The State of the Laboratory -- 1989

By its very nature, a report on the state of the laboratory should focus partly on the present and largely on the future. That is especially appropriate for Argonne because our future is bright.

However, I would like to start this talk with a look backward, because nothing better illustrates the state of Argonne at the start of the Bush Administration than the contrast with the start of the Reagan Administration.

The last time we had a new president, Argonne's funding plummeted. We lost one job out of five in four years. In fact, the first of these state-of-the-laboratory reports was delivered then to give the facts, to pin down the rumors and to explain measures needed to meet severe threats to our programs and budget.

In contrast, we entered the Bush Era with stable, climbing funding. Employment is trending upward. Granted the uncertainties that inevitably accompany a change in Administration, our outlook is for continued growth.

Many Argonne improvements account for this difference. The main one, in my opinion, is this: Eight years ago, Argonne had its major commitment of resources in programs that were either of low priority or scheduled for elimination by the incoming administration. Today, Argonne's resources and our leadership are in many areas that rate high with the new president and his team.

Advanced Photon Source

Both the old Reagan and the new Bush administrations have proposed 1990 budgets that include $40 million for the start of construction here. Previously, both DOE and the National Academy of Sciences gave the APS the highest priority in the nation for new materials research facilities.

This year we are getting ready for that construction start by

• awarding a $7.7 million architect/engineer's contract to Lester B. Knight of Chicago last month and awarding the construction management contract later this year,

• making early runs with the robotic fusion welding technique for the aluminum vacuum chambers, and developing prototype magnets and radio frequency cavities,

• successfully demonstrating the undulators, which create the laser-like X-rays, and the gallium pump, which cools the crystals that direct the X-rays to the experiments, and

• increasing APS staff to a level of about 80 by October.

It is vital that Congress approve the construction start in 1990 to meet the schedule on the screen, which has been approved by the Department of Energy. After the basic facility has been constructed, we expect beam lines to be added -- chiefly by industry and academia -- which will bring total investment in the APS to around $1 billion by the turn of the century.

Once we are in operation, we expect to receive about $80 million a year to support operations and related R&D of 350 staff members. When you add the amount that 2,000 visiting users per year will spend in this area and the economic turnover of those dollars within the state economy, we get a total impact on Illinois of $225 million a year stretching decades into the future. That is one reason the governor and the Illinois congressional delegation will pay very close attention to the APS budget as it goes through the congressional process.

But the importance of the Advanced Photon Source to Argonne is even greater. Up to 100 specialized experimental areas like this medical beam line will be accessible for leading-edge work by Argonne scientists in almost every discipline. The latest of many Nobel prizes to be given for X-ray and related research was given to a team that used an X-ray source with only one-billionth the brilliance of the APS.

The solutions to problems as diverse as pollution, steel failure or the AIDS virus are likely to follow from being able to determine -- at the atomic level -- the structures of the materials or virus involved. The APS represents a stake in the future for every person in this audience.

Integral Fast Reactor

At Experimental Breeder Reactor II in Idaho, the IFR has already demonstrated its passive shutdown capability in emergencies. Electrorefining of fuel batches has moved up from laboratory scale to engineering scale.

In tests currently continuing at EBR-II, IFR fuel has burned up more than 19 percent of its nuclear potential without having to be replaced and re-processed. This compares with three percent or less fuel burnup in current commercial reactors. The IFR also "breeds" fuel by enriching otherwise unusable uranium at the same time that it generates power. Together, those two characteristics make IFR metallic fuel up to 100 percent more efficient than present reactor fuel.

And this year, the nation's press discovered that the IFR will turn back the most dangerous and longest-lived nuclear wastes into the reactor and burn them up as fuel. It reduces the time that waste must be kept underground from thousands of years for present day reactors to a few hundred years -- easily within the engineering capability of humankind to plan for.

At the same time, nuclear power represents a partial solution to the "greenhouse effect", the global warming caused by emissions from burning of fossil fuel.

We are confident that work to convert the Hot Fuel Examination Facility-South building at Argonne-West into a plant-scale reprocessing demonstration unit will continue on schedule. But as in previous years' budgets, the proposed 1990 funding level for the IFR will have to be increased by Congress to maintain the rate of research progress we have achieved to date. The Japanese government is negotiating to add several million dollars to our budget.

