy's Noah Kaye has earned the Boy Scouts of America's Hornaday Award and redbreast sunfish have some new hangouts.
Kaye, a member of Troop 46, Toqua District, worked with Neil Giffen and Kelly Roy of ORNL's Environmental Sciences Division to install fish attractors in Hinds Creek, where populations of sunfish have been declining. Routine monitoring has also shown reduced size and numbers of sunfish in Bear and East Fork Poplar creeks. For Kaye, who plans to major in chemical engineering at Tennessee Technological University, it was a chance to make a difference and to earn a coveted award.
"Earning the Hornaday Award is important to me because preserving and enhancing the environment is essential," Kaye said. "If we don't do this, all things in nature that are beautiful will disappear and the world will be a duller place."
Researchers from the ORNL Aquatics Laboratory determined that they would need about 20 fish attractors, which provide cover and protect small fish from predators. The attractors had to be easily deployable and able to work in water as shallow as 16 inches. At least four of the attractors had to be made of biodegradable (natural) materials for deployment in Hinds Creek, which is off the Oak Ridge Reservation. Fish attractors deployed on the reservation could be made of other materials, including PVC pipe.
To qualify for the Hornaday Award, Kaye had to design and build the attractors, although Roy and Giffen provided guidance. Kaye built the attractors with cedar logs bound together and anchored with wooden stakes and boulders. Attractors for the Oak Ridge Reservation were made from PVC pipe partially filled with concrete and bound with wire, cable ties and waterproof glue.
ORNL Aquatics Laboratory researchers, with assistance from the scouts and Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, deployed the units at Hinds Creek. ORNL researchers installed fish attractors at East Fork Poplar Creek, Poplar and White Oak creeks.
For the ORNL scientists, the project was a success on a number of levels.
"It was an honor for us to support such a project, which allowed this very deserving young man to become only the second scout known to earn this prestigious award in the Great Smoky Mountain Council of the Boy Scouts of America," Giffen said.
Said Roy: "The attractors are definitely being utilized. The wooden stake bed attractors in particular seem to be providing critical refuge for juvenile sunfish and minnows such as the striped shiner. The PVC attractors seemed to be getting used by the medium to large sunfish and rock bass, and we're finding all size classes in the cedar attractors."
The Hornaday Award is named after the late William Hornaday, director of the New York Zoological Park and founder of the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Hornaday was a champion of natural resource conservation and a leader in saving the American bison from extinction. He named the award the Wildlife Protection Medal. Its purpose was to challenge Americans to work for wildlife conservation and habitat protection. After his death in 1937, the award was renamed in Hornaday's honor and became a Boy Scouts of America award.
UT-Battelle has a tradition of supporting the Boy Scouts of America. Last year, the managing contractor for the Department of Energy's ORNL made a $150,000 award to the Great Smoky Mountain Council for its campaign to renovate Camp Buck Toms. The money was to be applied to the establishment of classrooms for science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, activities at the camp, which is located near Rockwood. In recent years, UT-Battelle also made donations to the Oak Ridge chapter, the Friends of Scouting Campaign and other Boy Scouts projects to address the issues of hunger, poor health and homelessness.— Ron Walli, May 10, 2013
News Release | |||||||
| Media Contact: Bill Cabage Communications and Media Relations 865.574.4399 |
Research effort deep underground could sort out cosmic-scale mysteries
 | |
The Majorana Demonstrator is being assembled and stored 4,850 feet beneath the earth's surface in enriched copper to limit the amount of background interference from cosmic rays and radioactive isotopes. (hi-res image)
| |
"It might explain why we're here at all," said David Radford, who oversees specific ORNL activities in the Majorana Demonstrator research effort. "It could help explain why the matter that we are made of exists."
Radford, a researcher in ORNL's Physics Division and an expert in germanium detectors, has been delivering germanium-76 to Sanford Underground Research Laboratory (SURF) in Lead, S.D., for the project. After navigating a Valentine's Day blizzard on the first two-day drive from Oak Ridge, Radford made a second delivery in March.
ORNL serves as the lead laboratory for the Majorana Demonstrator research effort, a collaboration of research institutions representing the United States, Russia, Japan and Canada. The project is managed by the University of North Carolina's Prof. John Wilkerson, who also has a joint faculty appointment with ORNL.
Research at SURF is being conducted 4,850 feet beneath the earth's surface with the intention of building a 40-kilogram germanium detector, capable of detecting the theorized neutrinoless double beta decay. Detection might help to explain the matter-antimatter imbalance.
Before the detection of the unobserved decay can begin, however, the germanium must first be processed, refined and enriched. Radford coordinated the multistep process, which includes an essential pit stop in Oak Ridge.
The 42.5 kilograms of 86-percent enriched white germanium oxide powder required for the project is valued at $4 million and was transported from a Russian enrichment facility to a secure underground ORNL facility in a specially designed container. The container's special shielding and underground storage limited exposure of the germanium to cosmic rays.
Without such preventative measures, Radford says, "Cosmic rays transmute germanium atoms into long-lived radioactive atoms, at the rate of about two atoms per day per kilogram of germanium. Even those two atoms a day will add to the background in our experiment. So we use underground storage to reduce the exposure to cosmic rays by a factor of 100."
The germanium must further undergo a reduction and purification process at two Oak Ridge companies, Electrochemical Systems, Inc. (ESI) and Advanced Measurement Technology (AMETEK), before being moved to its final destination in South Dakota. ESI works to reduce the powdered germanium oxide to metal germanium bars. ORTEC, a division of AMETEK, further purifies the bars, using the material to grow large single crystals of germanium, and turning those into one-kilogram cylindrical germanium detectors that will be used in the Demonstrator. Once they leave AMETEK, Radford and his team transport the detectors to SURF.
The enrichment process is lengthy. The Majorana Demonstrator project began the partnership with ESI four years ago. To date, ORNL has delivered -- via Radford's two trips -- nine of the enriched detectors, which are valued at about $2 million including the original cost of the enriched germanium oxide powder.
Requiring a total of 30 enriched detectors, the Majorana Demonstrator is not expected to be fully complete and operational until 2015.
Those involved in the Majorana research effort believe its completion and anticipated results will help pave the way for a next-generation detector using germanium-76 with unprecedented sensitivity. The future one-ton detector will help to determine the ratio and masses of conserved and annihilated lepton particles that are theorized to cause the initial imbalance of matter and antimatter from the Big Bang.
"The research effort is the first major step towards building a one-ton detector - a potentially Nobel-Prize-worthy project," Radford says.
ORNL's partner institutions in the Majorana Demonstration Project are Black Hills State University, Duke University, Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (Russia), Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Russia), Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, North Carolina State University, Osaka (Japan) University, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory, Centre for Particle Physics (Canada), University of Chicago, University of North Carolina, University of South Carolina, University of South Dakota, University of Tennessee and the Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics.
The Majorana Demonstrator research project is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Physics.
ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy's Office of Science. DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit http://science.energy.gov.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.