Argonne Director discusses vision for Argonne and Rare Isotope Accelerator

Argonne Director Robert Rosner appeared on WBEZ-FM's "848" program May 24. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Steve Edwards: The new head of Argonne National Laboratory is competing for the chance to bring thousands of jobs and one-of-a-kind research opportunities to Illinois. Dr. Robert Rosner is leading the laboratory's efforts to land the federal government's Rare Isotope Accelerator project. The government has yet to decide where or whether the accelerator will be built, but their decision could have major implications for Argonne and its scientists. The winner of the $1 billion project will be home to the most powerful isotope accelerator in the world. Landing the project is one of Rosner's top priorities as director of Argonne. He took over the post in March after serving as the laboratory's chief scientist and he says the project is part of his long-term vision for the lab.

Rosner: I think the vision very much has to do with looking at the lab as an integrated whole. If you go back and look at the history of the laboratory, it is very much a reflection of how the Department of Energy, which is in fact its principle sponsor, has looked at the laboratory. So the structural organization of the laboratory has historically reflected the organization of the Department of Energy. You could ask whether or not that in fact is the best way of doing business. The answer to that question has changed with time. I think if you ask me about now and the immediate future, I think the answer is laboratory does have to look toward some restructuring of its activities.

In particular, if you look at the large picture, has to do with taking the basic sciences and tying them much more closely with the applied work, so there is closer integration between the people who think deep thoughts about basic science issues and folks who think deep thoughts about how science and technology can be applied to everyday life.

Edwards: How do you integrate those two areas that you are talking about?

Rosner: Well, you don't there by telling people what to do. I think this is the challenge -- in fact getting at the heart of it. The heart is convincing people that this is in the best interest of the laboratory, in the best interest in the work they are doing, and quite frankly in the best interest of society as a whole. One of the ambitions I have for the laboratory -- I think this is broadly shared by many people at the laboratory and for that matter at the Department of Energy -- is that given that American industry has largely stepped back from doing basic research, that industrial research is much more closely coupled to immediate results you see in a few-year time scale, maybe sometimes even sooner.

Edwards: Research that will lead to quite possibly to some sort of product.

Rosner: Exactly. They used to have a different attitude. The Bell Laboratories, the Yorktown Heights Laboratories of IBM, those laboratories once a upon a time had a very long-term vision for their future, where product development might not take place for two decades, or three decades.

Think of the transistor for example, and where we are today. So the question is: where in the United States does that kind of research take place? My answer -- and I think the answer for many folks in R&D -- is at the national laboratories such as Argonne, the ideal place for that kind of research.

So that does require a closer coupling between the basic research activities that we do and the applied research that we do. It is also the way of taking advantage of the facilities that we have. We have some key facilities at the laboratory. For example, the Advanced Photon Source is a key element in strategies in structural biology. The future development of biology and nanoscience: understanding the structure of things at the atomic scale after doing engineering at the atomic scale. You have to be able to look on those scales, and that is what the facilities at Argonne allow you to do.

Edwards: Well, let me pose to you a criticism that was reported not too long ago in the paper, I believe the Chicago Tribune, about integration. This came from Nick Rockoff from Lake Technology Partners and he says of Argonne, "Argonne has a fence around it and unless a lot a changes occur with the culture at Argonne, they are not going to be able to bring technologies out of there. They have not been good at doing that in the past." What is your response to that?

Rosner: Well, the fact of the matter is there is a fence. That is just a matter of fact. You go there and there is a fence.

Edwards: Literally.

Rosner: Literally. But I think that is the end of my agreement with that statement. If you go to the laboratory -- and for example let's pick an area of great interest, transportation technologies -- Argonne is playing a key role in this area, and the key role is being played with the major three American automobile manufacturers. We have a transportation center that does testing of hybrid vehicles for Ford, for GM, for Daimler-Chrysler. So in fact we participate very closely with industry in areas in which the laboratory is particularly expert. The filtering that comes on has to do very much with where we see we can make a contribution and then making sure industry in those areas couples with us.

When we go to the Advanced Photon Source and walk around the accelerator, around its perimeter, the folks working at the accelerator, in the the collaborative access teams that actually run the beam lines, you will see Abbott Laboratories. You will see most of the pharmaceutical companies in the state are represented. You will see major corporations throughout the United States that all have their logos on the machinery there. Their scientists are present at the accelerator.

So I am not quite sure what that criticism is really directed at. Maybe that Argonne can do a better job at the small scale. We do well with large corporations that are set up to take advantage of a large laboratory, and we maybe a bit laggard in thinking about the small guys. That is difficult because Argonne is a big laboratory but it may well be a good idea to look at that in more detail.

Edwards: Speaking broadly about the partnership between science and industry: How important is it that Argonne is operating this year? How important to the Chicago region is a thriving, successful Argonne?

