State of the Laboratory -- 1988

If I were to summarize the state of Argonne National Laboratory in one sentence, it would be this: "in a very difficult fiscal climate, we are accomplishing a major turnaround."

One evidence of the budget climate is the date of this meeting -- almost halfway through our fiscal year. Congress could not put together a 1988 budget that met the mandatory restrictions on the federal deficit until the end of December.

This has had two major impacts on Argonne. One is that we could not get guidance out of Washington as to what Argonne's 1988 budget was likely to be until very recently. Obviously, I could not report to you until we had some idea of that budget.

The other impact is that to meet the deficit restriction, Congress had to, in effect, commit in advance to severe restrictions on the 1989 budget, which is currently grinding through the congressional mill. And in both years, there has been the risk that any increase in one Argonne program will be taken away from another.

To mount a turnaround effort under these conditions is a major accomplishment. Everyone in this room has a right to be proud of it.

Laboratory turnaround

The hard times that Argonne had to survive are even more evident when you eliminate inflation and give our budget for the last eight years in terms of 1981 purchasing power. From this chart, you can see that we really did not start coming back until 1986. And we still have a lot of ground to recover.

The employment trend line illustrates this late recovery even more dramatically. It really was not until '87 that we started rising from our low point.

But Argonne has made a turnaround in more than just budget and employment. The attitude toward Argonne by those groups that can most influence our fate have undergone a change for the better. It is hard to chart in numbers, but is just as much a reality.

The top executives and the program managers in DOE have come increasingly to recognize Argonne's scientific and managerial competence. An important factor in this change is the support we have gotten from the Argonne area office through Anibal Taboas, and from Chicago Operations, headed by Hilary Rauch.

In Congress, we have gone from a position of having little recognition and even less influence to a point where we have a solid core of friends and supporters, plus a growing general awareness of our ability to get a job done.

And finally, among the public at large, there is a greater awareness and more positive feeling about this institution. Many factors have contributed to this change, but certainly the willingness of our employees to talk about Argonne and to speak up for the laboratory have been vital.

Successful initiatives

Back in 1984, I had to report to you immediately after a sizable layoff. I told you then that the lab was in better shape than in many years because we had new initiatives of high national priority. What happened is that like a surfer, we got a little bit ahead of the wave, paddled like crazy to get on the face of the breaker, and now we are accelerating our momentum.

Integral Fast Reactor

In the last year, the first fuel assemblies ever made with the new type of metallic fuel achieved a 15 percent burnup of their nuclear potential. In contrast, conventional fuel for light water reactors burns about 3 percent of its contents before it must be replaced and reprocessed.

We have also proved out the integral fuel cycle to pull usable uranium and plutonium out of the 90 other elements present in spent fuel. This year, we have gone from separating out a few grams to routinely transferring 10 kilograms, or 25 pounds, of uranium. That is almost a full plant scale.

Finally, we have proof in tests that the new fuel is remarkably immune to unexpected failures and can survive even the most serious accidents.

This year, we have started preconstruction modifications on the Hot Fuel Examination Facility/South at Argonne-West in preparation for installation of new remote control facilities to handle and reprocess IFR fuel.

Funding for the IFR operations reflects its emergence as the nation's flagship for advanced reactors. In congressional testimony recently, the DOE said as much.

Advanced Photon Source

The benefits to Argonne can hardly be overstated. The addition of a $456 million facility to the laboratory represents a positive sign for Argonne's future extending into the 21st century. Once completed, about 300 permanent jobs will be tied to the facility. In addition, it will attract scientists from universities, other laboratories and corporations to work at up to 100 separate target stations simultaneously.

The potential for industrial application of the APS has brought more representatives of industry into the design and planning stage of any basic research facility ever previously built. It will be the biggest federal project in Illinois since the creation of Fermilab.

The first schedule that DOE approved for the Advanced Photon Source would have brought the beam line on by 1992 and cost a total of $375 million. But that restrictive fiscal climate that I mentioned earlier resulted in short funding on our preconstruction research and development. As a result, the optimum schedule we can now propose looks like this. It would bring the total cost of the facility to $430 million and get us a beam line by 1994.

Unfortunately, President Reagan's budget and DOE's current schedule only allow $6 million for the construction start this year instead of the $20 million we consider optimum. It would stretch construction out to 1995 and increase total costs to $456 million.

That seven-year construction schedule has the hundreds of prospective APS users seriously concerned. If it is not changed, both the Europeans and the Japanese will use ideas generated in planning of the APS to complete similar machines one or two years ahead of us. In fact, the Japanese will be starting after we do and finishing before we do with their own 7 billion electron volt machine. We have some early indications that congress may seek to shorten our schedule.

