The State of the Laboratory -- 1990

Those of you who heard the Secretary of Energy, Admiral James Watkins, address Argonne employees, got the best possible sense of the state of Argonne National Laboratory. It was clear from his comments that the value of Argonne and its primary scientific initiatives are recognized and supported at the highest level of DOE.

We have other friends in high places. The President's Science Advisor, Allan Bromley, formerly served on our Science and Technology Advisory Committee. When the appointments were announced for President Bush's new Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, three of the 12 members were from Argonne's Board of Governors. One of them, Walter Massey, is a former director of this laboratory.

Finally, the robust health of the laboratory is reflected in more tangible terms. Our budget for the current fiscal year is $388 Million, up 22 percent over 1989. We have seen a steady rise over the last five years and expect an even sharper increase in 1991 to about $500 Million. We will be adding 200 new hires to our employment rolls this year and even more in fiscal 1991.

But we didn't get to this state of health by divine right or by accident. If we don't analyze and learn from our experience of the `80s, we could slide back to where we were at the beginning of the decade.

And where was that? We took the heaviest hit of any national laboratory in funding and employment the last time a new national administration came in. Not only did we lack friends among the president's advisors, we had mighty few friends anywhere we needed them -- in DOE, in Congress or in industry.

As a reminder for any of you who have forgotten, the possible closing of Argonne was grist for the rumor mills in Washington and the subject of headlines in local papers.

How did we turn it around and what can we learn for future guidance? The answer, I believe, is to look at each major program that is healthy now and see how it got that way.

To be really healthy, a big national laboratory must have at least one major national research facility -- usually a big accelerator. And entering the `80s, Argonne had just closed its biggest accelerator, the Zero Gradient Synchrotron. During the interim when we didn't really have a major national facility, we used two small accelerators to build our reputation for creativity, user friendliness and on-time, on-budget operation.

One was the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source, which cannibalized elements from the old ZGS. The other was ATLAS.

Finally, we got back into the big time by risking discretionary funds to assume leadership in the competition for the Advanced Photon Source, the biggest materials science facility ever built in this country. We will be breaking ground in a couple of months for this $456 million, world-class synchrotron radiation research center.

Advanced Photon Source

We are receiving $51.5 million for APS construction and supporting operations this year. The DOE spending plan, which is reflected in the president's 1991 budget proposal to Congress, supports construction that would allow us to start research in the fall of 1995 -- a year behind a similar synchrotron under construction by the Europeans and about the same estimated time as the Japanese.

Some members of Congress feel it is important to optimize our financial investment by shortening the construction schedule. Admiral Watkins is aware of the potential benefits. This optimized spending plan could bring us on line with the Europeans and ahead of the Japanese. We are ready to accelerate this project.

We have been hiring staff as fast as funds are released to us for that purpose. The cultural, archeological, geological and soil work is either on schedule or completed on the snowy acres that will shortly be our biggest research facility. The study, which found no significant environmental impact, is moving forward toward approval within the state of Illinois' Department of Energy and the federal DOE. Both the architect-engineering contract and the construction management contract have been signed with leading national firms.

The first quadrapole magnet for guiding the positron beam has been shipped to Fermilab for testing. A prototype undulator, which will wiggle the positron beam to generate brilliant X-rays, has been designed by APS for testing at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Testing continues on the aluminum vacuum chamber prototype. And we are advancing development of a unique design to run liquid gallium through channels in the silicon crystals that act as polarizing mirrors for the X-ray beam, both to cool one side of the crystal and to heat the opposite side to offset distortion. I can't emphasize too much the importance of every discipline at Argonne getting ready to use APS in its own field of knowledge. We will be pleased if geologists, ceramists, metallurgists, chemists, physicists and biologists from other organizations and countries gain world renown through their work at the Advanced Photon Source. But we would prefer that Argonne people be the ones to do so.

IPNS and ATLAS

Meanwhile, the accelerators that carried Argonne's reputation during the years when we "wandered in the wilderness" are doing very well indeed. What looks like a flying saucer here is really the GLAD target area being moved into the IPNS complex for specialized neutron studies of glassy, liquid and amorphous materials. It raises the number of instruments at IPNS to 12.

ATLAS, the Argonne Tandem Linear Accelerator System, has grown from this rather modest layout in the early `80s to Lowell Bollinger's current empire. Every time I visit, there's a new wall punched out or a new addition put on. This year we successfully injected positive ions from this new source into the accelerator, which will enable us to boost the beam intensity by 100 times and accelerate ions as heavy as uranium.

In the president's 1991 budget, IPNS funding is up 21 percent over this year, and ATLAS funding increases 16 percent over 1990.

