A Brief History of Materials R&D at Argonne National Laboratory from the Met Lab to Circa 1995
By Brian R. T. Frost, director of Argonne's Materials Science Division from 1973-1984. Posted Sept. 3, 1996.
The Beginning
Argonne National Laboratory officially began life in 1946, but in reality it
started when the Metallurgical Laboratory was established at the University of
Chicago in 1941 under the leadership of Enrico Fermi. The thrust of the
materials work at Chicago was to find ways of producing plutonium for use in
atomic weapons. Glenn Seaborg, who discovered plutonium at the University of
California, Berkeley, headed the group at Chicago, which developed methods of
isolating plutonium from irradiated uranium, while Enrico Fermi and the
physicists designed and built the first atomic pile Chicago Pile 1 (CP-1). This
pile consisted of a graphite structure through which channels were shaped to
contain natural uranium metal and oxide. Removing neutron-absorbing impurities
from the graphite and fabricating the fuel elements were the major challenges
faced by the metallurgists, notably John Howe and Frank Foote. That they
succeeded was shown when CP-1 went critical on December 2, 1942. But their work
had hardly begun because there was an urgent push to design and construct the
Hanford piles to produce quantities of plutonium. A number of metallurgical
problems had to be overcome with virtually no prior experience to draw on.
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The fourth anniversary reunion on the steps of Eckhart Hall at the University
of Chicago, Dec. 2, 1946. Back row, left to right: Norman Hilberry
(Argonne's second director), Samuel Allison, Thomas Brill, Robert
Nobles, Warren Nyer and Marvin Wilkening. Middle row: Harold Agnew,
William Sturm, Harold Lichtenberger, Leona W. Marshall and Leo Szilard.
Front row: Enrico Fermi, Walter Zinn (Argonne's first director),
Albert Wattenberg and Herbert Anderson.
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A prototype or "semi-works" reactor was built at Clinton (later Oak Ridge),
Tenn., and the first Hanford pile went critical in September 1944, producing
plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb dropped in August 1945, bringing the war to an
abrupt end. Meanwhile CP-1 was moved to a site in Palos Hills outside Chicago
and renamed CP-2, while a new heavy-water-moderated reactor, CP-3, was
constructed there to test aspects of Hanford pile problems, such as radiation
effects on uranium fuel. CP-3 assumed normal operation on June 23, 1944.
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Enrico Fermi (left) with Walter Zinn, Argonne's first director.
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During this exciting period, a number of scientists and engineers participated
who were later to form the nucleus of Argonne National Laboratory, among them
Walter Zinn, who became the laboratory's first director, and Frank Foote, who
became the first director of Argonne's Metallurgy Division.
Reactor Development
The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 established the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC),
which in turn established the national laboratories at Argonne, Oak Ridge, Los
Alamos and Brookhaven as contractor-operated facilities, as opposed to civil
service labs. Other labs followed -- Ames, Berkeley, Sandia and Livermore.
Argonne was operated for the AEC by the University of Chicago, an arrangement
that continues to this day. The organization of Argonne at that time was in
terms of the new disciplines and the old; thus, there were divisions
specializing in reactor engineering, reactor physics, chemistry, metallurgy.
etc., and within a division there were sub-disciplinary units, such as
corrosion, fabrication, etc. -- an arrangement that continues up to today,
which is testimony to its success.
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Assembly of the core of Experimental Breeder Reactor I at Argonne's Idaho site, 1951.
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Enrico Fermi and Walter Zinn discussed very early the possibility of
developing a fast reactor that could breed plutonium from uranium. Unlike CP-1,
-2 and -3, the fast reactor had no moderator, but used highly enriched fuel in a
densely packed core, which necessitated cooling by a liquid metal. From this
concept grew the design of Experimental Breeder Reactor I (EBR-I), cooled by a
sodium-potassium (NaK) eutectic, which was approved by the AEC late in 1947 and
was built at the new test reactor site in Idaho, first producing electricity in
1951 -- a mind boggling time scale by today's standards.
EBR-I was the first real challenge for the newly formed Metallurgy Division.
