This is a nuclear reactor, a machine of the atomic age.
Inside of it, a controlled chain reaction of splitting atoms can take place.
It is a strange machine, for it makes no noise and you see no moving parts.
All around the heavily shielded pile are scientific instruments, for this reactor is primarily for research.
But one thing is true of all reactors.
They can liberate atomic energy for man's good.
When, for example, certain chemical elements are inserted into a reactor, they can be changed into radioactive atoms called radioisotopes.
These isotopes are useful in every branch of science.
They have profoundly benefited medicine in the treatment and diagnosis of disease.
Radioisotopes behave the same as other atoms inside the body, but they also send out radioactive signals that can easily be traced to show hidden disorders.
Just as dramatic is the contribution of radioisotopes to industry.
They are being used more and more to improve manufacturers and to lessen their cost.
They are utilized in almost every kind of plant, from blast furnaces to oil refineries.
One of the greatest benefits of the atom will be power, power for light and power for industry, especially in areas that lack coal, oil or hydroelectric dams.
Reactors like this one are already producing electricity and they are producing it from relatively small amounts of But there is at present an acute shortage in the world, a shortage of specially trained men and women to work with the atom and develop its peaceful uses.
Without skilled people to operate and use reactors, to improve and perfect their design, they are meaningless pieces of machinery.
They are complicated structures and in untrained hands they are potentially dangerous.
This lack of trained specialists faces every country on earth without a single exception.
Training men for the atomic age is therefore an international challenge and it is being faced as it must be through international cooperation.
The United States is sharing that challenge.
It offers nuclear engineering training to foreign students in 30 different colleges and universities.
In addition, the United States Atomic Energy Commission sponsors further training at a number of atomic installations.
In March 1955, at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, it opened the International School of Nuclear Science and Engineering.
Since then it has expanded its program.
Today over 40 different nations have sent a total of over 200 students of nuclear science to Argonne.
This is a story of the class that began its training in the autumn of 1956.
Before the students came to Argonne, they spent four months of preliminary work at two American state universities.
Half the class came here to North Carolina State.
They came from Chile, from Egypt, from France, India, Israel, Yugoslavia, Italy, Japan, Turkey, Holland, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, and Thailand.
Meanwhile at Pennsylvania State University, 600 kilometers to the north, the other half of the class assembled.
This half of the class would do their preliminary studies here.
Their group included young men from Austria, Korea, Brazil, Germany, Greece, Iran, and Uruguay.
In addition, 14 students from the United States were present to study alongside them.
Most of these men were in their twenties, all of them already well educated in the lands from which they came.
Each of them was here to broaden and deepen his knowledge in nuclear science.
They were mature and intelligent and able rapidly to information.
Let's meet a few of them.
Bergois of Spain is a chemical engineer.
Srinivasan is a chemical engineer from India.
Asad of Iran is a skilled physicist.
Chemistry is a specialty of Ishihara of Japan.
Saffiotti earned his doctorate of chemistry in Brazil.
Chang of China is an electrical engineer.
So is Akçasu of Turkey.
Dietrichs of Germany is a specialist in physics and electronics.
But in the four months that followed, they studied in many fields in addition to the one that was their specialty.
There were chemistry labs and physics courses.
There were special sessions in chemical and nuclear engineering, in simply learning to use the tools of the atomic age.
There were hours too in the metallurgical laboratory.
The diversity of their training ranged over a broad field.
It went from theorizing on the structure of atoms to mastering a thousand -year -old craft like casting iron.
The director of student affairs had told them when they came that the work might be hard and the study hours long, and they discovered he had not exaggerated.
Black coffee became one of their indispensables.
It was prepared at all hours of the night right in the study center.
Though hours were long, new friendships were deep.
Even during coffee breaks, studies continued.
If one student was not clear about something, it was easy enough to find another who was a specialist in that particular field.
There was a constant interflow of information.
They helped each other all the time.
Near the end of their period of training at the university, the students gathered together for a farewell party.
They were joined by members of the faculty who'd come to know them and to like them very much.
Who says scientists are serious? Certainly not Professor Neely, who played the piano while a Four days later, the men flew south to Tennessee to tour the famed Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies.
Here they were joined by the other group of students.
The other half of the class, who had done their preparatory work at North Carolina State College.
Dr.
Overman, the director of this special training division, welcomed them with real pleasure.
For the graduates of his school, like our students, come from all over the world and throughout the United States.
The Oak Ridge Institute is an association of 35 American universities, operated in cooperation with the U .S.
Atomic Energy Commission.
It offers highly important courses in the techniques of using radioisotopes.
These courses have for years been open to students from the United States and abroad.
Over 2 ,700 persons from universities, hospitals, industries, and research institutions have taken training here.
At Oak Ridge, the medical division of the Institute of Nuclear Studies operates a special facility, including a hospital, for research on cancer and allied diseases.
Many American and foreign physicians come here every year, both to acquire new techniques and to share the knowledge they themselves have gained while working on medical projects of their own.
To acquire and to share atomic knowledge.
At Shipping Port, Pennsylvania, two days later, our students came to observe the actual construction of a full -scale nuclear power reactor in the United States.
Because their chief concern with the atom is the design and operation of reactors, this visit is one of the most important of the many they will make to atomic installations in America.
There are, of course, several kinds of power reactors.
The United States is building large ones of different types.