Rosner: Oh, I think it is absolutely essential for a number of reasons. First of all, it's a venue for bringing to the Illinois area a first-rate technical and scientific work force. The people who work at Argonne form the backbone for much of high-tech in this area. There are many, many instances where people who have been at Argonne go out to found companies. Or vice versa, when people from companies in Chicago area come to Argonne to take advantage of training -- for example at the Advanced Photon Source, for instrumentation --then go back to their home institutions or home laboratories. So from the point of view of providing the bedrock infrastructure for high tech in the greater Chicago area, I think Argonne plays a very, very important role. And this quite aside from other things that happen because Argonne is there, the fact that jobs are created over a broad spectrum, ranging from construction to the technical end. That is just an added bonus.

Edwards: There has been much written in recent months about the competition to locate the Rare Isotope Accelerator at Argonne. It is competing against Michigan State University and a Michigan consortium for an estimated $1 billion project. For those who aren't familiar the Rare Isotope Accelerator, what is it exactly?

Rosner: The thing to remember is that is we are made out of stuff that is made in stars. Ordinary stars produce nuclei up to iron. If you think of stuff that we are made of, up to iron, it is all made out of ordinary stars.

Past that, elements are produced in supernovae -- these are stars that explode. During the explosion, unusual things happen. The synthesis of much heavier elements than iron, up to things like uranium, transuranic elements, is produced in a very peculiar way. They require the flooding of nuclei with neutrons -- these are constituents of nuclei that are in neutral in charge. What happens in a supernovae is that there are typically many neutrons around and the so the probability of two neutrons interacting with a given nucleus is very high. It turns out that process of multiple neutrons interacting with nuclei is what produces the very heavy elements.

So how do we go about finding out about this? Well, until very recently it has been very hard to do. The reason is the elements that are produced have very, very short lifetimes. In other words they are rare; they are so rare that we don't find them in nature. We just find the end products of that nucleosynthesis -- the things like uranium -- but the elements that were produced on the way no longer exist. They have all decayed away.

The answer is you have to actually go about producing these rare nuclear isotopes. The challenge is, of course, since they are rare, since they decay so quickly, you have to produce many of them. That is the purpose of the Rare Isotope Accelerator -- to produce copious numbers of these very rare isotopes so we can actually try to understand the chain of events that take you from elements like iron all the way up to very heavy elements like uranium.

Edwards: There is tremendous competition for this particular project. Why does it matter to Argonne to be able to do this kind of research?

Rosner: There are many ways of answering that question. The most fundamental reason has to do with simple curiosity about where we come from. Physics and astronomy at it at its most fundamental level is really answering questions that almost sound like a theologian's questions: Where do we come from? What is our origin? How old is the universe? All those kinds of questions. It turns out that the Rare Isotope Accelerator, RIA for short, is involved in not only answering questions about what we are made out of, and how do we come to be, but also answering questions about how big the universe is. That is the way of answering it at the fundamental level, but there are reasons for answering it.

One of them has to do with the issue of where do we get the folks that really understand nuclear science sufficiently, who can help us in the next revolution in the nuclear industry? That help us produce radioisotopes for medical purposes? The answer is to draw people like that into the field, and you need something that intellectually excites them. A very important function of facilities like the Rare Isotope Accelerator is workforce development. It's all about producing the next generation of scientists who actually will help the United States, the world, do nuclear science in the future.

Edwards: So that is why we see Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich going to Washington to lobby for this? And how we see so many others from Illinois saying it has to be here?

Rosner: Yes. Exactly. It will make an enormous difference to the university community in Illinois. It will make a big difference to industry because the isotopes that can be produced can be used for medical purposes, can be used for materials science purposes as diagnostic tools. Industrial applications, workforce development, answering theology-like questions, and there are, of course, jobs as I mentioned earlier. Those are associated with big projects: the construction jobs when you are building the facility and then afterward for the operation of the facility.

Edwards: You had a scare not to long ago in which there was a mistake sent from the Department of Energy that indicated that Argonne would not be getting this project.

Rosner: Yes, indeed. A small misunderstanding.

Edwards: What do you think the chances are that Argonne will win in the end on this?

Rosner: As the director of Argonne, how can I answer other then I am convinced that we will do this. It is obvious isn't it?

I think there are really two questions. The first question is will RIA be built at all? My answer to that is: it should be built. It is a facility that deserves to be built. It is important for science, it is important for technology, it is important for the United States for workforce development. It would be difficult for me to swallow not building it. From that perspective, whether it is built in Michigan or Illinois is not the key question -- it is just getting it built because, in any case, either institution will be part of whatever eventually will be built.

Now if it comes to question of where it is most sensible to build it, I think Argonne -- for that matter, Illinois -- can make a very strong case for many, many reasons. We leverage much of fact that the infrastructure necessary for the facility already exists at Argonne, including the injector -- the part of the accelerator that will actually be starting the particles on their way. That already exists at Argonne: it is called ATLAS. It is an existing accelerator that we would reuse. We have the infrastructure for all the other parts for the facility in place already. Argonne is a place where we can handle radioactive materials. We have for 60 years; we know how to do this.

