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Help please! Any remnants of the Atomic Age on ISU's campus?

Kagavi

Kagavi

Well-Known Member
Mar 4, 2013
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California
www.kagavi.com
Hello good people:

I'm planning a new project and it's hard for me to research ISU stuff because I'm 2,000 miles away, so I'm hoping the CF community can help out! Right now I'm researching the history of the Atomic Age and the role ISU played in that. My question is very specific and hopefully it can be answered:

Are there still any spots on campus that have buildings or rooms that are still "frozen in that era" of the 1940s and 1950s. From my time in Ames, if I am recalling correctly, all of those buildings were along Pammel Drive. Do any specific buildings or rooms have big impressive machines, etc. that look like they were used in the Atomic Age/Space Age of the 1940s-1960s? Any rooms that are a time warp to that era?

I know about the Ames Lab, but I don't know what it looks like inside. Thanks in advance for any thoughts you can share!
 
Theres still a thing in Nuke E that has radioactive materials in it. Nuke E is about as stuck in the 1950s as any building on campus.
 
JoshuaKagavi said:
Hello good people:

I'm planning a new project and it's hard for me to research ISU stuff because I'm 2,000 miles away, so I'm hoping the CF community can help out! Right now I'm researching the history of the Atomic Age and the role ISU played in that. My question is very specific and hopefully it can be answered:

Are there still any spots on campus that have buildings or rooms that are still "frozen in that era" of the 1940s and 1950s. From my time in Ames, if I am recalling correctly, all of those buildings were along Pammel Drive. Do any specific buildings or rooms have big impressive machines, etc. that look like they were used in the Atomic Age/Space Age of the 1940s-1960s? Any rooms that are a time warp to that era?

I know about the Ames Lab, but I don't know what it looks like inside. Thanks in advance for any thoughts you can share!
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Gilman Hall is the main chemistry building on campus and there are rooms in the basement that are boarded up, supposedly due to radiation. Also I believe it houses US Department of Energy offices.
 
I'm sure the sealed rooms in Physics and Gilman are frozen in that time but they aren't exactly accessible to find out.
 
IcSyU said:
I'm sure the sealed rooms in Physics and Gilman are frozen in that time but they aren't exactly accessible to find out.
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With the help of this you may be able to get around better.

iowastate_map.gif
 
My grandfather was ROTC sergeant and had an office in the Armory. One day he was sent to Missouri to pick up a trailor and drive it to Ames. He found out much later it was the bomb or some major component thereof.
 
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If you want to know anything about contaminants/pollution on campus, ask Dr. Burras.
 
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Best place to go would be the Special Collections in the Parks Library. Just go in there, write on a note what it is you want, and they will bring out a box full of information that is exactly what you are looking for.

Great for primary sources, as well.
 
ISUCubswin said:
Best place to go would be the Special Collections in the Parks Library. Just go in there, write on a note what it is you want, and they will bring out a box full of information that is exactly what you are looking for.

Great for primary sources, as well.
Click to expand...

And if anybody knows about sources, it's ISUCubswin.

(Also, he's in California)
 
While I was in college, I did some work for a Civil Engineering professor who did soils research and had some projects out at the Ames Lab site NW of campus. Because of that work, I get regular mailings about getting health checkups because of possible radiation exposure during my work as a "former Ames Lab employee". My exposure would be extremely minimal, so I just throw those away when I get them. I graduated in '91, and I just received one of the mailings last month. So once you're on the list, you're on for life. Apparently.

Back in the day, I also dated a girl who was doing graduate research on the movement of radioactive materials through the clay soils in the woods out at the Ames Lab. She determined that the soils were so tightly packed that the "hot" material was moving somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter to a half inch per year. Which means that it MIGHT be a threat in a thousand years or so. Unless the materials broke down over time, like they do naturally. The funniest thing about her research? One of the local Ames folk singers (I don't think it was Greg Brown, but it was someone who was in town back in the mid-90's, can't remember his name off the top of my head - must be the radiation eating at my brain) kept going into the woods and destroying the tops of her monitoring wells in order to "save the planet".
 
Up north of campus there's some creepy woods with some building that housed some of that work. It is fenced off but not radioactive or anything, FP&M maintains them and sends student workers there all the time. They also still have the housing for a reactor in one of the research buildings up there. The reactor is long gone though.
 
Judoka said:
Up north of campus there's some creepy woods with some building that housed some of that work. It is fenced off but not radioactive or anything, FP&M maintains them and sends student workers there all the time. They also still have the housing for a reactor in one of the research buildings up there. The reactor is long gone though.
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The reactor used to be in Applied Science Complex I. I work in building 2 out there (Center for NDE), and the old pump room in the basement of building 1 makes a great x-ray lab due to the 5'-thick concrete walls.
 
iahawkhunter said:
The reactor used to be in Applied Science Complex I. I work in building 2 out there (Center for NDE), and the old pump room in the basement of building 1 makes a great x-ray lab due to the 5'-thick concrete walls.
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So, what is exactly done out there? I always wondered.
 
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