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On Saturday, June 6, NFPA is offering two special tours as part of its pre-conference seminars. One of the tours is a "behind-the-scenes" look at the unique fire protection challenges at the Department of Energy Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. (Information about the other tour of the Underwriters Laboratories facility is coming soon.)
Lisa Nadile, associate editor of NFPA Journal®, provides a preview of Fermilab tour, which will run from 9:00 am - 3:30 pm. Registration is required and the price of the tour ($195 for members; $225 for non-members) includes lunch and transportation from McCormick Place.
"Tucked outside Chicago, on a 6,800-acre national park, is a place where some of the world’s most powerful minds delve into the mysteries of the universe—while 45 bison keep watch. Well, almost. You have to see it to believe it, and you can when you join NFPA on our tour of Fermilab, the National Particle Accelerator Laboratory to learn about it and its fire protection.
The buffalo are there, grazing peacefully on a re-cultivated prairie. About 300 feet below them is a tunnel where streams of protons and antiprotons are beamed at near light speed only to meet a rather violent end in massive two-story colliders. Scientists and graduates students record the data about the leftovers and hope they see what they expect to see: quarks, neutrinos, antimatter or a brand new, career-making, Nobel-prize winning particle.
To run all these experiments that look for the tiniest of particles, they need some very large equipment. Fermilab’s accelerator ring is 4 miles long, the colliders are strung with millions of feet of wire, and equipment that uses ultra-high voltage sits tantalizingly near piped helium or hydrogen. Cryogenics and radioactive materials are the norm.
Not the norm is the large number of fire protection systems and devices used on site. During your tour, you’ll learn about them at a presentation on fire protection and a brief overview of the physics research. You’ll visit several detector buildings, the main control room, and Fermilab's remote operations center for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Switzerland."
- Lisa Nadile
Read more about this tour and all of our pre-conference offerings, or register today.
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