ORNL: THE FIRST 50 YEARS--EPILOGUE
This article also appears in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Review (Vol. 25, Nos. 3 and 4), a quarterly research and
development magazine. If you'd like more information about the
research discussed in the article or about the Review, or if you
have any helpful comments, drop us a line. Thanks for reading the Review.
Nearing retirement in 1992 after 50 years of service to the
Manhattan Project and the Laboratory, senior staff advisor Don
Trauger reflected on the lessons of a half century. "The Laboratory
and science at large," he urged, "should expand their strategic
planning to longer time spans." Rapid political changes on both the
national and international scene have limited effective
implementation of some programs to four years or even two years, he
noted. And industry as well is shortening its planning to as little
as two years because of high capital costs and demands for early
returns on investments. "Perhaps," Trauger suggested, "the national
laboratories can effectively consider the time spans that are
really desirable. Even 100 years is not as distant as we might have
thought."
Laboratory management, as always, devotes considerable attention to
planning the institution's future research and proposing the
acquisition of equipment and design and contruction of facilities
needed to support world-class science. The Department of Energy, in
fact, requires the Laboratory to prepare institutional plans
looking five years into the future, and in 1990 ORNL Director Alvin
Trivelpiece formed a planning group to analyze the Laboratory's
long-term corporate strategy.
In addition to assigning the highest priority to the Laboratory's
proposed Advanced Neutron Source (ANS) and other nuclear reactor
studies, Trivelpiece emphasized the global importance of the work
of Energy Division teams, who by 1992 had assisted 21 nations with
development of their energy and environmental technology policies.
Pointing out that events in these nations have ramifications for
the environment worldwide, Trivelpiece urged Congress to support
Laboratory efforts to assist other nations in meeting their energy
needs while reducing the strains on the environment and world oil
markets.
To improve science education, Trivelpiece advocated greater
cooperation with Oak Ridge Associated Universities, the University
of Tennessee, Pellissippi State Technical Community College, Roane
State Community College, Tennessee state government, and regional
school systems. He was particularly interested in designing
classrooms for the 21st century, using reasonably priced electronic
teaching aids and student workstations.
For the 1990s and beyond, Trivelpiece and the strategic planning
group expected Laboratory directions to be dominated by four major
themes: education, energy, environment, and economic
competitiveness. They proposed to support these efforts with three
new major user facilities the Laboratory hopes to complete within
a decade: the ANS and its adjoining research facilities, a
materials science center on the east end of the Laboratory, and an
environmental and life sciences center on the west end.
The increasing importance of materials science to the Laboratory's
efforts to improve national economic competitiveness is
demonstrated in the proposed Materials Science and Engineering
Complex, which the Laboratory hopes to construct near the Holifield
Heavy Ion Research Facility tower. Consolidating existing programs
in new facilities to enhance scientific interaction, the complex
would include centers for solid-state research and processing,
advanced microstructural analysis, advanced materials research, and
composite materials investigations.
Explosive growth in the materials sciences and their role in the
Laboratory's technology transfer programs since 1980 has severely
overcrowded existing laboratories. Building a new complex is
considered more economical than upgrading older structures to meet
modern environmental and safety standards. The proposed new complex
would make possible more on-site participation of university and
industrial researchers in cooperative projects in ceramics,
composites, superconductors, and high-temperature metals and
alloys. This complex, therefore, enjoys support from universities
and industrial firms in the Southeast.
At the western gate, near the existing Environmental Sciences and
Aquatic Ecology laboratories, the Laboratory proposes to develop an
Environmental, Life, and Social Sciences Complex. The complex would
include centers for biological sciences and Earth systems and a
biological imaging and advanced photonics laboratory. Its
completion would concentrate the Laboratory's programs in
structural biology, biotechnology, human genome, global
environmental studies, risk assessment and management,
environmental restoration, social sciences, energy technologies for
developing nations, energy efficiency, and transportation systems
research.
As with the materials science divisions, research in the
environmental, life, and social sciences in 1992 was scattered
throughout the Laboratory in older facilities. For example, the
Biology Division had been housed since 1946 in obsolete facilities
at the Y-12 Plant, eight miles from the X-10 Laboratory complex.
