The State of the Laboratory -- 1985

It is my pleasure to tell you that this state of the laboratory address is being delivered much later than I had originally intended.

I say that without apology. If I were delivering this speech earlier -- as I originally had planned -- this is the kind of news I would be delivering:

"So far as we can tell, our 1986 budget has been cut about $45 million below the 1985 level. We face the prospect of laying off about 1,300 people."

But by waiting until now -- and due to extraordinary effort on the part of the lab, the university and friends of Argonne -- I am able to tell you that Argonne expects to have funding in fiscal 1986 about equal to 1985.

I think you can understand why it is a pleasure for me to be late in making this address.

The funding is important. Let no one question that fact. However, even more important as an indicator of the state of the laboratory's health are the nature of the programs that were funded, and the technical achievements of the laboratory, which qualified Argonne for the additional funding.

More than a year ago when I discussed the state of the laboratory with you, I told you I was encouraged because we had more new, promising initiatives underway in areas of clear national priority than at any time in modern Argonne history. I said then that these initiatives would determine our future.

I can't claim to have recognized back then how quickly they would determine our fate. It was our initiatives -- our new thrusts -- that made up most of the funding that restored our '86 budget to the approximate level of 1985. Those initiatives made the difference. They didn't just allow us to keep jobs and work here. These projects are precisely the ones that we are counting on to provide Argonne's growth in the future. Let me review them with you.

Successful initiatives

An equally important priority for 1986 was funding to continue design work on the six billion electron-volt synchrotron light source. Two million dollars will be coming to Argonne this year to advance the design. In the course of the last year, Argonne has assumed clear leadership in the national effort to bring this concept to reality.

Other important initiatives include $2 million to support research at Argonne into the fundamental chemistry of energy processes. Advanced computing, which I emphasized last year as vital to our future, was provided an additional $3 million. About $2 million is expected for Argonne's Surface and Interfacial Science and Technology Initiative, which will add to our already significant strength in material science and technology.

In keeping with our strategic policy to perform defense work that is appropriate to our mission, we will receive about $4 million for space reactor research and other Strategic Defense Initiative projects, plus $1 million for treaty verification technology.

So far, only one of the two major bills on which we depend -- the energy and water bill -- has been passed by Congress and signed into law by the president. The interior bill is still in Congress.

We expect it to include between $3 million and $5 million for the steel initiative in which Argonne research will help American steel companies leapfrog their foreign competitors. The interior bill also will probably have about $3.8 million for conservation, including tribology, and another $3.8 million for corrosion/erosion, dry scrubber research and other fossil projects. In addition, growth in previously established programs here accounts for about $5 million over the president's budget.

Peer and personal recognition

For example, Secretary Herrington said during a press conference in Idaho, and I quote, "One of the things that impressed us was the IFR. I think it's the best technology in the world. Many countries will be coming here to learn about it."

Under Secretary Joseph Salgado, the second highest official in the Energy Department, wrote to me after touring the lab that, and again I quote, "Argonne is doing an outstanding job."

In a press interview, President Reagan's science advisor Jay Keyworth named Argonne first among the laboratories that were doing a good job in technology transfer.

Confirming these personal appraisals by national leaders has been recognition by our peers and by the public for outstanding work.

For example, five of the 100 most promising young scientists in the nation, as determined by a peer panel, were Argonne staffers. Of the 100 most significant scientific innovations in the nation, according to Science Digest, two were by Argonne scientists. And Argonne teams were credited for three of the nation's 100 most significant new technical developments during 1985. The three "IR-100 awards" brings the laboratory's total to 33 since 1964.

In addition, opinion leaders in the scientific community are growing more aware of Argonne's leadership, as evidenced by the many honors, fellowships and awards that were made to our staff members this year.

Physical research

Certainly, we can't give enough credit to the team involved in the conceptual design of the 6 GeV synchrotron light source. Last year at this time, we were one of three or four laboratories in the running for consideration of this project. To most of the physics community, Argonne was considered a dark-horse contender.

Because of the creativity and dedication of Yanglai Cho, Gopal Shenoy, and Argonne Fellow Lee Teng and their team, Argonne has clearly established itself as the leader in this effort. We still have plenty of hurdles to clear, especially considering that no decision has been made to build the accelerator. But the science community is now depending on Argonne more than any other laboratory to bring the 6 GeV planning to a stage where it can be included in the 1987 budget.

An important Argonne advantage in this competition arises from our performance at the two world-class accelerators already in use here. Argonne's prestige and reputation in accelerator technology have rested on IPNS and ATLAS for years. And in 1985, each facility continued to innovate to maintain its leadership.

