State of the Laboratory -- 1992

In presenting this report, there is a problem that is more metaphysical than scientific.

The problem is that we all tend to think of today as real and the past and the future as less-real. But it would be dangerous to think of Argonne that way. Instead, we need to remember that this is a "state" of the laboratory address. And in physics, a "state" is one of many conditions in which an atomic system may exist. In biology a "state" is a condition of something at one level in the process of growth or development.

Knowing where we are is not enough. We have to keep in mind as well how we got here and where we are heading.

Where have we been? In the `80s we went from one of the national laboratories hardest hit by cutbacks to one of the laboratories with the healthiest growth record. If Argonne were a publicly held corporation, the stock analysts would call this a "hockey stick turnaround." Our operating budget went from $222.1 million in 1981 to $392 million in the current fiscal year. Our employment dropped from 5,000 in 1980 to 3,689 in 1986. By the end of this fiscal year we expect it to total about 4,520.

How did we go from a state of distress so dire that there were rumors of Argonne's closing to our present state? One reason is that hard times made us hungry and aggressive in pursuing new initiatives. Another reason is that the initiatives we chose to emphasize were those to which the Department of Energy assigned high priority. A third reason is that as one set of initiatives matured, we kept generating new ones.

And underlying all this, we had some of the most competent people in the world. In short, we gave the nation a good payoff for its investment.

As a result, our budget this fiscal year is the highest in the history of the laboratory. And for the first time in more than a decade, the primary concern of Argonne's supporters in Congress is to support the president's budget for 1993. In prior years, Congress has had to add funds to the president's proposal to sustain important Argonne programs.

Integral Fast Reactor

A good example is the Integral Fast Reactor, which makes up most of this year's $167.7 million engineering research budget.

Our main thrust this year is to complete the construction at Argonne-West of a fuel cycle facility that can demonstrate on-site reprocessing at Experimental Breeder Reactor Two. This also involved intense effort at Argonne-East, where much of the equipment, like this electrorefiner, was developed and assembled. The year provided another demonstration that Argonne-East and Argonne-West are integral parts of the same efficient R&D team.

A full loading of IFR metallic fuel, like the pin being test-welded here, has been powering EBR-II to have irradiated feed stock ready when the fuel cycle facility is completed sometime this late fall. The new fuel has achieved a record nuclear burn up of 19.3 percent. In comparison, fuel in conventional light-water reactors has to be pulled out of the reactor at three to five percent nuclear burnup.

We have made significant advances in waste treatment through innovative use of zeolites as a material that will effectively contain and immobilize waste salts from the electrorefining operations.

Perhaps the best gauge of our progress comes from the University of Chicago Special Advisory Committee for the IFR. Its executive summary reads, "we believe the IFR should be elevated to a definite and very important part of the U.S long-term strategy... We recommend the design and initiation of construction of a demonstration IFR plant within this decade."

Another significant endorsement came in Secretary of Energy Watkins' Official Posture Statement and Budget Overview. It reads, "in addition to supplying energy, the advanced liquid-metal reactor and its related integral fast reactor fuel cycle provide a unique opportunity to extend resources and potentially improve light-water reactor, high-level-waste management by recycling the actinides from light-water-reactor spent fuel into the IFR fuel cycle."

Our research to recycle these actinides has drawn interest both from U.S. industry and from foreign corporations.

Another new area of research is opened by the "build down" of nuclear weapons across the globe. Plutonium could either represent a major problem of storage and control or it might be put to beneficial use as IFR fuel.

Advanced Photon Source

Progress on the Advanced Photon Source is just as promising and just as diverse. Operations and construction funding this year total about $114.2 million.

As you may recall, Congress has shorted APS construction in previous years. In 1993, the president's budget recommends "catch-up" funding of $11 million, which would help to assure that we won't have to stretch out the original construction schedule. Fiscal 1993 will be the biggest spending year for the APS, with about $160 million in total funding.

As this aerial photograph indicates, site preparation is well advanced. We will occupy the injector building this spring and construction of the experimental hall has already begun. We have also completed conceptual design of a 240-bed housing facility for which Governor Thompson pledged state support.

The APS organization now includes 350 people. They are working in parallel on supervising construction, administering procurement, tightly scheduling deliveries and a great deal of R&D on the equipment that will generate and use the world's most brilliant X-rays.

Argonne occupies two beam lines at Brookhaven's synchrotron, where we can both conduct research and test concepts and equipment. We are actively using facilities at Cornell, Stanford and University of Wisconsin as well.

To assure the position of the X-ray beam, which must be accurate to within a micrometer -- less than the thickness of a human hair -- an APS team has designed a monitor that uses a vapor-deposited diamond surface. This innovation will be important for radiation facilities around the world.

A related problem, control of heat load from these very intense beams, led to an innovative angled monochrometer to select the X-rays. APS engineers have even custom-designed the girders on which the system sits to reduce the deflection carried up to the beam line from ground vibration and settlement.

Among the outstanding achievements of APS, in my opinion, has been the quality of people recruited to the project and use of experts from outside the laboratory.

This tradition started through participation by the broad scientific community in the original conceptualization of APS. It is evident from the scientific workshops that have been held for the user community and in the initiatives undertaken with outside experts in cost containment and reliability. And it is reflected in the proposals by 19 collaborative access teams seeking 22 sectors of the APS for research. Since that number exceeds the beam lines to be available with current construction funds, a phase II proposal has already been submitted to DOE to provide for additional beamline development through the end of the decade.

Perhaps the highest praise for the Advanced Photon Source is that it is able to advance the state of the art in so many ways at the same time that it stays on schedule and on budget.

Energy, environmental and biological research

Funding for energy, environmental and biological research rose to $56.6 million this year.

