State of the Laboratory -- 2004

Delivered March 26, 2004, by Argonne Director Hermann A. Grunder.

Argonne Director Hermann A. Grunder

Welcome to the State of the Laboratory Address.

I have put together where the laboratory is and where I see the laboratory going, and I will conclude with the obvious, namely, that the laboratory is poised to take a major leap forward.

Let me explain. As you very well understand, Argonne National Laboratory is a Department of Energy, Office of Science laboratory. It is a science and engineering lab, created to attack difficult problems from a multidisciplinary point of view. And that's why we have a number of disciplines; that's why we have large facilities.

That is our contribution to the scientific community: Running these facilities, making them available. Now you are very clear about it, that the scientific community consists of universities, laboratories and industry. Industry is spending the largest amount of R&D in our nation, but they probably spend much, much less on the R side where we and the university are.

Within the lab, the divisions and therefore, the division heads, carry in my books a responsibility for creative good and plentiful research or, as the case may be, engineering or development. That's very important to understand because a division should be a unit where cross-communication is extremely easy. As you know, I'm harping about cross-communication about the lab and cross-communication to the outside, with the university.

So, the point which I really want to make from my heart to you is to thank you. You have a tremendous group to work with; you are a tremendous group in your accomplishments; and you are a tremendous group for going forward. As I'm going through the programs, I will thank individuals but that is, by necessity, flawed because, if you thank individuals, there are so many others you forget.

Right after this talk, we will have a awards ceremony for what are known as the Director's Awards, and then tonight we will have 118 awards for people who have spent anywhere between 25 and 45 years working here. That's pretty good. One of these days we'll celebrate a 100 th anniversary award for somebody.

Now, perhaps not the most important but probably the most impressive award is indeed an award which someone of us gets from the outside, from a peer group. And the Nobel Prize is a pretty good award. And so we thank Alexei Abrikosov for being with us and having received that award and continuing to study. Let me quickly note something: Not everybody gets a Nobel Prize, and, you see, a Nobel Prize is a symbol. It happens in a group where there are other prizes. And so we go on to Valerii Vinokour, we go on to George Crabtree, who got the John Bardeen and Kamerlingh Onnes Prizes. That's not accidental. People who work together as friends are people who are lifting the research of a group – of a division. And that's why there is the divisional spirit and the divisional dedication to excellence.

But let me read you a few more awards: Massimo Salvatores has a Grand Prix Ampere from the French Academy . Todd Allen has a Young Engineering Award from the American Nuclear Society. Young people is one of the very important things. Kenneth Nash won the Glenn T. Seaborg Actinide Separation Award, and Nestor Zaluzec, with Dieter Gruen, and Orlando Auciello, and John Carlisle and Ali Erdemir 2003 R&D 100 awards. Walter Podolski has the award for a standing contribution to the FreedomCAR Fuel Cell Technology Team. And I'm sure I forgot fifty more. Forgive me for that. And let's give these guys a hand.

(applause)

Now, I want to talk about the program at Argonne and its synergies.

You know that we have the APS, the IPNS, ATLAS as user facilities. Let me say something about user facilities. User facilities, running of them, are a service to the community. Building of them is a service to the community. But you cannot run or build a user facility without having in-house capability that knows how to use it; who can judge what is the right thing to build, what is the right thing to improve, and how you get 97% availability. Murray (Gibson), we thank you for doing a fabulous job, you and your team, and for setting us an example how we should run the user facilities.

So, we go on and look now at the areas where we are best in class, and guess what? Of course, one is the APS. We have 2,800 users; we have exceptional reliability; we have the exceptional stability of the APS; and we keep on improving it.

And our best-in-class efforts make up one of three categories I will talk about: best in class, strong competitive programs, and up and coming programs.

So I'm here in best in class and, obviously, I will go alphabetically.

The Decision and Information Sciences Division is clearly best in class. There are the analytical tools they developed, so valuable for any decision-making process of some complexity, but they are particularly valuable in the context of national security and protection of the infrastructure. First class! Best in class, actually! No wonder that they spend half their time in Washington . And here I want to mention (James) Peerenboom, who is doing just an outstanding job.

The Environmental Assessment Division, under Tony Dvorak. They did the Environmental Assessment of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and made its continuation possible. They were chosen by the Department of the Interior because of their track record in making environmental assessments. That's best in class, and that's why I'm so proud to have a little picture of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline with a few dignitaries hanging outside my office.

Material Science has an international reputation. They are continuing terrific work in characterizing and finding new materials for the world to come. Because make no mistake: A laboratory such as ours, together with the entire research environment, is the foundation of the economic welfare of the nation in the future.

So now, in Material Science we have a facility coming up which is very exciting, namely our Electron Microscopy Center. It went through a couple of hoops and we'll still have to go through more hoops but – as a research tool: Second to none. That's why it is mentioned here in best in class.

I would say there is a similar situation is the Mathematics and Computer Science Division. They set themselves the goals, on one hand, to run a teraflop-class machine in order to satisfy our computing needs across the laboratory and, secondly, to go into “petascale” computing.