The initial Mark 1 fuel element contained fully enriched uranium bonded by a
NaK eutectic to a stainless steel jacket -- a basic concept that survived
through 1995. There was some concern that the clean surfaces of the fuel and
cladding would lead to solid phase bonding, which might make the removal of
fuel rods from the reactor difficult. Thus, an early research program studied
diffusion couples of all possible combinations of metals. Radiation and thermal
cycling effects in the fuel were also studied, including irradiation tests in
CP-3, the Oak Ridge X-10 reactor and Materials Test Reactor (MTR), which laid
the foundation for future designs of metal fuel elements for breeder
reactors.
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An early hot cell with "master-slave" manipulators, which were
first developed at Argonne.
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The Mark II core had U-2%Zr fuel which melted during transient (rapid rampup
of reactor power) tests on November 29, 1955. This was due, in part, to the
inward bowing of the ribless fuel rods, which caused a reactivity increase.
This meltdown required a complicated core disassembly. The mass of solidified
fuel and cladding was shipped from Idaho to Illinois for disassembly and
detailed examination in newly built shielded caves. It was shown that
vaporization of the NaK had driven the fuel away from the core into the coolant
channels, providing an effective reactor shutdown mechanism.
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An EBR-I Mark III fuel rod and assembly.
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EBR-I was restarted with a Mark III charge, which consisted of U-2%Zr fuel
metallurgically bonded to Zircaloy-2 cladding, and a subsequent Mark IV
Pu-1.25% Al charge, which operated from November 1962 until December 1963 when
the reactor was shut down because its successor EBR-II was coming on line. All
of these elements were fabricated at Argonne.
December 27, 1947, was an important day for Argonne because on that date the
AEC transferred all responsibility for reactor development to Argonne; this
included the MTR and the Nautilus submarine reactor, both of which Oak Ridge
was developing. This fully stretched the capabilities of the Argonne staff, to
an extent that Zinn could initially only allocate 11 of his staff to EBR-I
design. MTR and the Nautilus reactor were quickly passed on to others.
Westinghouse took over the detailed design of the Nautilus reactor and the
civilian version of the naval reactor was built at Shippingport and contributed
to the highly successful pressurized water reactor (PWR), which forms the bulk
of commercial reactors operating today.
Boiling Water Reactors
Work began in the 1950s at Argonne on boiling water reactor (BWR) development.
This grew out of a broad evaluation of reactor concepts and from the design of
the CP-5 heavy-water-moderated research reactor, which came on line in 1954 and
played a major role in neutron research at Argonne. Zinn relates how an
experiment to test heat removal from the CP-5 core during loss of coolant flow
showed that boiling heat transfer was very effective and would not compromise
core stability.
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An EBR-I Mark III fuel rod and assembly.
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An Experimental Boiling Water Reactor fuel assembly.
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This led to the design and construction of the BORAX series of
reactor experiments, leading eventually to the Experimental Boiling Water
Reactor (EBWR) or CP-7, which came on line in 1956, and later the Vallecitos
boiling water reactor and Dresden-1 -- both built by General Electric and the
forerunners of today's BWRs. The close proximity of Commonwealth Edison
electric utility to Argonne was a major factor in Commonwealth Edison being the
first utility to build an operate a commercial BWR (Dresden-1).
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An EBWR fuel assembly in the fabrication shop with members of the
fabrication group.
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There were five BORAX reactor experiments, each designed to test a particular
facet of BWR design. A 1959 publication by Joe Handwerk, then the leader of
Argonne's ceramics group, and Robert Noland, leader of Argonne's coating and
jacketing group, described the fabrication of the fuel elements for Borax-IV.
This employed a thoria-urania pellet fuel lead-bonded to Al-1 wt% Ni cladding
in a plate-type geometry. The plates were mounted in a box-type sub-assembly.
The fuel plates for EBWR consisted of U-5wt%Zr-1.5wt%Nb roll-bonded to
Zircaloy-2 plates, which were placed in box-type sub-assemblies. Argonne
produced 930 acceptable plates, and irradiation tests demonstrated an
operational life equivalent to 3 1/2 years of reactor operation.
Corrosion Studies
All of this reactor development made major demands on the staff of Argonne's
Metallurgy Division. Fast reactor development demanded a knowledge of the
compatibility of materials with liquid sodium and the NaK alloy, while water
reactor development had very different problems in water corrosion. Corrosion
studies at Argonne began in earnest with the Naval Reactor, where knowledge of
the corrosion of zirconium in high-temperature water was vitally important.
