Thursday, Aug. 21, 1997
Udated at 8:45 a.m.
Former Lab director Norris Bradbury dead
When offered the position of director of the Laboratory in 1945, Norris Bradbury reluctantly agreed to take the job for six months or until it was filled permanently, whichever came first. He remained for 25 years, overseeing the transition of the Lab from the site of a wartime crash project to one of the nation's premier research facilities.
Bradbury, who was born May 30, 1909, in Santa Barbara, Calif., died at his home in Los Alamos Wednesday night, the family said. Services are pending.
Bradbury arrived in Los Alamos in July 1944 to work on the Manhattan Project, the crash program to build the world's first atomic weapons. He was in charge of assembling the nonnuclear components for the world's first nuclear explosion, which occurred at Trinity Site in southern New Mexico on July 16, 1945.
Less than a month later, following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, World War II ended. Many Los Alamos scientists, including Director J. Robert Oppenheimer and Bradbury, planned to return to their pre-war jobs or take advantage of other employment offers.
"About 4 p.m. one afternoon, Oppie (Oppenheimer) called me in and asked me if I'd be willing to take on the directorship," Bradbury recalled for an article in the September 1970 issue of the Atom, a former Laboratory publication. "I was anxious to get back to Stanford (to teach physics), but I said I'd think about the offer." After talking it over with his family and colleagues, "I told Oppie I'd take it for a short period."
Bradbury took over a research institution that had just completed an immensely successful project, but did not have a compelling mission at that time.
As Glenn Seaborg, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, said on the occasion of the Lab's 25th anniversary in 1968: "Some of my colleagues maintained that it would never be possible to make Los Alamos attractive for competent scientists. It was remote from civilization. The wartime buildings were already falling to pieces ... . Furthermore, most of the 'big name' scientists had left Los Alamos with Oppenheimer."
Bradbury, who later said he stayed because he could not lead an institution with an uncertain future unless he was willing to link it with his own future, overcame the difficulties. He convinced the nation of the need to maintain nuclear expertise, persuaded a core of scientists and engineers to remain and tackled projects such as Operation Crossroads, a test of the effects of nuclear weapons against Navy ships.
"Oppenheimer was the founder of this Laboratory," senior fellow Louis Rosen said during a discussion of the Bradbury Era that was reported in the Winter/Spring 1983 issue of Los Alamos Science. "Bradbury was its savior."
Another wartime colleague, Richard Baker, said, "If Norris hadn't stayed, or someone like him, I think the Lab would have collapsed."
During Bradbury's leadership, the Laboratory developed the first thermonuclear weapons and continued groundbreaking research in a number of nuclear and nonnuclear weapons areas. It also maintained a solid record in basic research.
Bradbury earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., and a doctorate in physics from the University of California at Berkeley for work on the mobility of ions in gases. He spent two years as a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then joined the faculty at Stanford to teach physics. During the 1930s, he established a reputation as an expert on the conduction of electricity in gases, properties of ions, and atmospheric electricity.
He had joined the naval reserve while at UC and was called to active duty in 1941. He worked in projectile ballistics at the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Va., until he was offered the job at Los Alamos.
The Atomic Energy Commission presented Bradbury with its highest honor, the Enrico Fermi Award, in 1970.
Bradbury was cited by the AEC for "his inspiring leadership and superb direction of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory throughout one-quarter of a century, and for his great contributions to the national security and to the peacetime applications of atomic energy."
He also received the Legion of Merit from the Navy, the 1964 annual achievement award from the New Mexico Academy of Science, and the Distinguished Public Service Medal from the Department of Defense in 1966.
Bradbury was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society. He received honorary doctor of science degrees from Pomona College and Case Institute of Technology and an honorary doctor of laws degree from the University of New Mexico.
He is survived by his wife Lois and three sons, James, John and David.
--John A. Webster
ACE
will carry Los Alamos solar wind hardware
After more than 10 years of planning, research and development, space scientists at the Laboratory will watch their solar wind sensors leave Earth on board NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer satellite scheduled for launch on Sunday.
In addition to the Lab's solar wind detectors, NASA's latest space explorer will carry sensors that have been designed by various universities and laboratories to study energetic particles in the solar system.
"The ACE mission will provide insight into the formation and evolution of the sun and various astrophysical processes," said Dave McComas of Space Atmospheric Sciences (NIS-1). "It will help us understand how the solar system formed and will even teach us about sources of the materials needed for the formation of life."
Earth is bombarded constantly with high speed particles coming from the sun and sources outside the solar system. ACE, orbiting at one hundredth the distance from Earth to the sun, will provide scientists with information about these particles and identify which ones are likely to hit the planet. ACE also will be able to warn scientists of potential geomagnetic storms caused by coronal mass ejections that can destroy satellites and disrupt electronic communications and electrical power grids.