The men spent a full day looking, listening, and asking questions, for nuclear engineering is an extremely new and complex field.
At last, near Chicago, the students arrived at their final destination.
During their period of study at the International School, most of them would live at the YMCA in LaGrange, Illinois.
Some of them, who brought their wives and children with them, would take apartments in nearby towns.
For most, however, this hotel was their home and study center for the remainder of their stay in America.
Next day, the students began their final and most intensive period of study, a period for which their previous four months of training was a preparation.
Understandably, there was a mood of excitement and anticipation on this first day.
The International School of Nuclear Science and Engineering is a part of the Argonne National Laboratory, which is one of America's prime centers for the design and development of nuclear reactors.
International friendships develop rapidly when a man of one country learns truly to know a man from another.
The morning of their arrival at Argonne, the sixty students were formally welcomed by Dr.
Roland Tacker, director of the International School.
No one shares more fully than he the aspirations of these young engineers and scientists.
No one was more eager to see that they should be at the fullest benefit from their subsequent study.
So began another four and a half months of doing and learning.
In the metallurgical laboratory, the instructor explained that the students would themselves manufacture uranium fuel plates.
This was an important part of their lab work, and they worked together in teams to accomplish the task.
A nuclear reactor's performance ultimately depends on the selection and quality of its fuel materials.
Reactor engineering has demanded new ideas, new designs, and new uses of heretofore little -used metals.
By use of a laboratory rolling mill, each group made its own fuel plates.
It was job.
It required patience, skill, and teamwork.
Another problem the students were asked to think about is the high cost of nuclear fuel.
One way in which this cost can be lowered is by reprocessing the spent fuel, salvaging the unburned portion for later use.
Therefore, one of the experiments the students do is concerned with methods of reprocessing.
During their stay at Argonne, each of the students visited the gamma irradiation room.
Here at the bottom of a tank of water that acts as a radiation shield, experiments are going on in irradiating food.
Inside the metal cylinders are food stuffs that are exposed to varying intensities of gamma rays.
These rays can destroy the bacteria that spoil food.
This happens to be one process that shows great promise in using beneficially the byproducts of nuclear reactors.
Other uses are still being discovered.
Another facet of nuclear engineering is thermodynamics.
How do you best transfer heat from a radioactive reactor core to an electric generator? Water loops are one means of doing this.
Still another is the use of liquid metals like sodium.
Here again, the students carry out in teams experiments involving much thought and precise instrumentation.
In another special physics lab, the students get acquainted with the Argonaut, a pioneer reactor designed exclusively for educational purposes.
For our students who will teach others when they return to their native countries, it is an extremely valuable instrument.
They use the Argonaut reactor in many ways.
They conduct their own experiments and test their own theories.
With the research aids of the modern nuclear scientists, they spend many hours at calculations.
Many of them have already established specific projects which they want to pursue, projects that might someday benefit the world.
It was not far from Argon, years ago, that another historic goal was achieved.
In nearby Chicago, Enrico Fermi and his associates built the world's first self -sustaining atomic pile and thus ushered in the atomic age.
Part of that pile's original graphite and uranium is now at Argon National Laboratory and the entire assembly is now an important training tool.
The great advantage of the Argon school to the student of nuclear science and engineering is that here he actually uses and works with atomic machines at the same time he studies them theoretically.
This using, working, and theorizing also takes place around Argon's biggest research reactor.
This scientific instrument, known as the CP5, is used to solve complex problems in the field of theoretical physics.
But the period of study for our students was now coming to a close and they would return to the countries from which they came, to Europe, to Asia, to South America, to all over the world.
For nearly a year they had shared a unique educational experience.
They had, by learning, helped to fill a worldwide need for atomic scientists and engineers.
What is more, they will spread their knowledge to others in ever -widening circles.
This is already being done by previous students of the International School.
In Tokyo, Japan, Mr.
Susumu Suguri is at work in the Electrotechnical Laboratory teaching other students and researchers.
At Santiago, Dario Moreno is teaching at the University of Chile's School of Engineering.
His subject, the practical application of atomic studies in the field of nuclear power.
At a laboratory near Oslo, where Norwegian and Dutch scientists are working together, Corin Lund, another former student of the International School, explains a pilot plant for reprocessing uranium.
In Milan, Italy, is nuclear engineer Lorenzo Rossio.
He too returned recently from the Argonne Laboratory and is leading a new project at the Italian Center for Nuclear Research.
In Buenos Aires, engineer and physicist Ernesto Schoenfeld is teaching men and women of Argentina, teaching both the theory and uses of nuclear science.
In Cairo, Egypt, Mikhail Saad and Efat Kamal are two more graduates of the International School.
They too carry on the same tradition of disseminating knowledge in the field of atomic energy.
But our story has been that of the class that finished its training in the summer of 1957.
Wherever they go, to whatever part of the world, they will take with them knowledge that will result in the betterment of human life.
When they first came to America, they were already well -trained specialists in their respective fields.
Now they are on their way to becoming leaders in nuclear science.
Soon, they in turn will undertake the training of others and thus help to cut down the shortage that exists in the field of atomic energy.
The shortage of specially trained men and women.
But the machines and the bright promises of the atomic age are nothing without people.
These young men are to a degree atomic specialists, but they are much more.
They are human beings bound together in a kind of United Nations of Science.
They are the engineers of a future dedicated to the cause of peace.
