Artifacts from experiments descended from the first detection of neutrinos will go on display at a center planned adjacent to the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan, who had participated in testing nuclear weapons, “originally thought they would set up a neutrino detector near a nuclear fission bomb. They thought lots of neutrinos would come out. It seemed certain because of conservation of energy,” says Henry Gurr, a former graduate student of Reines's and longtime Savannah River neutrino researcher, now at the University of South Carolina, Aiken. “But they soon realized that was problematic because they'd only have one chance, so they decided to set up near a nuclear reactor, which, as Reines said to me, ‘is practically a continuous atomic bomb.’“
In 1955 Reines and Cowan set up tanks of scintillating liquid near one of the Savannah River Site's plutonium production...