High-temperature superconductors

Our leadership was solidified a few months ago when Governor Thompson announced that the National Science Foundation had designated a consortium of Argonne and three Illinois universities as a $25 million National Superconductivity Science and Technology Center.

Out of 14 items in the list of accomplishments in high-temperature superconductivity by DOE's Office of Basic Energy Science, 5 involved Argonne researchers. We have led in the investigation of the atomic structure and electronic structure of the three major classes of compounds that have shown the greatest promise as high-temperature superconductors.

In superconductivity applications research, we have

• raised the current density in wire by 10 times over what we could achieve a year ago,

• extruded wire out of the new materials as they have been discovered, and

• proved with industrial partners that one superconductor provides better shielding for cable than copper or iron.

Parallel computing

We continue to build our capability and expertise toward the time, perhaps 1991, when DOE establishes a national production center for parallel computation. We want it located here. We now have eight parallel computing models at our Advanced Computer Research Facility, and have established an industrial affiliates program. We are also developing a state program that will provide guidance to small business on how to use parallel computers.

An area that stands high on the new administration's priority list is the complex of problem involving greenhouse effect, global warming, acid rain and other effects of burning fossil fuels. Argonne's special expertise ranges from basic research on the makeup of coal to an unexcelled capability for technical analysis.

Both President Bush and Energy Secretary Watkins have designated two other areas of special concern in their early pronouncements.

Outreach: technology transfer and education

We will have a dramatization of how that benefits Argonne employees immediately after my talk. But our leadership is also benefiting the Department of Energy through the favorable attention it has drawn from the public and industry.

With the creation of ARCH Development Corporation two years ago, we became the only national lab in the system that had established a separate venture corporation with a university. This year, we announced another first, the establishment of ARCH's development fund -- $8.5 million in seed money to help finance the commercialization of discoveries made at Argonne and the university.

President Bush and Secretary Watkins also agree that they want stronger outreach from the national labs to education. Argonne plays host to the most students and faculty members -- about 2,000 a year -- of any national laboratory. Our five-year plan calls for significant growth even beyond the present level of activity.

It is an advantage for the laboratory to have demonstrated leadership in areas that are important to the new administration. But it is also a sign of health that we excel in areas of traditional national laboratory activity, such as accelerator development. We have two which have carried our reputation over the last decade. Both are continuing to demonstrate creativity and vitality.

Accelerator technology and development

We are also completing a $1.5 million detector called the Fragment Mass Analyzer, which will aid the search for previously unknown nuclei. Other successful additions to ATLAS, especially a gamma-ray detector developed in cooperation with the University of Notre Dame, put us in a favorable position to compete for a $17 million national "gamma-sphere" detector complex. Two other labs are competing for this plum.

Our other major accelerator, the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source, tripled its neutron beam intensity with the installation of a new enriched uranium target last fall. This will allow more experiments in less time and allow for many specialized experiments that require very small samples. We continue to receive three times as many proposed experiments for IPNS as we can accommodate.

It is significant that, although the 1990 budget for physical research activities at Argonne increased in the range of five to seven percent, budgets proposed for IPNS and ATLAS will be up more than 20 percent.

The latest Argonne initiative in accelerator development is a technique called "wake field acceleration. " It promises to accelerate subatomic particles to higher energies in shorter distances than has been possible before.

This is accomplished by firing a pulse through plasma or a radio frequency cavity to create a wake. If a second pulse is timed to follow exactly right, it can ride the wake of the first pulse like a surfer behind a motor boat. Doe has been most excited and encouraging about our progress.

In another obvious growth area, we are approaching a saturation of our present capacity for work on assessment and characterization of environmentally contaminated DOD and DOE sites. We have $30 million worth of such work at present, and more of it on the horizon.

But at the other end of Energy, Environmental and Biological Research, funding for fossil and renewable energy by the new administration -- as with the past one -- has been proposed to Congress at a low level. We expect that Congress will raise those budgets as they have in the past.

Non-programmatic advances

Argonne continues to enjoy a high reputation in Washington for cost-effective controls in its support operations. Finally, the physical plant and the Argonne site look and work better than they have in a decade, if you discount the trenches and mud that mar the landscape from Rudy Bouie's work in progress.