Let me explain. I have learned – obviously from our experts – that what science in the United States needs in the next decade or two is two computing platforms. A platform is a tool you can do your computing with, namely a vector machine, a variety of the Cray. Cray is a company that has pursued vector machines for decades. And a more multipurpose machine such as BlueGene/L. These two platforms are synergistic in system software. And so, we have made an agreement with Oak Ridge National Laboratory that we what to work together on these two machines. The hardware for BlueGene/L will be at Argonne, the hardware for Cray will be at Oak Ridge . These are competitive efforts and Oakridge and Argonne are competing for the available money.

The next point to mention is very important and – in a sense the origin of the laboratory – is the nuclear engineering effort. It is just unbelievable how advanced this laboratory is in nuclear engineering, and that is incredibly important for the future. Let me explain: The greatest emphasis in the foreseeable future is nuclear waste and the associated proliferation problem, and it doesn't matter whether you take waste or proliferation first, the issues belong together. Now, you need to solve that problem, and Argonne people ahead of me knew very well how to solve it: It's fast reactors. And the faster we get to fast reactors, to coin a phrase, the better off we are, because any number of models show that if you don't have fast reactors you are stymied by the waste issue and nuclear energy will simply die. And as other models show, there is not really a path forward without nuclear energy.

So we are thankful to our colleagues here, and our colleagues at Argonne West, who have done very key experimental work. I won't go into more detail or specifics, but it is pioneering work. Best in class.

On nuclear energy, we work together with six other laboratories to check up on each other and to do the work in the laboratories which are best suited for it. I would like to thank everybody who has contributed that, and I would like to thank John Sackett for his enormous contribution to nuclear energy. I'm so happy we can count John Sackett as the youngest of us and therefore he is going to be here another 100 years. He will get the 100-year award.

Going on with best-in-class issues we have Structural Biology. Andrzej Joachimiak and his team are just second to none. There were 150 protein structures they identified in fiscal 2003 alone. This is a world record. Some of you may not know what this is. In structural biology, you want to know exactly what protein structures look like to understand how they function.

Now what Structural Biology needs besides a little upgrade to the beamline, is a protein factory to produce the proteins in milligram quantities. And then we need an advanced crystallization facility. The State of Illinois has, in the governor's budget, design money of $1.5 million dollars and the State, at the moment, is seriously entertaining funding the whole facility for $33.5 million dollars. That, of course, is a wonderful competitive advantage in competing for the protein factory.

Okay! We now come to what I call the strongly competitive programs, where other laboratories or institutions have similar projects. We will do all we can to make our contributions to these programs.

And at the beginning is the Accelerator Physics Group. During the construction of the APS, accelerator physics was clearly second to none at Argonne because you needed these accelerator physicists and engineers in order to build the APS. Murray still keeps a good team. We will need those people again to build RIA, but we should also be looking further into the future. We should think of new methods, and under Kwang-je Kim we founded a accelerator, physics and engineering group which can be matrixed. In other words, everybody can participate and everybody can learn from each other. So that's up and provides strong support. Then, Argonne and Berkeley were the birthplace of actinide chemistry and it is going very strong here still. We should keep it that way because actinide chemistry continues to play a very very important role in nuclear engineering.

Environmental Science is strong at Argonne . We go from assessment to remediation. We have catalysts; we have examples; we know what to do, and how to handle an environmental problem. And Harvey Drucker. I think that's one of his loves, besides transportation and other things, but we are lucky to have an associate lab director who takes that much interest in environmental assessment.

Now we come to a field I grew up in. That's nuclear physics, which Argonne is famous for two very important things among many. Besides having John Schiffer, we have the group that did ab initio calculations of nuclei with no assumptions, and we are up to carbon and with larger computers we can go on and eventually explain all the nuclei. That's a long range plan. We also have a unique capability in ATLAS and, building on that capability, we want to build RIA, the Rare Isotope Accelerator, which I call the ultimate nuclear physics machine. My colleagues disagree because nothing ought to be ultimate because it tests the limit, but perhaps there is a limit. In any case, RIA is now if near CD-0, which is mission need, and the moment mission need is published we'll be told how the competitive process will go and then we will beat the pants off the competition.

My presentation would be totally incomplete without the IPNS. I had the incredible luck – IPNS is neutron scattering – to be in on the IPNS in its very early days. I was at a different place when I came here with (Don) Stevens from DOE. The IPNS is made up of leftovers of the High Energy Physics Program, the Linac and the Rapid Cycling Synchrotron, and it has become a fabulous machine demonstrating that you can do neutron scattering with accelerated protons. Up to there, it was the wisdom that only reactors could do “real neutron scattering.” And now the SNS is an accelerator, too! Bigger, brighter, shinier, newer, etc... etc…, but the IPNS has to educate the next two generations of neutron scatterers or they won't know how to use the SNS. And then I foresee that the IPNS becomes a tool for more local use because it's not the premier national facility any more. But the IPNS has a distinguished history and has a good future.