Argonne scientists led by Joe Draley cooperated with the Westinghouse
scientists in testing the Zircaloy family of alloys.
It was also important to establish whether corrosion rates were affected by
radiation. To assist in this study, Argonne installed and operated a
pressurized-water loop in the MTR, mainly to test fuel plates of Al-U-Ni-Fe
alloy silicon-bonded to aluminum plates, which were used in some of the BORAX
cores and the SL-1 Army reactor.
Radiation Effects
Radiation effects were ill-understood both for the fuel and the cladding. The
coming on line of MTR, CP-5 and the prototype reactors provided the
environments for radiation tests, but this, in turn, required adequate hot
cells with their associated remote handling equipment to allow detailed
post-irradiation examinations to be carried out. A family of hot cells was
built at Argonne-East and -West for this purpose. The establishment of a Remote
Systems Division gave Argonne a strong capability for developing hot cell
equipment, especially master-slave manipulators -- an early form of robotics --
the technology of which was quickly transferred to industry. "Technology
transfer" is a buzzword today, but the transfer of reactor technology to
industry was a major accomplishment of Argonne in the first two decades of its
existence.
The development of the fuel elements for the Hanford production reactors in the
1940s quickly showed that unalloyed uranium behaved poorly in pile. The
orthorhombic alpha-uranium grew under thermal cycling and swelled rapidly due
to the formation of fission gas bubbles. This led to a two-pronged attack on
these problems at Argonne, as at other labs in the United Kingdom and France.
The ability to launch a two-pronged attack at Argonne was made possible by the
realization in the AEC in the late 1940s that there was a need to fund basic
materials research programs. On the one hand, technological studies of the
effects of alloying on swelling and growth phenomena bore fruit in terms of
using alloying to increase the fuel burn-up limits, as hinted above. On the
other hand, basic studies of the phenomena were very enlightening. An
electrolytic method was developed by Bernard Blumenthal and Bob Noland that
produced uranium with less than 25 ppm of impurities; single crystals without
substructure could be grown from this material by a grain coarsening technique.
The possession of these crystals enabled irradiation experiments, reported by
Hugh Paine and Howard Kittel at the first Geneva Conference on the Peaceful
Uses of Atomic Energy in 1955, to show the different dimensional changes along
the three crystallographic directions in alpha uranium.
If uranium seemed complex, plutonium was more so, with six allotropic forms and
a lower melting point than uranium combined with a low thermal conductivity.
Again, a two-pronged attack on these problems evolved at Argonne. Technological
alloy development ultimately came up with U-Pu-Zr alloys as possessing good
performance and compatibility with cladding. This alloy provided the basis of
the Integral Fast Reactor design. At the same time, basic studies were
beginning to develop an understanding of the electronic properties of plutonium
and its alloys.
Solid State Science
The Manhattan Project spawned a new branch of materials research involving new
materials and new phenomena, some of which fitted the traditional science of
metallurgy and some the newer science of solid state physics and chemistry, the
distinction at that time being in terms of macroscopic effects versus atomistic
processes. As an example, the development of the graphite moderated Hanford
reactors required methods of removing high-cross-section impurities ( a mix of
chemistry and metallurgy) plus an understanding of radiation effects that
caused graphite to swell and distort. The latter was tackled by a team in the
Chemistry Division under Oliver Simpson, with Gerhardt Hennig as group leader.
This led to an interest in radiation effects in other non-metallic solids, such
as sodium chloride, where radiation caused color centers (atomic displacements)
that could be annealed out at higher temperatures.
The solid state group in the Chemistry Division grew and in 1959 was accorded
the status of a division. Plans were developed to construct a new home for the
division, which culminated in 1968 in the dedication of Building 223 -- a
modern research laboratory designed with clean rooms, low temperature labs
(principally for superconductivity research) and materials preparation labs.