At IPNS, Jack Carpenter and his team produced another technical advance, like the ones that have won them honors in the past, by developing the world's coldest neutron moderator. It operates at about 12 degrees above absolute zero and produces neutrons at about 20 degrees above absolute zero.

Lowell Bollinger and his team barely stopped long enough to celebrate the dedication of the world's first superconducting heavy ion accelerator, ATLAS, before they added a new injector. It permits acceleration of ions heavier than any previously used.

And I hope you didn't expect me to complete a discussion of physical research without attention to my home discipline -- chemistry. Especially when we have an achievement like Phil Horwitz's. Literally hundreds of millions of dollars could be saved by his TRUEX process, which shrinks high-level radioactive waste to one percent of its original bulk by removing transuranic elements. The key chemical in this process also promises to improve our ability to detect small amounts of radioactive materials in the human body.

Engineering research

Fuels development, led by Leon Walters has produced more than 100 batches of fuel castings in the experimental fuels laboratory. Les Burris, leading the pyroprocess development has successfully completed initial experiments on electrorefining and halide slagging. The safety effort, led by John Marchaterre and Bob Sevy, has completed three accident simulation experiments in the Transient Reactor Test Facility to confirm inherent safety characteristics of the metallic core design.

In addition, a team led by Mike Lineberry, Bob Phipps and Jim Burelbach designed an IFR fuel-cycle facility that would cost only about $50 million for a 1,400-megawatt, commercial-scale IFR plant. The development is in support of projects conducted by commercial firms that now have adopted the metallic fuel in their plant designs.

Energy, environmental and biological research

Richard Doctor, John Harkness, Jeff Marchetti and Ron Wingender have shown experimentally that more than 90 percent of the nitrous oxide in flue gas can be removed in the double alkali scrubber. These laboratory experiments used two different additive systems to enhance the NOx removal, while also removing more than 90 percent of the sulfur dioxide.

And finally, the research team of Patricia and Joseph Dehmer and Stephen Pratt recently put into operation an experimental facility that uses tuned lasers to detect and measure key pollutant compounds mixed into large quantities of surrounding materials.

Administrative support

Primary examples would include the reorganization of our scientific programs from four major clusters of programs, each with its own associate laboratory director, to three. We are already benefiting from the more cohesive grouping of related research areas, and the realignment of our organization to our strategic plan.

We have significantly strengthened our technology transfer organization. Our strategic planning group has been enlarged and its responsibilities increased.

The story of how we are improving our support operations has become a hit on the Washington circuit. After Under Secretary Salgado heard about it here, he suggested that other people in DOE needed to know about it. Gale Pewitt, our chief operations officer, has explained it to most of the people who count on the administrative side in Washington, and quite a few program managers, to boot. We are also getting requests for information about it from other laboratories. Gale could probably spend most of his career consulting on how to do more with less.

Our overhead control program has three major thrusts. The first is through setting the budget for direct expense levels. Over the last five years, this has resulted in a reduction in the number of support divisions from 12 to 4, and an increase in the ratio of support employees to support supervision from 6-to-1 to 9-to-1.

The second is the expenditures management program, which aims at increasing productivity, controlling expenditures and encouraging laboratory-wide efficiencies. As you may have read in the bulletin, savings in 1985 from employee ideas summarized by the expenditures management steering committee totaled more than $800,000.

The third major area is resource allocation under the Argonne overhead management system, which has resulted in a reduction in the support operations budget by $2.5 million. This is a disciplined method of evaluating each activity of the service organizations, assessing the risk of eliminating an activity, and developing a target budget based on those findings. Our on-going goal is to offset inflation through continued use of Argonne overhead management.

The final class of improvements here is one that any of us can see. It is in the physical plant. You can now drive over most of our roads without jeopardizing your springs, axles or sacroiliac. Roofs that have leaked for years are being reworked. As we meet today, three new buildings are being finished. And the interiors of established buildings are no longer seedy or sterile looking.

The laboratory is starting to look like a first-class establishment where first-class work is being done.

All of these improvements -- in scientific results, in physical plant, in overhead management and in image -- supported the arguments of our advocates in Washington during the budget process. Those advocates included the University of Chicago and key Illinois congressmen. An especially active role was taken by Rep. Harris Fawell, Rep. George O'Brien, Rep. Sidney Yates and Senators Paul Simon and Alan Dixon.

Future challenge, future promise

And now we can all relax? Right?

Wrong!

If I don't convey any other message here today, I want you to go away believing this: the time when we could all take it easy and let the money come in is part of the past. We haven't seen that era in a long time, and we don't expect to see it again.

If we had relaxed over the past year, there would be fewer of us here today.

There is serious consideration in Congress of legislation forcing a reduction in the growth of the national debt. It has been suggested that a recision of some 5 percent in bills already passed would be a good way to start.

