SciBooNE earns Fermilab DOE environmental award
Mark Bollinger, deputy manager of DOE's Fermi Site Office, presents Young-Kee Kim, Fermilab deputy director, with a DOE Pollution Prevention and Environmental Stewardship Accomplishment Award on July 22. Rick Tesarek, SciBooNE project head (far left), Morgan Wascko and Tsuyoshi Nakaya, SciBooNE co-spokespersons, look on.
When the SciBooNE collaboration was cobbling together its particle detectors from spare parts in early 2007, pollution prevention wasn't really on their minds.
"The award is fortuitous. Recycling parts of the detector was the only way to do what we needed to do," said SciBooNE co-spokesperson Morgan Wascko, Imperial College London.
Still, the collaboration's creative efforts landed it a DOE-wide Pollution Prevention Star (P2 Star) Award in April for its reuse of existing materials. On July 22, the laboratory also received a DOE Pollution Prevention and Environmental Stewardship Accomplishment Award for the collaboration's efforts. Mark Bollinger, deputy manager of DOE's Fermi Site Office, presented the latest award to Fermilab Deputy Director Young-Kee Kim and certificates of appreciation to co-spokespersons Wascko and Tsuyoshi Nakaya, Kyoto University, and project head Rick Tesarek, Fermilab, at a ceremony on the second-floor crossover.
"Necessity, drive for invention and personal commitment led the Fermilab SciBooNE team to reuse a significant number of experimental components, saving both money and resources - $3 million and 70 tons of material," Bollinger said. "By doing so, Fermilab advanced the DOE and federal goals for robust environmental stewardship at federal facilities."
Wascko said that much of the credit should go to the collaboration members, particularly the students.
"While we saved $3 million, the hidden cost was in the time that people took to vet old equipment and to get the experiment up and working to specifications," he said.
Nakaya also credited KEK and former director general Yoji Totsuka for crucial support. One of the experiment's detectors came from KEK and will return there.
Fermilab Deputy Director Young-Kee Kim marveled at the collaboration's speed and resourcefulness.
"They've done a great job reusing pieces of detectors and also a great job setting up quickly," she said. "I thank the SciBooNE collaboration for their hard work."
-- Rhianna Wisniewski
Members of the SciBooNE collaboration pose for photos hold the DOE P2 Star Award and Fermilab's DOE Pollution Prevention and Environmental Stewardship Accomplishment Award and corresponding certificates of appreciation.
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