With the start up of the CP-5 reactor in 1954 neutron scattering research
increased in both metallurgy and solid state science, along with neutron damage
studies over a wide temperature range, including liquid helium temperature of 4
degrees Kelvin, where the defects were essentially "frozen in" and their
subsequent annealing could be studied in detail. In the 1960s, Tom Blewitt and
his colleagues in the Metallurgy Division used similar techniques to study
radiation effects in metals, most notably copper. As will be seen later, this
type of work was invaluable in tackling the practical problem of void swelling
in reactor alloys.
Plutonium
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Gloveboxes in the plutonium laboratory, circa 1959. |
In 1951, Walter Wilkinson sensed that there was a growing need for more
comprehensive facilities for fabricating plutonium fuels at Argonne. A modest
lab for studying the physical metallurgy of plutonium and its alloys had been
established in the Chemistry Building, mainly for basic studies, and this laid
the groundwork for Building 350, which was dedicated in 1959 with Art Shuck in
charge, assisted by Jim Ayer, Al Hins and others. At that time, it was one of
the world's largest and most advanced facilities of its kind. It included a
room 165 feet long and 72 feet wide, containing a herringbone pattern
fabrication line with a central spine from which specialized units branched,
e.g., casting, extrusion, rolling, welding, etc.
In addition to the fast-reactor fuel elements developed there, a growing need
existed for fuel plates for the critical assemblies that Argonne was building
to mock up fast-reactor core configurations. ZPR-6 and -9 were built in
Illinois and ZPPR in Idaho. Altogether, many tons of plutonium were fabricated
for these assemblies.
Experimental Breeder Reactor II
EBR-II started out as a logical follow-on to EBR-I with increased power and
electricity generation, but it quickly included a unique feature -- the Fuel
Cycle Facility (FCF) -- in effect a large hot cell attached to the reactor in
which the irradiated fuel elements were reconstituted by melting, which removed
the volatile and gaseous fission products. What was left was an alloy of
uranium with certain fission products, labeled "fissium". Some Metallurgy
Division staff who had been involved in the initial development of the fuel
elements moved to Idaho to assist in starting up the FCF. From this grew a
significant metallurgical effort at the Idaho location, which continues to this
day. The first sub-assembly, fabricated remotely from melt-refined irradiated
fuel, was returned to the reactor in April 1965. This feature was phased out by
1969 to make way for a new role for the reactor -- an irradiation test bed for
the national fast-reactor program. To accomplish this, the EBR-II project was
formed in 1968 to bring together all operations in one organization. A number
of senior Metallurgy Division staff, including Howard Kittel, Dave Walker and
Bob Noland, moved over into that project, leaving the way open for the
Metallurgy Division to hire a number of new, young staff members to begin a
different approach to fuel-element development under the leadership of Paul
Shewmon, Che-Yu Li, Brian Frost and others.
Advanced Reactors
Meanwhile, Argonne's aspirations as the nation's premier reactor development
site continued to grow. Two new reactors were conceived in the early 1960's --
A2R2, the Argonne Advanced Research
Reactor, and FARET, the Fast Reactor Experiment Test. A2R2
was a flux trap reactor with a
designed peak flux in excess of 1015 neutrons per cm2 per sec.
Two factors led to its demise: the design of the
High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge (and maybe the High Flux Beam Reactor at
Brookhaven), and delays in getting construction under way. A large hole was dug
before the AEC canceled the project, and the hole remained untouched for more
than a decade.
FARET was intended to test fast-reactor fuels and components and was overtaken
by the AEC's decision to build the Fast Flux Test Facility at Hanford as a
larger test reactor, a decision influenced strongly by the naval reactor
experience in using MTR, ETR and ATR in Idaho for extensive loop tests of fuel
and components. Thus, Argonne lost some of its momentum and leadership in
reactor development and became more subservient to the centralized direction by
the AEC's Division of Reactor Development and Testing. Included in this shift
was the creation of the Program Office at Argonne under Al Amorosi (one of the
pioneers of the Naval Reactor program at Argonne and a leading player in the
design and construction of Detroit Edison's Fermi-1 commercial fast reactor) to
help plan the reactor program. Several key Metallurgy Division staff (Larry
Kelman, Larry Neimark and others) joined that office for several years, later
returning to the Metallurgy Division.