So we come to transportation technology, one of Harvey 's loves. (Assistant Secretary of Energy David) Garmin was here and called the transportation center the best lab, the best facility. It's beautiful and Larry Johnson is running it first class. That is a great facility. It brings visitors. We not only make tests on hybrid vehicles and other vehicles but we are getting into the business of advising industry and being useful to the automotive industry which, as Harvey keeps telling me, is changing very rapidly to an assembly plant. So it is very significant work.

Now, let's come to the up-and-coming areas, and as good as we are in structural biology we lack a little bit in bioinformatic cell biology, and that crossties to mass computing. We are working very hard on making, with the University of Chicago , some key appointments.

We have three new facilities in mind here: The RBL, which is not built but is approved; the aforementioned crystallization facility, which we hope the State is paying for – that's the protein factory; and we will be tops in biology with bioinformatics. We'll have the whole works.

I would like to say a particular thanks to Al Wagner, who has taken the leadership of chemistry and is currently reinventing the division. I suspect it will come out on Femto-second Chemistry, and Murray has a beautiful tool, the Argonne Free Electron Laser, but it can't be a facility because it's totally local. That is very exciting.

And I would be terribly remiss if close to chemistry I wouldn't mention the beautiful facility Eric Isaacs is building us: The Center for Nanoscale Materials. Nanomaterials is the exciting area where physics, chemistry, and biology come together and the Center will be where we can not only characterize new materials, we can actually build new materials. I thank Eric Isaacs and his team for the great effort.

So, last, not least is national security. And again I give Harvey Drucker a lot of thanks for his effort, for pulling it together, and I want at the same time to introduce to you Alan Foley. Alan, would you stand up?

Okay – Alan Foley, who's Associate Lab Director for National Security. He is currently having discussions with many of you because we want to find out the appropriate way to organize us. In the meantime, we have the choice of being intramural or extramural. So in the near future, I will get together with the ALD's and decide, with all our marvelous stuff, how is the nation going to profit from it? Some of it will just automatically, through journals and through publications and through conferences, get into the public domain. But not only is it good policy it's also the law, the Stevensen-Wydler Act (of 1980), to do active technology transfer. And Stephen Ban has taken the responsibility for this effort and together with the university and other people we are trying to get as much out in the public domain as we can. I'm told that we have in (fiscal) 2003 twenty licenses and $2.1 million dollars.

Furthermore, we have several joint commercialization efforts and we have launched one company, which is called Advanced Diamond Technologies, and Dieter Gruen is a key member of that club.

Now, as you know, no good deed goes unpunished and we will have to compete our contract, Argonne East in 2006, Argonne West – the RFP will be issued the middle of April. The draft RFP is out. We want to acknowledge John Sackett's heroic effort in keeping a diverse group together. And now we have hired a director as part of our bid. His name is Dan Arvizu, he has accepted and he would be the director for the Idaho National Laboratory. We have promised him, as we have promised John, the support necessary to make them a success. It is very clear that we cannot fall down on the job we have and so from now on everybody works eighty hours.

Now be aware that a competition is hard work. It's occasionally frustrating work. However, it's also an opportunity to look at yourself, meaning the laboratories, and see where you could be a bit more efficient, be a bit more communicative; be a bit more or a lot more, collaborative to the good end of more and better science being produced. And of course we are trying very hard, and will succeed, in keeping the relationship between Argonne West and the Argonne East nuclear energy efforts, because both parts have a lot to contribute and will contribute a lot in whatever scenario you want to take. But of course the best scenario is we beat the pants off our competition and go on as if nothing happened.

I need to spend a few words on the issue of employer of choice. We want to be the employer of choice. That is not just a vain ambition of mine or somebody else. In order to run a laboratory which is at the cutting edge of science and technology and engineering, you've got to have the best people, and you only get the best people if you are the employer of choice. You know what I mean by that. It is an environment where creativity can flourish, where there is transparency of how you spend federal dollars, where there is an ease with communication, and there are no artificial boundaries to where somebody can come or go. There is particularly no glass ceiling of any variety. That's what I call the employer of choice.

And so, first of all, it's obvious: you have to have an environment in which you feel safe and in which you are safe, and an environment where your housekeeping is such that you find your notes again. And you don't get electrocuted tripping over something. So that's known as ISM and add another S for security. We are doing sensitive work and therefore the security has to be good! Perfect to be exact! I commend you. Our incidents have gone steadily down, and that's great. Keep doing that. We had 2.2 million working hours without an incident. That's fantastic! Keep doing that. Somebody fell so we start the clock new. That's no tragedy, but just keep focus on ISSM.

The next point is, if you want to have a good environment, you need to pay attention to diversity. Every hiring we do, you need to make sure that you have considered minority and women candidates. That's the law of the land, no excuse, let's do it.

With ISSM and diversity and high intellectual integrity I don't know what would stop us. I really don't know.

So, we have a cadre of high quality, high intellectual-integrity individuals. We have organization models which work. We can reach the cost divisions. We're together with the University of Chicago , with which we, by the way, increased joint appointments from 20 to 90. There's roughly 30 faculty. We get an influx of intellect which we should welcome.

With all these things in place and these facilities coming to pass, we are the place where things happen. Thanks to you.

Thank you.