The Laboratory's Solar Wind Electron Proton Alpha Monitor provides the solar wind observations for the ACE mission. These observations provide the context for elemental and isotopic composition measurements for the other experiments on ACE. The data also will provide researchers an opportunity to study solar wind phenomena such as coronal mass ejections, interplanetary shocks and solar wind structure.
The solar wind is part of the sun's corona that cannot be held down by the sun's gravity. Instead, the outer fringes of the coronal plasma flow away in all directions in a constant stream of particles moving at roughly a million miles an hour. The sun's magnetic field controls how fast the wind moves into outer space.
Near the sun's equator, the magnetic field lets relatively slow-moving particles escape, while at the higher latitudes only the fast-moving ones are released. When the fast-moving particles overtake the slower ones, they produce a shock wave similar to a jet's sonic boom on Earth.
Coronal mass ejections can contribute to these interplanetary shocks by expelling a bubble of gas with a strong magnetic field that may contain billions of tons of matter that travel outward at several million miles per hour. The solar material streaks out among the planets and impacts anything in its path, potentially disrupting satellites, radar, and radio signals.
Lab scientists will measure the solar wind using two instruments that measure in three dimensions the density, energies and directions of travel for electrons and ions. Each device consumes only five watts of power and together the instruments weigh only 15 pounds. The instruments are curved-plate electrostatic analyzers that fluctuate in voltage to trap incoming electrons and ions.
The solar wind ion and electron detectors collect the particles through apertures directing them into a pathway between a pair of parallel electrically charged metal plates. By adjusting the plates' voltages, Los Alamos scientists can tune their instruments to collect particles of different energies.
As the satellite spins, the detectors sweep across conical segments of the sky centered on the spacecraft's spin direction. The combination of a particle detection and the spin of the spacecraft provides unique directional information.
The detection units were recycled, refurbished and enhanced from versions of the solar wind instruments from the Ulysses project.
Launched by the space shuttle Discovery in October 1990, Ulysses flew by Jupiter in February 1992. The primary goals of Ulysses were to investigate the properties of the solar wind and the heliospheric magnetic field out of the plane of the planets where all previous spacecraft had been located. In contrast, ACE will stay in this plane but will observe the composition of particles in space with 10 to 1,000 times better sensitivity than was previously possible.
ACE is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on board a Delta II rocket.
--Kathy DeLucas
Pulitzer Prize-winning author to present colloquium
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes will present a Director's Colloquium on public-health issues at 1:10 p.m. Aug. 27 in the Administration Building Auditorium.
In his talk, titled "Public Health, Public Knowledge, Public Peace," Rhodes will ask how ideas from the field of public health can help to reduce threats from surplus plutonium in much the same way that nations learned to cooperate in complete transparency to eradicate smallpox.
Rhodes won the Pulitzer Prize for history for his 1986 book, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." He also has written four novels and seven other nonfiction books, including "Dark Sun, The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" (1995).
The colloquium is open to the public and will be broadcast on LABNET Channel 9.
State officials to make a case today for park-and-ride
shuttle
Officials from the state Highway and Transportation Department today will make their case for continuing the Northern New Mexico Park and Ride Express when they ask the state Highway Commission for funding.
The two-week demonstration project carried 11,564 passengers between Santa Fe, Los Alamos and Española, said Brian Ainsworth of the state road agency.
"We will present something to them for assistance with funding," Ainsworth said. He said project officials have developed two options: one would be to lease 30 buses and 10 paratransit buses at a cost of about $2 million a year. The figure includes an estimated $460,000 in revenue that would be created from passenger fares and advertising, he said.
The second option would call for the state to purchase 30 52-seat buses and 10 paratransit buses that seat 22 passengers. This option would cost $6 million, again deducting for revenue generated from fares and advertising, he said.
If the state Highway Commission -- they are meeting in Taos today and Friday -- approves the request, the park-and-ride program could conceivably start up again by mid- to late-November, Ainsworth said.
Ainsworth said the department would need between 60 and 90 days to select a contractor to operate the service, create permanent park-and-ride lots, hire and train new drivers, firm up route schedules and meet all other federal and state mass transit requirements.
And though the total ridership during the two-week trial project was below what highway officials hoped to attract. Ainsworth said the department is pleased with the response and believes the park-and-ride project is viable. "The figure is pretty dynamic considering it was only a two-week demonstration period and people knew it was going to end," he said.
"A good measure in the transit business is it takes about nine months to develop a full-blown transit system. That's when you're going to reach your peak ridership," he said.
The state had hoped to attract between 15,000 and 16,000 riders during the trial.
Ainsworth also noted the overwhelming support Laboratory employees had for the demonstration project (see Aug. 15 Daily Newsbulletin).
