aamusedinatx | More Local Color

Until it was shut down in 1993, a 10,000-ton magnetic doughnut known as the Bevatron smashed atoms under tight security for 39 years in the Berkeley hills.

It was one of the giant machines that America built for physicists to continue their atomic research after the bomb ended World War II. Because it was off limits to the public for most of its history, few people know much about what happened inside the Bevatron, housed inside a 180-foot-wide domed building.

Now, the U.S. Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory wants to demolish what's left at the site to make room for unspecified future projects, but some locals are pushing to save the facility as a historic landmark.

City officials and some residents want the national lab to fully document the historic value of a site that contributed to four Nobel Prize-winning research projects and sustained Berkeley's status as a center of physics research during most of the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

Full article here.