Of neutrons, alpaca and rhubarb pie

IN 1941, the hills of eastern Tennessee near Knoxville were home to century-old farms. In 1942 the Army Corps of Engineers began to transform 59,000 acres into a testing ground, one of three, for developing the atomic bomb. Buildings went up so quickly that children would return from school disoriented, not recognising the neighbourhood they had left that morning. Grass had no time to sprout. Mud was everywhere. The X-10 Graphite Reactor went critical in 1943; the plutonium it produced was sent to Los Alamos. Scientists remained after the war, and Oak Ridge is now one of 17 national laboratories.

I am in Oak Ridge for a story on energy research, but I had been to Knoxville before: my grandparents lived here, in small house with a pretty garden. They grew strawberries and rhubarb that my grandmother would bake into pies and send to us up North. My father defected to New England as a teenager, but he returned home during his college summers to work at Oak Ridge, which he says he loved. He once paddled onto a river with a scientist to test a raft for the marines. They promptly sank. ...