"Right now we know what we need to do with the Lab," he said. "We need to have 10-minute service starting about 3:30, quarter-to-four," he said. "What the 10-minute service will do is eliminate the big backlog of people [going home]. We'd move people out of there more quickly," he said.
Increasing the frequency of routes also would reduce the cost of having to house buses in Los Alamos, he explained.
The park-and-ride service cost riders $1 each way. The state Highway and Transportation Department and local governments spent $100,000 to fund the pilot project
Johnson Controls World Services Inc. vans transported bus riders from the Technical Area 3 dropoff point to other technical areas, and picked them up at the end of the day to catch the bus home.
--Steve Sandoval
Electrical
Safety Committee chartered
Director Sig Hecker recently chartered an Electrical Safety Committee whose members work in the presence of electrical hazards, are responsible for supervising electrical work or have specialized safety credentials. The committee also includes a representative from Johnson Controls World Services Inc. (representing the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 611-IBEW), the Los Alamos Area Office (DOE-LAAO), a JCI engineer and a person representing subcontractors who perform electrical work at the Lab.
The Electrical Safety Committee reports to the director on the effectiveness of the Lab's electrical safety program (as determined by audits and evaluations), promotes electrical safety improvements, assists in program implementation and performs other related tasks. Complete information on the committee, its functions and new members are in a master management memo (Adobe Acrobat required).
Harry R. Wellman, former acting UC president, dies at age 98
Harry R. Wellman, who interrupted his retirement to serve as acting president of the University of California from 1967 to 1968, died Monday following a long illness.
Known by colleagues as a "quiet facilitator," Wellman started working for the university in 1925 as an extension specialist in agricultural economics and played a key role in the shifting of most administrative authority from the president's office to the campuses.
"Throughout his long and distinguished career as an agricultural economist and university administrator, Harry Wellman's name was synonymous with the highest standards of integrity, skill and service to the university and to California agriculture. Both have lost a dedicated steward and a faithful friend," said C. Judson King, UC provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. "On behalf of President Atkinson, who is away from the office, I want to extend the heartfelt condolences of the University of California community to the Wellman family."
"Harry was not a dramatic person doing dramatic things," said former UC President Clark Kerr. "He was a quiet facilitator, who was able, by friendly persuasion, to impact the university in a quiet effective way."
Born in Alberta, Canada, on March 4, 1899, Wellman received his bachelor's of science degree from the Oregon Agricultural College in 1921. He received his master's degree in 1924 and his doctorate in 1926 from UC Berkeley. In 1960, he was awarded an honorary law degree from Oregon State University.
As vice president of agricultural sciences, Wellman was instrumental in the development of teaching and research in campus agricultural programs. He also administered university agricultural field stations and farm advisory offices around the state.
Wellman was key in the development of the Department of Biochemistry at UC Davis.
"Wellman was very influential in keeping agriculture moving ahead in the state of California," Kerr said.
Following a reorganization of administrative offices in 1958, Wellman was named to the newly created post of vice president of the university, serving as second in command to President Kerr.
In that capacity, Wellman helped decentralize administrative control from the president's office and Regents to the chancellors and campuses. The transfer was smooth, said Loren Furtado, former assistant vice president for budget, because Wellman was a "first-rate administrator. A person who had a great deal of charisma in dealing with the regents, staff and administration. He got along with everyone very well and he had a way of making decisions that people were willing to execute."
Kerr, who while president was one of the architects of California's Master Plan for Higher Education, which serves as the framework for California higher education, credits Wellman with running the university while he was heavily engaged in this massive effort.
Wellman officially retired from the university in 1966, with titles of vice president emeritus of the university; professor emeritus of agricultural economics; and agricultural economist emeritus in the agricultural experiment station and Giannini Foundation.
In January 1967, Wellman postponed his retirement to become acting president to fill the vacancy left when the Board of Regents dismissed Kerr.
Wellman handled that situation with his usual aplomb. "The university was greatly traumatized by the firing of Kerr," Furtado said. "Wellman helped bring about tranquility and alleviate tension."
In addition to his service with the university, Wellman performed several duties with the federal government, including chief of the general crop section of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration from 1934 to 1935. He was a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 1943 to 1954. He was also a member of the California Board of Agriculture.
Wellman's scholarly work centered on price analysis, marketing and agricultural policy, particularly in relationship to California fruit and vegetable crops. He also published more than 150 monographs and articles on economic aspects of agriculture.
Wellman is survived by his daughter, Nancy Jane Parmelee, son-in-law Robert Parmelee, three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. In lieu of flowers, gifts should be made to the Harry R. Wellman Fund for Support of Graduate Students in Natural Resource Economics, or to the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way, Berkeley, CA.
Memorial services will be held at 2 p.m. Aug. 30 at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley.
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