With much of the Laboratory's global research centered in the newly
formed Environmental, Life, and Social Sciences Directorate, the
collaborative interactions facilitated by concentrated research in
this new complex would help open new horizons for the solution of
global challenges.
One noteworthy problem area for the Laboratory lies in nuclear
physics. Although the Holifield heavy-ion research accelerator was
only 12 years old in 1992 and had set new records for beam energies
in 1992 that were 60% higher than those achieved in 1982, it had
fallen on hard times. New European accelerators provided even
higher energies, and budget cuts reduced the operating time
available for researchers at the accelerator.
To reverse these trends, the Laboratory proposed using the
Holifield facility to accelerate radioactive ion beams, a unique
capability that would make the facility more valuable to nuclear
physicists, especially those interested in astrophysics. If this
proposal is approved, a recoil mass spectrometer, jointly funded by
the Laboratory and universities, would be acquired to complement
the radioactive beam capability.
While applying cost constraints to facilities such as the Holifield
accelerator, DOE began to devote vast resources during the 1990s to
improving scientific understanding of the transport of wastes in
the environment and the remediation of waste disposal sites. As a
result, Trivelpiece expected the Laboratory to expand its waste
management and remediation work.
BACK TO THE FUTURE
As the Laboratory approached the beginning of its second half
century, Alvin Weinberg was preparing Eugene Wigner's papers for
publication. His effort to uncover and organize the Laboratory's
past gave Weinberg an opportunity to reflect on Wigner's legacy.
The Laboratory's most renowned scientist not only set a standard of
performance for Oak Ridge, Weinberg observed, but he also provided
a vision of the future that speaks as directly to the uncertainties
of the 1990s as it did to the uncertainties of the 1940s. In a
simple statement of truth, Wigner once remarked, "Every moment
brings surprises and unforeseeable events--truly the future is
uncertain."
Weinberg himself viewed aging and the future with equanimity. He
has wryly concluded that scientists improve with age because their
knowledge broadens as they become older. Much of science, he said,
comes not out of brilliant flights of fancy but from viewpoints and
techniques growing out of a lifetime of scientific inquiry.
The same sentiment might well apply to an institution that reaches
the half-century mark. Its corporate experience and accomplishments
should serve as a foundation of strength upon which to build a
vigorous future of inventiveness and purpose.
Although the Laboratory, like science generally, seems more
interested in the future than the past, it sometimes turns to its
past for hope, inspiration, and understanding. When drafting plans
for Laboratory initiatives during the 1990s, the strategic planning
group admitted that improving national competitiveness through
technology transfer and science education might be "more difficult
than the Manhattan Project, which birthed the national laboratories
nearly a half century ago."
In the 1940s, the nation's attention and resources were riveted on
the war, and Laboratory efforts on behalf of the atomic bomb
received the highest priority. Today, the enemies are less clearly
defined and Laboratory initiatives must share the political
spotlight with other government priorities and needs. Thus, the
Laboratory will have to work even harder to justify public
investment in its research activities. As Weinberg recently
suggested, if the Laboratory is to become a prime engine of the
national economy, its people must "adopt the same high standards
and dedication shown during the four years of the Manhattan
Project."
And so the experience of the Laboratory has come full circle. Amid
the complex of buildings, intricate equipment, piping, test tubes,
roads, reactors, accelerators, robots, and supercomputers, one
force stands above all others in explaining the institution's
success: the dedication of the people who work there. That
dedication reached its first peak during the war years, when
secrecy prevailed. Fifty years later, the Laboratory is determined
to open its doors to the future, drawing on its storehouse of
knowledge and skills to serve the public interest.
The purposes to which the Laboratory can now apply its talents are
more varied. But for the Laboratory, the future has always been
uncertain. Its staff has seized opportunities and redefined the
Laboratory's purposes time and again to fit changing circumstances.
As the Laboratory celebrates its 50th anniversary and as it stands
on the threshold of the 21st century, there is little doubt that it
will marshal its resources and talents to meet the challenges of
tomorrow. At the dawn of a new era, this much is certain: if the
Laboratory's past is its prologue, then its next 50 years should be
as demanding, rewarding, and surprising as its first half century.
(keywords: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, history)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please send us your comments.
Date Posted: 2/22/94 (ktb)