Alexei Smirnov [1]

In 2000, when Oak Ridge officials began touting the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) project across the state at many an economic development luncheon, they encountered many a blank look. Most business and civic leaders weren’t clear on exactly what a Spallation Neutron Source was, let alone able to foresee its impact on the region’s immediate future.

Granted, scientists are in general poor marketers, and “Spallation Neutron Source” is the type of mouthful that doesn’t inspire jingles. Furthermore, Oak Ridge, known as Secret City, is a place accustomed to keeping secrets, not advertising them. After all, this was the secret place, hidden away in the mountains, where they built the bomb. In 1945, at the peak of the Manhattan Project, 130,000 people were employed in Oak Ridge. Many of those workers didn’t learn of their involvement with the development of the atomic bomb until many years after their collective labor culminated in three nuclear detonations in New Mexico, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nonetheless, the level of disinterest and active miscomprehension in response to the SNS announcement was worrisome. After Bill Madia, then-director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, carefully described the project at a 2002 conference in Nashville, one attendee dismissed it as “just another expensive nuke.”

But while not many understood the science behind the SNS, fewer still grasped its larger significance—a victorious ending to a protracted battle on the national stage in which the long-term survival and sustained relevance of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was at stake.

So what exactly is the Spallation Neutron Source? It’s both complicated and simple. The SNS is a big, shiny toy. And after the other kids see we have it, they’re going to want to come over to our house to play with it. Too simple? Okay, how’s this. The SNS is a $1.5 billion science project paid for by the U.S. Department of Energy. A very large science project—designers had to factor in the curvature of the Earth when building it—and when it goes online, it’s pretty much guaranteed a blue ribbon in neutron science. But perhaps the best explanation of what the SNS is, starts with one of what it does.

Building the better nutcracker

When Bob Weller thinks of the Spallation Neutron Source, he thinks hickory nuts. The Vanderbilt University professor of physics, materials science and electrical engineering is fond of hickory nuts. They are delicious and grow in abundance in Tennessee, but they also are hard to crack. According to Weller, it’s much the same with neutrons—they are hard to crack but worth the effort.

So the SNS is a giant nutcracker used to extract neutrons out of atoms’ nuclei. “You shoot a proton beam at a giant gob of mercury, at a very high speed,” Weller explains. The study of material using neutrons has some marked advantages over other approaches. “When neutrons interact with matter, they are not electrically charged,” Weller says. “This makes them an inherently nice particle for certain kinds of measurements.” Neutrons can be scattered at metals, compounds, etc. to ascertain atomic structure—to pry deep into a given material without disturbing it in any way. It’s much more efficient than X-ray scattering—if you can get to the neutrons. Neutrons live inside the nuclei of atoms, which are a good bit harder to crack open than hickory nuts. And even when you succeed, the neutrons freed as a result last only about 15 minutes before decaying into protons and electrons. Even this decay is an advantage—it makes them easy to handle in a controlled environment, and when they disintegrate, they don’t leave behind nuclear waste (though the process to free them does result in some radioactive residue).

Once SNS opens this year for the world’s relatively small, but powerful community of some 5,000 neutron scientists, it will give them the most powerful tool ever to study the molecular makeup of car parts, jet wings and many other mysteries inside the things that surround us. Imagine paper clips that will bend but not break, or car parts that will better absorb the shocks of a collision, resulting in a bruised sternum instead of a broken neck. In other words, groundbreaking research is on tap—research that will determine the safety and efficiency of the transportation we use and the effectiveness of the medications we take, research that will transform the fabric of our daily lives in the not-so-distant future.

Hanging by a phone line

But as important as the SNS is to neutron research, it still almost died a slow death in Congress in the late 1990s.

Over the years, America, the place where neutron scattering was first invented, has fallen behind the rest of the world in neutron science. France has had a neutron source since the 1970s in Grenoble. England built one dubbed ISIS at the UK Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford in 1985. Those two installations are the main reason why the world’s neutron scientists have gravitated in the past three decades to Europe. Alvin Trivelpiece embarked on a mission to change that. During his tenure as chief of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and Research between 1981 and 1987, the electrical engineer-turned-physicist devised a plan to build centers of cutting-edge research at four of the nation’s 19 science laboratories. After the first three were successfully approved, it was Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s turn.

Trivelpiece had his sights on an Advanced Neutron Source for ORNL. ANS was a substantial upgrade to the High Flux Isotope Reactor, dubbed hy-pher by insiders, that still operates there—from 100 Megawatts to about 300 Megawatts. But the project would have involved a highly radioactive core and raised questions about radioactive waste at a time when the Department of Energy’s budget review committee was increasingly concerned that nuclear waste cleanup costs had skyrocketed across the nation from $100 million to about $1 billion. Anything that had to do with high-flux (i.e. radioactive) technology was destined for failure.

On a December day in 1997, around two in the afternoon, after ANS had already failed to get in the DoE budget twice, Trivelpiece got a call from the White House. “Why don’t you switch to Spallation Neutron Source,” the caller suggested. “Because if ANS fails the third time, it’s dead.” Who was the caller? Trivelpiece is not telling. Instead, he recounts how he had only two hours to cobble together plans for an alternative project. It worked; SNS got approved. Trivelpiece may wish to remain mysterious about his friendly tip, but few at ORNL doubt which politician to credit for their big break. When asked about the mystery White House caller, Bill Appleton, the former second-in-command to Trivelpiece, says, “I’d just as soon not say. It was pretty high up, and it was from Tennessee, so you can pretty much guess who it was.” Vice President Al Gore, that’s who. Asked about his role in landing SNS at Oak Ridge, the former veep promised to get back to Business Tennessee on specifics, but said: “I was involved closely in bringing it to Oak Ridge.” In a Jan. 21, 1998, speech to ORNL scientists and staff, Gore said “it would be irresponsible not to reclaim world leadership in this critical field.” According to Greg Simon, Gore’s former chief domestic policy advisor, the Vice President was “aware of every detail. I was in contact almost weekly with Al Trivelpiece and Oak Ridge staff between 1993 and 1997.”