The Fuels Technology Center
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Frank Foote (right), first director of Argonne's Metallurgy Division, at the
groundbreaking for the Fuels Technology Center (Building 212) in 1959. |
To retrace our steps a little, the importance of reactor materials research at
Argonne was recognized when AEC permission and Congressional approval were
granted in the late 1950s to build a new Metallurgy Building,
Building 212, designated for political purposes the Fuels Technology Center. This
multi-purpose building -- with basic and applied research labs, high bay areas
for fabrication and large-scale testing, and hot cells, (the most important
being the Alpha Gamma Hot Cell Facility, or AGHCF) -- was dedicated in 1962.
It marked a transition from relatively small-scale basic and applied research
to a larger scale program. Some of the larger-scale work had, perforce, to be
carried out at reactors which included CP-5, MTR and EBR-II, but the samples
were returned to Building 212 for detailed examination.
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Building 212 shortly after its dedication in 1962. |
Neutron Scattering Research
Neutron scattering has a long history at Argonne: Enrico Fermi, Bob Sachs and
Bill Sturm did pioneering experiments around 1947 at the CP-3 reactor using a
mechanical chopper developed by Fermi with John and Leona Marshall. With the
start up of CP-5, there was some emphasis on diffraction studies of hydrides
and deuterides of Zr, Hf and Ti because hydrogen atoms scatter neutrons well,
unlike X-rays. The same principle has been applied to uranium compounds with
light elements, such as carbon and nitrogen; for example Mel Mueller and Hal
Knott reported on the structure of UN and UC in a 1958 paper. Later work used
the fact that neutrons have a magnetic moment and are scattered coherently or
incoherently by materials containing magnetic atoms. Studies of the magnetic
moments of a number of actinide compounds, mainly by Mel Mueller and Gerry
Lander, helped in the understanding of the electronic structure and properties
of these compounds.
Interest in neutron scattering studies continued to grow in the 1970s despite
the low fluxes at CP-5 compared to HFBR and HFIR. This led to the concept,
espoused by Jack Carpenter, of an accelerator-driven pulsed neutron source
which obviates the need for a chopper. Pulses of spallation neutrons, generated
by energetic protons bombarding a uranium target, offer several advantages over
reactor neutrons. The abandoned injector ring of the Zero Gradient Synchrotron
(ZGS) presented an opportunity to build a bargain price spallation source, the
Intense Pulsed Neutron Source (IPNS), which has operated since May 1981 and has
attracted numerous researchers from U.S. and foreign laboratories.
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Argonne's Intense Pulsed Neutron Source. |
Directors of IPNS have included Gerry Lander and Bruce Brown, who began their
Argonne careers in the Materials Science Division. Materials scientists have
used IPNS in the diffraction mode to study the structure of high-temperature
superconductors (see below), for small angle scattering to study fine
precipitates in alloys, and for deep-penetration measurements of internal
stresses in structures, among a wide variety of studies. For several years a
liquid helium radiation effects facility was located close to the IPNS target.
Fuel Element Modeling
As noted above, the influx of new talent in the late 1960s, combined with the
growth of computer technology, led to a new approach to fuel element
development based on computer models of fuel performance. Many of these new
recruits, especially Dick Weeks and Vyt Jankus, became involved in the
development of the LIFE code. This code described fuel and cladding behavior in
a reactor as a function of time, using as input the physical properties of the
components. This, in turn, indicated the relative importance of the various
properties and gave priorities to studies and measurements of those properties.
Detailed models of important phenomena, such as fission gas behavior in fuel,
provided greater mechanistic insight and led to the development of
sophisticated models that are invaluable in making safety assessments and are
used by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for light-water-reactor (LWR)
assessments. Confirmation of the code's capabilities came from integral fuel
element irradiations and from measurements of specific properties or phenomena,
such as irradiation creep.
Advanced Reactors Post-1970
Reactor development at Argonne has continued to almost the present day, unlike
the situation at many other national labs. The 1970s and early 1980s were
dominated by the Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF), built at Hanford to test fuel
element assemblies, and the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, a 350-MWe commercial
prototype, which was never built but which absorbed much effort by the labs and
industry. Argonne played a role in these developments by testing fuels in
EBR-II and examining them in the AGHCF and at the Hot Fuels Examination
Facility( HFEF) in Idaho, which was built in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Starting in 1984, Argonne took the initiative in announcing the development of
a new fast reactor concept, the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR), which was based on
the EBR-II scheme of a fast reactor with an integral fuel reprocessing plant.
