Does anyone know if they still have to wait for months to open the chamber after experiments to wait for the radioactivity to cool down?
If I remember, and it’s surely not exactly the same thing, a lot of the issue is around pumping down vacuum spaces. Targets at the lab were suspended from handgrown spider silk (the lab employed a resident spider raiser/silk puller). And they tried to keep the large laser cavity pumped to vacuum constantly because pumping things to ultra low vacuum with things like veto pumps just takes forever. Stuff outgasses and creates militorr of pressure for annoying periods of time. The same issue shows up post maintenance in semiconductor manufacturing. Prep and recovery for maintenance can take 10x the time of the actual maintenance action itself.
The facility itself was fascinating. Banks upon banks of capacitors in the basement that apparently sound like a gunshot going off when it’s fired. Giggawatts of power for picoseconds.
U of R has some pretty sketchy nuclear past history though, as the hospital ran some tests in the 1940's of injecting some unwitting patients with plutonium, uranium, and polonium to see what would happen. There's an almost abandoned tunnel (actually, it may well be abandoned at this point) that goes underneath Elmwood Ave between the medical center annex and the hospital proper which has a very old, very locked door labelled "isotope storage chamber". Creepy.
I don’t think this has ever been the case. Note that I have been involved with experiments on the NIF, but only from the academic side. The NIF typically fires 1-3 time per day, and I believe that this is mostly an optics constraint. We weren’t producing neutrons though, so YMMV.