They say that when the nuclear scientists went to their first festive demonstration in Norilsk in white gowns and with a banner LAMA – Laboratory of Atomic Methods of Analysis – the people took them for the team of the restaurant of the same name. Soon the word ‘nuclear’ (sounds as yaderny) was added to the original name. For a quarter of a century, LAYAMA has successfully introduced methods based on the use of a nuclear reactor into the analytical practice of the Norilsk Combine.
In the photo archive of the Polar Division, photographs of the first LAYAMA building near the Bariernaya mountain, taken by the ubiquitous Vladimir Chin-Mo-Tsai in 1970, have been preserved.
A year later, the master visited the departments of the nuclear reactor operation, radiochemistry, nuclear-physical methods of analysis. Chin-Mo-Tsai captured the faces of the first engineers, physicists and chemists of the famous laboratory.
The laboratory with a nuclear reactor solved the tasks assigned to it, and in 1995 the most exotic attraction of the Norilsk industrial region stopped existing.
Read other materials of our photo project in the History spot section.
Text: Varvara Sosnovskaya, Photo: Vladimir Chin-Mo-Tsai/Nornickel Polar Division archive
