Illinois
Covered Nuclear Facilities in Illinois
If you worked at these facilities during these times, you are covered under the EEOICPA Special Exposure Cohort Facilities.
Argonne National Laboratory – West
One of the U.S. Department of Energy’s largest research centers. It is also the nation’s first national laboratory, chartered in 1946. The Laboratory specializes in reactor engineering, reactor physics, chemistry and metallurgy. Early reactor research focused on the production of plutonium from uranium.
Argonne is a direct descendant of the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory, part of the World War II Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb before the Nazis did. It was at the Met Lab where, on December 2, 1942, Enrico Fermi and his band of about 50 colleagues created the world’s first controlled nuclear chain reaction in a squash court at the University of Chicago.
The premises covered under this listing include all those which are part of the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) campus in Argonne, Illinois and those in which operations associated with the former Met Lab were performed under contract to the Atomic Energey Commission (AEC) once Met Lab operations were administratively incorporated into ANL.
Throughout the course of its operations, the potential for beryllium exposure existed at this site, due to beryllium use, residual contamination, and decontamination activities.