By CHARLES B. CLEVELAND From doublethink to 'Speakeasy': Jumping from 1984 to 2001 OVER 1,700 SCIENTISTS—out of an
overall staff of 4,700 persons—are employed at Argonne National Laboratory. This concentration of scientific expertise is devoted to energy research
and myriad projects in the physical,
biomedical and environmental sciences. A visitor hears a new language: fast
breeder atomic reactors, neutron hodoscope, gamma rays, thermal pollution,
radio-ecology, spin fluctuation studies,
magnetic properties of actinide compounds, rubidium generator. There is
even something with the intriguing
name of "Speakeasy," a computer programming language developed at
Argonne to make scientific computations faster and easier. But in the hands of an experienced
guide such as Dr. Robert G. Sachs, the
director and one of the world's leading
physicists, it translates into projects affecting all of us: the production of an
electrical car to replace today's gas guzzlers, turning the sun's rays into energy,
making Illinois coal usable without
polluting the air, a cure for cancer, and
new techniques for making heart bypass operations and similar operations
safer. All this is taking place in a setting that looks like some unlikely hybrid of a college campus and a nature
center complete with a herd of white
fallow deer. The laboratory is located on a 1,700-acre site 27 miles southwest of downtown Chicago, not far from where the
Springfield-Chicago Highway 66 joins
the Tri-State Tollway. It operates under
a three-way contract involving the
University of Chicago, the federal
government's Energy Research and
Development Administration and a
group of some 30 midwest universities.
It is sometimes confused by the public
with the newer project 25 miles west of Chicago at Batavia where a giant accelerator is banging away at the deeper
secrets of the atom. Although the public
knows little about Argonne, it is now almost 30 years old and has assets of
more than $450 million and an operating budget of about $135 million a year. More than half the laboratory's efforts are connected in some way with
the energy crisis. A top priority item is
the liquid metal fast breeder reactor, a
newer and not yet commercially available source of atomic-generated energy,
which is considered to be a potentially
inexhaustible source of power. Still
further ahead is atomic energy by "fusion"—energy from combining atoms
rather than "splitting" them. Argonne
is trying to get this together also. Dr. Sachs emphasizes, however, that
the laboratory is not wedded to atomic
energy development, but is working on
"just about any other kind of energy
source you could think of." Coal is considered one of the most important of
these sources. One important laboratory project is seeking ways to burn coal
"in an environmentally acceptable
manner"—that is, pollution-free. This
could be important to the state since
Illinois coal deposits are among the
richest in the world. There is a lot of
energy buried under the state. The
problem is that when this energy is released during combustion, a lot of polluting sulfur is also released—into the
air we breathe. Two ways around this
are to convert coal into a gas or liquid
first, or to burn coal in specially designed boilers. Dr. Sachs feels that coal and
nuclear energy rank as the two likeliest
short-term answers to our energy shortages. Converting solar energy into usable
energy is still largely a visionary scheme
to all except the researchers at
Argonne. The problems are huge. It would take a mirror more than 30 miles
square to collect the energy put out by
the equivalent power plant today. Just
tracking the sun is a major engineering
feat; sunlight has to be reflected into a
converter and the converter casts a
shadow on the mirror used to collect the sunlight. One step toward what Dr. Sachs and
others believe will be eventual success
has already occurred. A researcher in
high energy physics who was studying
very minute fundamental particles
needed a machine for one of his experiments. It turned out to meet one of the
needs for solar energy—collecting light
over wide angles. Scientists bristle at the word "breakthrough" because most scientific advances are steady, a sort of planned evolution. Despite this, the term does fit the development of new high-performance batteries which make the electrical car a real possibility for highway travel. The same principle is also being applied in an effort to find a way to store electrical energy. If this were accomplished, it would even out the daily peaks and valleys of electrical demand and the seasonal ups-and-downs as well. Combatting pollution gets a lot of attention at Argonne. Underway are elaborate studies of heated water (from factories and atomic plants) on Lake Michigan and other water supplies and what to do about it. Effects of radiation are studied, including the impact—from many years past—of radium on women who painted fluorescent materials on watch dials and, by licking the brushes, unconsciously contaminated their bodies. These are studies
which will help guide surgeons in organ transplants; still others in plant biology. Argonne is, in many ways, the world of tomorrow — today. 382 / Illinois Issues / December 1975
Chicago