Like Oak Ridge, Argonne National Laboratory serves as a living witness to the continuity of American 20th century physics: after its first incarnation as part of the Manhattan Project’s Metallurgical Laboratory (the group that first successfully isolated Plutonium), it was the first research site to be designated a National Laboratory after the war. In the sixty-five years between some of the world’s first nuclear reactor research and today’s most cutting-edge accelerator development, there was hardly a science-and-technology subject in which Argonne didn’t have a hand.
This history is written all over the lab, even as it is already carving itself a place in the 21st century:
The beautiful but abandoned Building 330, which housed the 1950s-era Chicago Pile 5 reactor. Argonne was also the second home of Enrico Fermi's Chicago Pile 1, which was moved to the lab from the University of Chicago in 1943 and renamed Chicago Pile 2.
In an amazing contrast, old warehouses lodge some of the world's most cutting-edge research.
Argonne's obviously much newer Advanced Photon Source, which produces the brightest x-rays in the western hemisphere.
Summer of Science 