Wakefield Accelerator

What may be the accelerator of the future, the embryonic Wakefield Accelerator, continues in development in high energy physics. The concept promises to accelerate electrons to higher energies in shorter distances than previously possible. It uses the electromagnetic fields generated in the wake of a pulse of charged particles to accelerate a trailing pulse of particles. It is similar to the way a speeding truck can pull a following vehicle behind it.

In 1987, Argonne performed the first demonstration of Wakefield Acceleration. Currently, we are conducting 16 to 18 Wakefield experiments per year. We have narrowed the preferred system to dielectric tube. DOE is considering a phased development to give us a 1 GeV Wakefield Accelerator in five years.

Finally, we are conducting useful accelerator work with strategic defense initiative funding.

Realistically, we do not expect growth in funding for the neutral particle beam, which flows off the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source. However, we are installing a Continuous Wave Deuterium Demonstrator, which could influence on our future fusion research.

Integral Fast Reactor

The second major component of Argonne's turnaround is in reactor research.

For perspective you may recall that in 1980, the Clinch River Breeder Reactor was the nation's advanced reactor flagship. The Fast Flux Test Reactor at Hanford was the primary test facility for it. Argonne's Experimental Breeder Reactor II was seriously threatened with shutdown.

What happened then is one of the classic bootstrap stories of American science. Clinch river died. Seizing the opening, Argonne's teams brought forth the innovative concept which has now become the nation's leading advanced reactor concept -- the Integral Fast Reactor.

It is the only technology that can take the long-lived nuclear wastes generated in the reactor and recycle them back into the reactor as fuel. This reduces the toxic lifetime of high-level nuclear waste from millions of years to a few hundred years.

We have already demonstrated that the IFR is passively safe, that the new metallic fuels have an extremely high burnup before they have to be replaced in the reactor, and that we can recover commercial quantities of fuel from pyrometallurgical reprocessing of used fuel. We are now evaluating fuel failure mechanisms. In the process, we are documenting all of our research to establish a firm base for licensing the IFR when it goes commercial.

We expect to complete the refurbishment of our Fuel Cycle Facility at Experimental Breeder Reactor II in Idaho in 1991. We will then have a pilot-plant-scale IFR prototype.

As in the past, the president's budget has been adequate in facilities funding, which totals $76.9 million for fiscal '91. But the operating budget of $10 million is about $17.1 million short. As in the past, we expect that Congress will correct this shortfall.

At the same time that the IFR is realizing the potential we saw for it earlier, new potential growth areas also have opened up. One of them is the possibility that IFR could not only process its own nuclear wastes but the tons of nuclear waste stored around the country in the used fuel of commercial light-water reactors.

Through theoretical analysis, we have found two or three ways this might be done. Through use of discretionary funds, we are following up those possibilities. If we are successful, the IFR would solve not only the energy problems of the future, but the nuclear waste problems of the past.

The other area of possible growth for IFR lies in the international arena. The Japanese are already funding some IFR research to keep current on the technology. The French are seriously evaluating their own nuclear system and have recognized the need for additional R&D. Argonne's breeder reactor, which was once an orphan in the world system, shows clear potential to dominate in the future.

High-temperature superconductivity

Like our reactor success, the basis for Argonne leadership in superconductivity was based on historical competence in the field.

We fully committed that expertise into the opening created when new high-temperature superconductors were discovered in 1986. Since that time, Argonne has had the largest publicly funded program in the nation.

Currently our program for high-temperature and low-temperature superconductivity totals about $15.6 Million per year, which is 17 percent over our level in 1989.

Five of the 14 superconductivity-related accomplishments listed by DOE's Office of Basic Energy Science were achieved at Argonne. And our leadership in applications research has attracted an array of industrial collaborators on projects as diverse as filaments for cable and naval propulsion.

I believe we've already answered the primary question about high-temperature superconductors, which is, "can they ever carry enough current to be used in a commercial product"? These high-temperature superconducting leads are very close to market readiness in taking power from conventional electrical feeds and running it into low-temperature superconductors of the type used on big accelerators. We have also made major advances in increasing the flexibility of superconductors by incorporating various combinations of silver as a backing or a component in the wire.

Argonne is in a particularly good position to take the lead in two other areas of superconductivity application.

One is magnetically levitated trains. President Bush has designated this as one of the 10 important new technologies to be pursued by the nation, and $10 million was earmarked in the 1991 budget proposal for maglev research.

Argonne has the expertise in high-temperature and low-temperature superconductivity. We produced the technical-economic study of maglev on which the national planning is based. We have a maglev experimental wheel with which to test configurations of guide beds and vehicles.