High-temperature superconductivity

Funding for Argonne's superconductivity research has grown rapidly from a small base. We got some news last week that indicates the figures for '88 and '89 may be even higher. But our goal is to beat our foreign competitors to the marketplace with practical superconductors incorporated into commercial products. We need an even stronger commitment from Congress, from the administration and from private industry to do so.

Other areas of growth

For example, the ATLAS accelerator project continues to grow with the groundbreaking for an addition to hold the new fragment mass analyzer, and with funding to advance a new injector system. Our new electron microscopy center continues to develop with the addition of this new transmission electron microscope installed this year. A $2 million, 300 kilovolt ultrahigh-voltage analytical electron microscope is also being designed for installation in about two years.

Our advanced computer research facility is adding the latest advanced parallel computer, and has gained national recognition from manufacturers and from the community involved in advanced computer architectures as a unique test bed for innovative techniques.

We have undergone a major restructuring of our fossil programs, consolidating 50 separate projects into eight clusters. Low funding for the fossils and renewables programs is one of the major problems we are facing.

Another area in which top-flight R&D at Argonne is threatened by annual budget crises in Congress is the reduced-enrichment-for-research-and-test-reactors program. Our team has developed substitute fuels that can be used in research and test reactors in place of the weapons grade fuels currently employed.

An important part of our growth during this period when funding from DOE has been so hard to come by has been the work that we do for clients other than DOE. We expect some creep in the '88 figures and for growth to continue into the foreseeable future.

Currently, major portions of our work for others is for the Department of Defense. The biggest projects are the neutral particle beam in the 360 complex and an advanced computer program, which an EES team is doing for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Another promising initiative, which could be funded by the Department of Defense, is research to develop a means of cleaning up sites where many years of producing munitions or other environmentally harmful products have contaminated the soil.

Outreach to industry, academia

We have a variety of industrial partners on such diversified projects as the monolithic fuel cell or the COMMIX computer code, originally developed to predict the effects of mixing hot and cold water in reactor cooling systems.

Finally, we are joined with consortia of universities on both the Multiphase Flow Institute, and the Midwest Plant Biotechnology Consortium.

These cooperative research arrangements have required good communications between our technology transfer center and the scientific program offices. They are closely related to our formal outreach efforts.

In industry, the primary responsibility lies with technology transfer and the ARCH Development Corporation. I honestly feel, and DOE seems to agree, that we have one of the really outstanding technology transfer programs in the nation. It has contact with an average of about 105 private companies each month.

We are similarly a recognized leader in outreach to academia, playing host to more students and faculty -- about 1,200 -- than any other national laboratory. This year, we were designated the host institution of the National Science Foundation co-op program for colleges with nuclear engineering departments. This summer, we will bring in 50 of the nation's brightest high school students -- one from each state -- for research in high temperature superconductors. Next week, we will have the second annual Science Bowl, in which 32 local high school teams will compete in a science quiz. And we are developing a program through which college students will be able to come here with faculty for a semester of study for full college credit.

Another very visible evidence of our turnaround is that Argonne no longer looks like a deserted mill town, but like an international center of research. The site enhancement program has dressed up the entry road, front gate and visitors' reception center. Roughly $2.5 million in road work and $9.8 million in new roofs have been completed as of this year. The next time you see dirt torn up around here it will be for the $5.2 million installation of the new chilled water system and a $12 million renovation for building 200.

The people of Argonne

One is John Schiffer of the Physics Division, who this year was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. The other is David Moncton, acting director of our Advanced Photon Source, who received the Department of Energy's Ernest Orlando Lawrence Memorial Award for science and engineering related to atomic energy.

We have strengthened our management organization with the appointment of Dave as acting associate laboratory director for APS; Frank Fradin as associate laboratory director for Physical Research; Leon Stock as head of the Chemistry Division, Hans Kaper as director of Mathematics and Computer Science; and John Hunt, our new manager of security.

There are about 3,000 other names I would like to mention who may not have gained special attention, but whose daily dedication to doing a superior job has contributed to the upswing in Argonne fortunes.

To provide additional security for our people, in January we introduced $300,000 in free accidental death and dismemberment insurance for employees on travel for the laboratory. We are also evaluating other fringe programs to determine the benefits and costs of changes to keep Argonne competitive with or better than the other laboratories. And as I hope most of you are aware, we have Dr. Ellis Steinberg chairing an ad hoc personnel committee evaluating hires, promotion and development of employees.

Ladies and gentlemen, I want to conclude this State of the Laboratory address with one thought. It is that any time we are not gaining ground, we are losing ground. The turnaround that every person in this room helped to forge is only as good as our last performance and our last rating.

When we start to take it easy, if we do not continue to run scared, if we do not continue to stretch ourselves to do better than what we can do easily, then we are going to start losing ground again and have to dig ourselves out of a hole. We have momentum going for us right now. And I know we have the quality of people who will continue to make the most of it.

Thank you for your efforts during the past year, and for the even better job that I know you will do this year.