The important part of EEBR's future lies in those APS collaborative access teams, or CATs, which I mentioned earlier. Argonne is leading the organization of the Structural Biology CAT, which will provide us with knowledge about the molecular makeup of blood clotting factors, like this one, virus and toxins.

In my report to you last year, I welcomed a team of Yugoslav scientists who had developed a new method to identify gene patterns in DNA, that blueprint found in every cell which determines hereditary characteristics. This year, in a blind test, 343 base pairs of unknown DNA were identified without error by this group. Industry is already showing interest in this work which promises to match up DNA pairs 10,000 times faster than conventional methods.

Another embryonic Argonne initiative -- a $9 million center of transportation expertise -- is evolving from ongoing programs. Included are:

• Research and development of magnetically levitated vehicles, including a test track for magnet and guideway configurations;

• Hybrid vehicles and alternate-energy vehicles;

• New materials, especially light material;

• A lead role in the Advanced Battery Consortium, made up of the Big Three auto makers and major national laboratories;

• Cooperation with General Motors to apply advanced computing techniques to everything from metal cutting to crash worthiness;

• And finally, use of the world's largest superconducting dipole magnet as a test bed for marine propulsion. This so-called "Red October" system magnetically squirts electrically charged sea water through a channel to provide efficient and silent transport.

Other growth areas range from the sky, where we are studying cloud formation and its role in global climate change, to under the ground, where our studies on the environmental impact of the superconducting super collider and the new production reactor have established Argonne as DOE's center of expertise for major environmental studies.

Physical research

This year's budget for physical research totals about $79 million. In collaboration with seven universities, we will complete construction of the APEX experimental area at ATLAS. The Intense Pulsed Neutron Source continues to rank as the most productive, cost-effective neutron source in the nation.

Development continues at our Wakefield Accelerator, which is designed to accelerate particles to higher energies in shorter distances than any previous method. Its photo-cathode-based electron gun uses the laser system to generate a very short, intense pulse of electrons in a way that has not been done before. We expect to commission phase 1 of the Wakefield Accelerator this summer.

Argonne continues to lead in the chemical separation of radioactive elements from ground water and waste. The process has generated one of Argonne's most promising spin-off companies.

Last year, Argonne became a part owner of the world's fastest supercomputer. It has performed 32 billion operations per second. This spring, we will bring to the site for testing a new generation of parallel computer, the Intel Touchstone Paragon, which can perform 64 billion operations per second.

And our R&D in superconductivity continues to rank as the largest publicly funded effort in the nation. In the last year, 18 superconductivity-related inventions were reported out of Argonne.

Technology outreach

Our continuing strength in the area of work for others reconfirms the wisdom of the University of Chicago policy to accept defense work at Argonne only when it makes a contribution to our basic non-weapons mission.

We have not experienced the dramatic cutbacks that the weapons labs face. Construction continues on the Continuous Wave Deuterium Demonstrator, which will be useful for fusion research, and the development of advanced computing techniques for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Our work in environmental remediation at military sites and disarmament inspection should also hold up.

We continue to lead in putting our discoveries to work within industry and in education. We are currently negotiating more than 30 cooperative research and development agreements with corporations. The six we have signed range from inspecting ceramic-coated engine parts to encouraging micro-organisms to eat contamination in soil.

This year, the 50,000th student in the Chicago Science Explorers Program will visit Argonne as part of the science education program that includes class work, tours of Chicago area scientific facilities and viewing of Bill Kurtis' video series.

Environment, safety and health

Just as investment in Argonne research has gone up, investment to assure safety, health and environmental protection also has risen to a 1992 estimate of about $24.3 million. Currently, about 270 Argonne people are dedicated to ES&H. And everyone at the laboratory is paying more attention to those concerns. At least that is what our opinion poll of employees indicates.

The complete results and analysis of the poll are due this month. We know from the preliminary report that 77 percent of the people responding felt there had been improvement in leadership on ES&H at the laboratory both at the top level and line-management level since October, 1990. You all thought your own attitudes have improved more than management's.

Overall, 91 percent of the respondents felt that changes during the past year have improved their awareness of safe work practices and 87 percent felt the same way about the environmental concerns.

The employees rated Argonne generally on ES&H at 8.1 on a scale of 10 for worker safety, and 7.9 on a scale of 10 for environmental protection.

When we get the full results, they will be published for all of you to see. But it is pretty clear to us and, I believe, to DOE that there has been a change in culture at Argonne. We are on our way toward becoming first among equals in this important area within the national laboratory system.

In summary, Argonne's performance has contributed to an excellent outlook. We are benefiting from the highest level of support ever from the University of Chicago. Our support within the Department of Energy is rising. And our support in Congress continues to improve.

Changing role of national labs

But there are at least two factors that could affect our future.

One is some intensive soul searching and analysis about the national labs and their appropriate missions. It was triggered by the end of the Cold War and the shrinkage of work at the weapons labs.

This analysis was undertaken by two groups: the Secretary of Energy's Advisory Board and the laboratory directors themselves.

These studies focus on the core competence of each laboratory and reducing redundancy of facilities and research. Because we have built Argonne's strength on the primary initiatives I have discussed, our laboratory should come out of this process in good shape.

Risk of prosperity

The other factor affecting our future is a risk which any organization -- public or corporate -- faces after a relatively long period of prosperity. We may forget how we got here.

If we don't stay hungry, we are not going to stay on top. If we aren't aggressive and continue to take prudent risks to extend ourselves, we risk lapsing into creeping mediocrity. If we don't learn from the hard times of the past, we could face hard times in the future.

I don't believe that will happen so long as we remember that the state of this laboratory is in constant transition. We all have to make sure that transition is in the direction of improvement.