Overall, Argonne's performance was judged "excellent" in our most recent appraisal by the Department of Energy, and our nuclear energy programs earned a rating of "outstanding". In summary, I believe Argonne is in good shape.

We better be. We're going to need a lot of our energy to face new challenges. Secretary Watkins has made it clear in all his pronouncements that this is a new era.

New challenges

This will require some change in attitude and action for some people in this room. Change is not always comfortable.

But we are going to change and we are going to excel in this new era. I have personally pledged to Secretary Watkins that Argonne is 100 percent behind his new approach. Working with Anibal Taboas, Argonne Area Office Manager, and Hilary Rauch, with his Chicago Operations Team, I expect to keep that promise. I expect each of you to keep it with me.

Awards presentations

First, we have $1,000 Director's Awards to go to five individuals or teams whose achievements were judged to be the best of those already recognized last year with Pacesetter Awards. I would ask them to come on stage to receive their checks.

First, Robert J. Forrester from Argonne-West for his leadership in production of safety analysis and other environmental analyses on the HFEF-South modifications. His effort brought significant benefits to the IFR fuel cycle demonstration program.

Next, John Richard Horton of Support Services Division is recognized for his outstanding effort to improve service in travel and in food services while maintaining tight cost controls.

Next, a Director's Award for Robert Kampwirth, and Joonhee Kang, both of the Materials Science Division. They provided extraordinary talent and many long, late hours to produce thin films of the new oxide superconductor containing bismuth, strontium, calcium and copper. These efforts push Argonne to the forefront of this highly competitive field of thin-film, high-temperature superconductivity.

Would Richard C. Pardo and Peter Billquist, both of the Physics Division, step up? They receive an Award for their outstanding contributions to the completion and operation of the ATLAS electron cyclotron resonance ion source and its high-voltage platform.

Finally, a multi-divisional team consisting of James Viccaro, Robert Smither and Suk Kim, all of APS, and George Forster, of materials and components technology, for their success in the design and testing of the APS prototype undulator and liquid-gallium cooled first-optics at Cornell University Synchrotron. As a result of their work, Argonne has received high visibility as an emerging synchrotron radiation laboratory.

To help me with the next series of presentations, I would like to ask Tom Churchwell, vice president of ARCH Development Corporation, to hand out checks that represent a total of $58,750 in royalty distribution to Argonne inventors of five technologies.

First, an aggregate of $25,000 is given to the inventors on eight patents that relate to the monolithic solid oxide fuel cell. Inventors who are here with us this morning include John Ackerman, Dennis Dees, Joseph Herceg, Franklin Mrazek, John Picciolo, Jitendra Singh and John Young . Fuel cell inventors who benefited but who are not with us today include Harlan Anderson, Andrea Bosak, Donald Busch, Terry Claar, Joseph Dusek, Brian Flandermeyer, Charles McPheeters and Roger Poeppel.

Next, I want to recognize the inventors of the toxic gas detector, or sniffer, developed here at Argonne. Commercialization of this technology so far has led to a $10,000 return to the inventors. They include Joseph Stetter, Melvin Findlay, William Penrose and Solomon Zaromb. Unable to be with us today is Taka Otagawa.

I would like to invite the inventors of the ArgoNox additive, which inexpensively removes more than 70 percent of the nitrogen oxides from stack gases at coal-burning power plants. To receive the $3,750 royalty distribution, I'd like to invite on stage John Harkness and Richard Doctor. Ronald Wingender is not able to attend this morning.

Finally, we have a check here for $12,500 for Dieter Gruen, who is absent today, for the commercialization of his metal precursor technology related to high-temperature superconductivity, and checks that bring to $6,000 the royalties paid on the helium dilution refrigerator to Ken Gray and Pat Roach, who couldn't be with us.

Congratulations to all you gentlemen.

Let me conclude by acknowledging that there are programs of high excellence which I did not mention in my very condensed review this morning. There are individuals who deserve recognition and reward which we could not bring up on stage. But that doesn't mean that I don't realize that the state of our laboratory is a direct result of the effort by every one of you. I appreciate it, and count on you to help build an even better future for Argonne.

Thank you.