The key element was an electrochemical cell with a molten-salt electrolyte for
separating the actinides from the fission products. Initial work was centered
in Argonne's Chemical Technology Division, while later work -- which included
the renovation of the Fuel Cycle Facility -- was carried out in Idaho. The fuel
was a U-Pu-Zr alloy, which displayed good burn-up and safety characteristics.
While the IFR demonstration in the EBR-II plus the Fuel Cycle Facility was
ready to operate in 1995, nuclear power opponents succeeded in convincing both
the Clinton Administration and Congress to zero out funds for further
development and to authorize the shutdown of EBR-II, leaving the United States
without a fast-reactor program, in contrast to the rest of the developed world.
The Congress and DOE allocated funds to Argonne to close down EBR-II in an
orderly fashion and to carry out other nuclear studies, which included nuclear
waste disposal and LWR studies on both U.S. and Russian reactors.
Commercial Reactors
In the 1970s, a series of corrosion problems developed in commercial LWRs, and
Argonne was called on by utilities and the Electric Power Research Institute
(EPRI) to help in identifying the cause of failures in water circuits. Later
work was supported by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to assist them in
understanding the causes of pipe failures and in developing regulatory
guidelines. Following the Three Mile Island core meltdown Argonne assisted in
the examination of the remnants of the failed core, using its specialized hot
cell capabilities. Currently, Argonne is assisting the NRC in evaluating the
potential for extending the lives of existing reactors by up to 20 years, a
very important study in view of the lack of orders for new nuclear plants in
the United States for the past 15 years.
Non-nuclear Energy Systems
The 1973 OPEC oil crisis led to the consolidation of all U.S. energy research
under the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA). This led to a
considerable shift in program contents at Argonne and the other national labs.
The desire to convert our extensive native coal resources into liquid and
gaseous fuels resulted in new programs to develop
high-temperature/high-pressure processes, which made severe demands on
construction materials. The corrosion and compatibility of steel and ceramic
components with molten slags, mixed gases and hot liquids were studied in
detail. The development of refractories for this purpose led to a collaborative
program with suppliers of refractories to the steel industry to make and test
improved products.
The desire to improve the efficiency of coal combustion spawned programs on
fluidized-bed combustion and magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), both of which involve
the containment of corrosive solid/gas mixtures at very high temperatures. An
unusual aspect of Argonne's MHD program was the shipment to Moscow of a
channel, by Air Force C5A, to be tested in a Russian high-temperature
institute. The program was abruptly terminated when the Soviets invaded
Afghanistan. A more recent activity in fossil energy has been the development
jointly with industry of membranes for converting natural gas to liquid fuels
and for the separation of hydrogen for fuel cells.
Research on improved batteries and fuel cells has been a major effort at
Argonne, based mainly in the Chemical Technology Division, but with strong
support from materials scientists. The principal thrusts have been on a
lithium-iron-sulfide battery, which operates at a high temperature at high
efficiency, and on the monolithic solid-oxide fuel cell, which is also
efficient and compact. The success of both systems has relied on the
development of suitable materials, particularly specialized ceramics.
Superconductivity
An exciting area of research, which has involved close cooperation of basic and
applied materials scientists, is high-temperature superconductivity. For more
than two decades, starting in the 1960s, Argonne had a research program on
low-temperature superconductors in both the Materials Science Division and the
Solid State Science Division (which subsequently merged), and had practical
experience in building hydrogen bubble chambers using Nb-Ti superconducting
magnets for high-energy-physics research. When Bednorz and Muller of IBM
discovered high temperature superconductivity in 1986, followed by the
improvements made by Paul Chu at the University of Houston, Argonne was able to
mount a sizable effort in both basic and applied research in this field.
In the Materials Science Division, insights into the structure and properties
of the yttrium-barium-copper oxide superconductors were quickly obtained with
structural studies at IPNS being especially valuable. Methods of making
superconducting wire, tapes and blocks were developed in the then Materials and
Components Division (now Energy Technology Division), along with engineering
studies of magnet and bearing designs and of magnetically levitated vehicles.