Finally, if you want to run an international project, a project in which we invite scientists from all around the world to participate, you want to have ease of travel, transportation. How can you choose a better place than the Chicago area? So from that point of view, Argonne was placed brilliantly very close to O'Hare. In my mind there is no question where it should be.

Edwards: We are talking to here on 848 Chicago public radio to Dr. Robert Rosner. He is the director of Argonne National Laboratory, newly appointed last month. We are talking to him about his future vision for Argonne and some of the key projects on the horizon, including the $1 billion Rare Isotope Accelerator project, also known as RIA. Argonne received some good news recently, as it relates to the Center for Nanoscale Materials or CNM. This is a project that will allow further research in the area of nanotechnology. Much has been made of the potential power that nanotechnology holds for unlocking not only scientific secrets but in terms of product application. What is the real benefit for having a center like this in Illinois?

Rosner: I think the key elements of the center at Argonne are twofold. First of all, it is the only one of the nanocenters that have been built by the Department of Energy that is literally coupled directly with the Advanced Photon Source, a facility to examine material on a small scale. So you can ask why would you want to do this, what is actually going on? I think the answer is if you really dream about the distant future, you think about what might be possible if you knew how to implement what biological systems -- the human body -- are able do to on the nanoscale. We constantly produce on the nanoscale proteins, the stuff of life. We know how to do this in an anthropomorphic sense -- our DNA instructs the cells how to manufacture things. Wouldn't it be interesting if we could instruct things on that scale to produce practical machines that operate on the nanoscale?

Imagine things that sound like science fiction: nanomachines that can explore blood vessels within your body to look for plaques and that are able to clean them. Imagine having probes that are inserted into your body to look for tumor cells, for example. You can imagine nanotechnology in the future can do great things.

The starting point, of course, is we have to figure out how to get there, and the Center for Nanoscale Materials is all about trying to get there. So they're trying to get there first from in the point of view of material calculation, looking at things on the small and seeing how they are constructed. Then eventually to actually synthesize things that make things on the small scale using the diagnostic tools that we have while we are actually building them.

Edwards: How far are we on the knowledge continuum as it relates to nanotechnology and its potential?

Rosner: We are really just starting. I think there been an enormous amount of hype, but I think there is an element of truth in the hype in the sense that you need the dreams in order to actually push things forward now. The dreams motivate young folks to go into science in the first place and translate their excitement into the research product. In that field I think we are frankly starting at the beginning. The things that I was talking about earlier are not things that will happen next year, or in five years. We are talking about the distant future, 20 or 30 years. But you have to start now.

Edwards: Let's take a look at the next 20 years. You're part of the strategic planning process for science and technology at Argonne National Laboratory. I wondered if you could look out at over the next two decades and think about the ways in which our world may be transformed. What are some of the promising developments on the horizon that the average people don't know about these days? What do the next two decades hold?

Rosner: Well, I think that the average person actually knows how to dream the kind of dreams that will tell you what Argonne should be doing and will be doing. When we drive up to the gas pump and we notice that gasoline sells for $2.40 a gallon for regular, and we know that the amount of gasoline in the world is finite and will probably run out in the next 10 to 15 years -- at least cheap gasoline, if we call that cheap.

You realize that something has to replace it, and you can say that about every facet of our energy economy. We know that we are consuming energy resources at a rapid clip. We are not the only ones doing this: the Indians and the Chinese are coming online in major, major ways. The Europeans don't seem to be spending less money on energy resources either. So the world as a whole is facing a very serious crisis.

The question is, what will replace the energy sources that we are using right now? The answer has to be in the form of multiple possibilities.

One possibility is greater exploration of new types of renewable resources, things like solar, or perhaps the use of biological materials -- renewable resources producing liquid fuels, which in fact is going on in Illinois, where we are producing ethanol from corn.

Imagine if you could engineer bugs that grow because of photosynthesis, light, and are able some how to produce hydrogen and hydrogen can power cars.

Imagine the ability to reinvest in the nuclear industry, going back to recreating a powerful nuclear industry in the United States that's safe, that we can trust and that can be used in fact to also create hydrogen for automotive power.

All these different possibilities are things that are right now staring us in the face. We are in the process of making decisions about where we want to go. From the Argonne perspective, where we want to be is basically in the midst of it, to be in the midst of the hydrogen economy to come, to be in the midst of answering questions such as how will we sequester carbon. That is, how do you take the carbon that comes out of your exhaust and put it in a way that the carbon does not go into the atmosphere, does not contribute to global warming?

We want to be part of the story of hydrogen fuel cell; we want to be part of the story of reinventing the nuclear industry in the United States. If you look at our 20-year vision, it is very much about our abilities on the basic science side and our abilities on the technical, applied side. The big purpose for us is to be major players in helping the United States and the new world of energy.

Edwards: Dr. Robert Rosner is the new director of the Argonne National Laboratory. Dr. Rosner, thanks very much.

Rosner: You're more than welcome, it was a pleasure. Thank you, Steve.

For more information, please contact Steve McGregor (630/252-5580 or media@anl.gov) at Argonne.