This shouldn't scare us. No one rained money down on us in the past couple of years. No one is going to rain it down on us in the future. I don't expect R&D money to grow more plentiful anywhere in the near future -- not in the universities, not in industry, and not in the federal government. We can plan on earning every dollar we get.

Despite those near-term challenges, I believe Argonne faces a promising future. The results of the last 12 months confirm that belief. But we will only succeed in the future if we take the same approach we took this past year.

We can't say, "We have some successful initiatives, so let's sit back and milk them." We have to keep innovating. We have to keep achieving. We have to keep adjusting to new conditions and demands, the same way we did this last year.

Long-term strategy -- `Operate as a laboratory'

To begin with, we have made some basic assumptions about major national objectives that are likely to influence lab priorities and programs in the coming years.

They are:

• First, that energy generally will re-emerge as a national R&D priority over the next decade. The timing is uncertain, but U.S. oil imports will rise, and a few mideastern countries will resume a dominant supply role in oil. Electricity will continue to increase its share of the total energy market.

• Second, the scale and complexity of facilities required for scientific research will continue to expand, and national laboratories will build most of the new ones.

• Third, preservation of environmental quality will continue to be a major national policy objective -- one that faces major technical problems.

• Fourth, industrial competitiveness will become an increasingly important -- perhaps dominant -- standard for evaluating federally supported research in this country.

• Fifth, exploratory research will continue on advanced concepts of military technology. Much of that research will concentrate in areas where multi-program laboratories have traditionally been strong.

Our existing base programs and the new initiatives build on those assumptions. They fit into six major thrust areas, with specific initiatives related to each. Let me point out that this list of priority initiatives was developed last spring. You should recognize most of them from my description of the budget items that were added by Congress early this winter.

Under the science and technology base, you will see the center for fundamental chemistry of energy processes, and advanced computing, both of which are funded for 1986.

As part of industrial competitiveness, we have the steel initiative, which we expect to have funded. Incidentally, our research this year already yielded a patent application on a method of electromagnetically casting liquid steel into sheets. The process would eliminate the ingots and rolling mills that chew up so much cost. Also, we list the off-road machinery initiative which could provide firms like John Deere, J.I. Case and Caterpillar with technology to leapfrog their foreign competitors.

There is the Midwestern Plant Biotechnology Consortium, which will meet near here tomorrow. About a dozen major midwestern universities will join more than 30 industrial corporations in determining research priorities. The National Science Foundation already has expressed very serious interest in participating and supporting this effort.

Also Argonne and the university have established a separate corporation -- ARCH -- geared to commercialize innovations from both institutions. You will hear more about this shortly.

Under environmental quality, our initiatives include experimental waste treatment and advanced environmental control technology.

In the area of national security you can see technology for arms control and treaty verification, which receives some funding this year, and the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Going on to liquid metal reactor R&D, our primary initiative is the Integral Fast Reactor, of course.

And under basic and applied surface science, the initiatives include basic surface science, the 6 GeV light source, corrosion and erosion and tribology. Almost all are being funded this year.

These initiatives are funded at a level that enables us to get a foot in the door. If we show results with what has been given us, we can expect them to grow. By 1990, the initiatives we have discussed, and others, which I expect to be developed each successive year, could constitute up to 40 percent of the lab's budget.

We are looking even farther ahead -- to the year 2000 -- in planning to assure that key support services, the physical plant and the infrastructure are in place when they are needed. Assets have to have money spent on them to make sure they are there in the future. That is why 40 buildings have been demolished in the last four years and 14 more are to be mothballed for future program use.

Revitalization projects costing nearly $21 million are currently underway on roads, roofs, steam lines and the like. The 1987 revitalization program has $28.6 million in funding validated. Argonne is scheduled to receive the largest share, about 35 percent, of line-item funding for national laboratories over a six year period.

This year, we will install a $4.5 million entry-level, high-performance computer which will double Argonne's scientific computing power. In fiscal 1987, we plan to install an $8.5 million private branch exchange digital telecommunications service to every telephone location throughout the laboratory. That system will serve Argonne's needs for at least 10 years.

And finally, we are experimenting with different cost recovery systems for support services. Our aim is to preserve critical capabilities at the same time that costs are spread equitably among users.

These are all important developments. But they are essentially underlying expressions of a bigger change -- a more important change -- that I foresee for Argonne. It is a change in mind-set, a change in attitude.

It is the change from instinctively defending old programs and old turf to instinctively seeking offensive advantage in leading the way into new areas of national need.

It is a change to thinking and feeling like a winner. We got a start in that direction this year. And that is the most important development that I can report to you in describing the state of the laboratory.

Thank you.