This led to the formation of the Illinois Superconductor Corporation (through
the ARCH Development Corporation, an affiliate of the University of Chicago),
licenses of inventions to several companies and a major collaborative effort
with Commonwealth Research Corporation to develop superconducting flywheel
storage systems. Much of this has been facilitated through Argonne's being one
of DOE's three Pilot Centers for Superconductivity and a partner in the
National Science Foundation's Center for Superconductivity with the University
of Illinois, Northwestern and the University of Chicago.
Advanced Photon Source
A major stimulus to the basic materials research programs has been the
construction of the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne. This 7 GeV synchrotron
source, using state-of-the-art wigglers and undulators will be the nation's
brightest X-ray source when it comes on line at full power in 1996. It will
open up new areas of materials research because it will provide higher
resolution and tunability of the beams.
Conclusion
In the past few years, the national labs have been under fire from the
Congress. Their roles and even the need for their existence have been
questioned. This is due in a large part to the end of the Cold War, which
diminished the need for an aggressive nuclear weapons program and, hence, the
need for three large weapons laboratories. The demise of advanced reactor
programs has added to questioning of the role of the non-weapons labs.
The current Congress is highly critical of the need for the national labs to
continue their efforts to aid American industry in competing with the rest of
the world. Nevertheless, it seems that labs like Argonne will continue to exist
and to play an important role in advancing science and technology. The
stewardship of major research facilities is reason enough alone to justify the
existence of the labs. But there are many other reasons; as the foregoing text
shows, Argonne and its sister labs have the capability of tackling high-risk,
long-term problems of a multi-disciplinary nature that universities and
industry cannot handle. Accountability is to the taxpayer rather than the
shareholder or the examination board, which creates an unbiased attitude
towards solving difficult problems; "honest broker" is a term that is often
used in this context. These are all qualities that are needed by a country with
a large technological base.
Organization of Materials Research at Argonne.
In 1946, at the formation of Argonne National Laboratory, a Metallurgy Division
was created under Frank Foote, who had joined the Manhattan Project in 1943.
After the war, Foote returned to Columbia University for two years, during
which time Jim Schumar acted as division director. Foote stepped down as
division director in 1965, and Mike Nevitt took over. Meanwhile, a basic solid
state physics and chemistry program started in the Chemistry Division under
Oliver Simpson, and this became the Solid State Science Division in the 1960s
with its own new building.
When Mike Nevitt became deputy laboratory director late in 1969, Paul Shewmon
became the director of the Metallurgy Division and changed its name to the
Materials Science Division, in keeping with the trend towards embracing all
types of materials and not just metals. Paul Shewmon left to join the National
Science Foundation in 1973 and later the Ohio State University. In 1973 Brian
Frost took over as division director.
In 1982, an attempt was made to unite all materials research at Argonne under
one organization -- the Materials Science and Technology Division (MST), which
incorporated MSD, SSS and elements of the Chemistry and Chemical Technology
Divisions -- still under Frost. When Frost he stepped down in 1984 to start the
Technology Transfer Center, he was followed by Frank Fradin as director of MST.
The retirement of Bob Zeno as director of the Components Technology Division in
1986 led to the splitting of MST into the Materials Science Division, under
Fradin, and Materials and Components Technology (MCT), under Dick Weeks, a
former associate director of MSD and MST. In 1987, Fradin was promoted to
associate laboratory director for physical research, and Bobby Dunlap became
the director of MSD. When Weeks was promoted to general manager for energy
technology in 1994, Roger Poeppel took over MCT, and it was renamed the Energy
Technology Division in recognition of its broader role.
The cost of doing business has changed drastically over this 50-year period. A
memo by Foote, dated July 1, 1946, gives a "Plan for the Metallurgy Divison..."
which shows a staff of 10 professionals, 10 "non-academic" and five shop staff
at a total cost of $85,000/year. The mean of professional staff annual salaries
was $4,000. By 1964, the organization chart shows seven basic research groups
with 40 staff and eight applied research groups with 59 staff. The cost is not
given, but it was probably around $10 million/year, because expensive
facilities had been added. Today, the total number of staff working on
materials problems at Argonne is on the order of 300 people at an annual cost
of around $60-70 million.
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