We have a proposal into the state of Illinois that would enable us to build a short maglev track here. We are already in contact with such industrial partners as General Motors Electromotive Division and Pullman. As both a rail and air center, Chicago offers the network of commercial collaborators to assure market relevance.

The other potential growth area is Naval propulsion. Argonne built the world's largest superconducting dipole magnet for magnetohydrodynamics experimentation with fossil fuels. But we will use it to test the feasibility of taking in sea water through one end of the channel, throwing an electric charge into it and then electromagnetically repelling it out the other end of the channel. This water-jet system is free of most of the moving parts involved in today's ships.

Environment and health

Environmental and health research has promising growth potential for the `90s. A decade ago, doing general research in this area for the nation was a big part of Argonne's program. It took the biggest "hit" when the Reagan Administration came in.

Now we are able to turn our expertise toward environmental characterization and remediation of specific sites. We have more work than we can handle.

Argonne did the environmental characterization work of the various Superconducting Super Colllider sites and is continuing to do environmental studies for the New Production Reactor. We have more than $10 million in work on military bases where past use has left environmental problems.

Argonne has high competence in the field of radiation biology, which has tended to get low priority in national budgets. We hope to capitalize on Argonne's position as the nation's only full capacity reactor research center to foster related research into radiation biology. We expect to build on the recent discovery by our biomedical group of an enzyme that -- in a test tube -- controls tumor growth for a wide variety of cancer types.

The high-quality work already done by our biomedical people in characterizing antibodies and virus mechanisms should benefit from a tool like the Advanced Photon Source.

We expect to get funding to do research on Argonne's own environmental problems.

Finally, we expect to use our expertise in complex parallel computing, instrumentation and data management to contribute to the study of changes in global climate.

Education and industrial outreach

Argonne will also continue to lead in two major DOE initiatives that are not in the direct line of scientific research.

The president and the secretary of energy are determined to improve science and math education in this country. Argonne is in a particularly good position to contribute because we have built up the most comprehensive and well developed model of a science education center at a national laboratory in this country. About 1,800 students and faculty come to this lab each year, ranging from pre-college through postdoctoral.

Secretary Watkins also has provided $500,000 for us to develop the Chicago Science Explorers. This innovative program will take Bill Kurtis' science specials from public television or video tape and make them the core of a whole program of classroom preparation and field visits to science institutions. We aim to not only attract the students' attention, but to solidly anchor their interest in science.

The other outreach program is to industry. During his visit here, Admiral Watkins indicated that the emphasis on technology transfer from the national labs is only going to grow stronger. I consider that we have one of the most innovative technology transfer programs with industry among the national labs.

Environmental restoration

As I mentioned earlier, environment and health research are likely growth areas in the future. But not all the money we spend on those topics will be in research. We have a lot of corrective action to take -- not just for the last 10 years -- but for the last 40 years at this site.

Current plans call for us to spend more than $180 million through 1995 for environmental restoration and remediation, starting this year with an $11.2 million budget. Among the first projects is improved handling of water that runs off of the coal pile and effluent from the boiler house.

We will upgrade the present waste-water treatment facility at the southeastern corner of the property. And dozens of unused fuel tanks are being taken out of the ground and disposed of. Fuel tanks that continue in use will be upgraded to highest environmental standards.

All this work, plus the many changes in our procedures at Argonne are, in part, preparation for a visit from the Department of Energy's famous "Tiger Teams". They will be casting a very critical eye on everything we're doing in environment, safety and health. I expect the same kind of initiative that has made us successful in our scientific programs to show up in the preparations for this inspection.

In summary, the state of the laboratory's health is very good. If we can learn from the lessons of the last decade, we can look forward to even healthier growth in the next decade.

Admiral Watkins came here 45 years to the day -- February 16, 1945 -- after General Leslie Groves of the Manhattan Project met in Chicago with his policy group to lay out the directions they thought the national laboratories would take after World War II. Their planning tracks very closely with a lot of the topics we have discussed today, including outreach to industry, outreach to universities and a half dozen other important parts of our mission. However, from year to year and administration to administration, the emphasis within those components of the mission shifts.

When we are alert to the changes in emphasis, we succeed. When we fail to sense new directions or commit ourselves too quickly to fads, we end up with trend line like we had the first half of the `80s.

Underlying our strategy is the basic assumption that we have the people with the talent, the energy and the creativity to do the job. I want to thank all of you for the effort that you have put forward in Argonne's turnaround and to tell you that it is a pleasure to work with an organization of such competence.