Bringing it home

The change in target and its initial funding success didn’t mean the project’s troubles were over. It would still take a determined bipartisan effort to land the project in Tennessee. As far back as 1995, then-Republican-Mayor of Knoxville Victor Ashe flew to Washington, D.C., to lobby the Congress and Senate on behalf of Oak Ridge as ORNL’s prospects shrunk in light of looming budget cuts at the Department of Energy. Among early supporters of ANS/SNS were Senators Bill Frist and Fred Thompson, as well as Bill Baxter, Thompson’s former finance guy now a director at TVA. At the same time, Rep. Zach Wamp joined the growing chorus in support of the new Oak Ridge project. But SNS had its share of detractors fighting to move it to another national lab or to cut its funding altogether.

Among the most vocal of critics was Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), who toured the future site of SNS in Oak Ridge in 1999 as part of his duties as then-chairman of the House Committee on Science. His reported back to Washington that “SNS project management is in turmoil, spending is lagging, project cost and schedule estimates have not been fully developed.” Sensenbrenner recommended no SNS construction funds for 2000. That was a big blow for Trivelpiece, who by then had been appointed by the DoE as director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Not only had he ended up with “many former friends” at other national labs as a result of landing the SNS project at Oak Ridge, now his funding was going to be cut or cancelled. “[Sensenbrenner] got irritated at something. I was apparently at the center of his annoyance,” Trivelpiece recalls. “It goes back to a Byzantine political intrigue that you have to read Solzhenitsyn to understand.” Business Tennessee attempted to contact Sensenbrenner to see if his opinion of SNS has changed, but his spokesman said the congressman had not been to Oak Ridge for five years and would not have current knowledge of the project.

Despite critics and political intrigues, SNS construction funding was approved. In December 2000, Al Gore came to Oak Ridge to participate in the groundbreaking ceremony alongside then-Gov. Don Sundquist, Sen. Bill Frist, Rep. Zach Wamp and other dignitaries.

Six years later, “the biggest challenges have all been overcome,” says Lee Ridinger, who oversees the project on behalf of the UT-Battelle partnership, which was established to share research between the University of Tennessee and Battelle-managed Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “SNS is on budget and on time. Going back for more money was never a possibility.” According to Ridinger, among the many factors that contributed to the successful construction of SNS was Trivelpiece’ idea of involving the nation’s other laboratories in its construction, thus neutralizing some potential enemies. “National energy labs are in a constant state of civil war, like Japanese shoguns, so we had to fight that fight,” recalls Simon, who sat through numerous DoE budget hearings with a funding figure for SNS scribbled on a piece of paper in his back pocket.

As it turns out, landing SNS at Oak Ridge may have saved the entire laboratory from extinction.

The return to relevance

Many scientists interviewed for this article say that 10 years ago, before SNS, they would have predicted that ORNL would be the first laboratory to come under DoE’s cost-cutting axe. This is no longer the case now that the East Tennessee lab finally has the centerpiece project it had been lacking for decades. In fact, the neutron cracker is the 21st-century Manhattan Project for the region—except it’s much less secretive, less radioactive and much cheaper. (The bill for the Manhattan Project was roughly $2 billion—$20 billion in 2004 money.)

However, while seclusion in the mountains of East Tennessee was good for the Manhattan Project, it poses a challenge to business development around the laboratory as it asserts its newfound relevance in the 21st century. ORNL is a goldmine of patents, but it has been notoriously slow in becoming the Silicon Valley of the South. “For God’s sake, can’t we do something to make some apples fall closer to the tree?” Trivelpiece laments, referring to numerous companies that got their start inside Oak Ridge labs, but chose to build their headquarters elsewhere.

One such example is publicly traded, $53-million-in-sales Abaxis (ABAX), whose portable blood analyzers can perform more than 20 types of tests on humans and animals, based on a technology used by astronauts. The company, born out of an invention in Oak Ridge, is now based in Union City, Calif.

Developing business in the region has been the full-time occupation for Bob Wilson, who presides over the Center for Entrepreneurial Growth in Oak Ridge. With a $750,000 grant from ORNL manager Battelle, Wilson has been coaching local executives for four years, which gave him ample time to identify two main weaknesses: “Not enough capital to fund early-stage companies, and lack of experienced management talent,” he says. “We’ve got successful entrepreneurs, but they’ve put their money in their pockets and went to the farm. And that ticks me off.” At least some out-of-towners who recently bought retirement nests at Rarity Bay are beginning to express interest in local ventures, Wilson says.

Wilson agrees that having SNS next door should be a boon to the local economy beyond the immediate impact from its construction. In a way, SNS is not just a giant experiment in neutron science, but also a litmus test for how well Oak Ridge markets itself in the future. As the project opens for foreign scientists this summer, the laboratory will be forced to further shed its reclusive reputation in order to be viewed as a destination more exciting than Grenoble or Oxford. According to Trivelpiece, who at 72 is a consultant at Sandia National Laboratories in Nevada, wooing scientists to Tennessee will not be a challenge. “Everybody goes to where the action is,” he says. “[Scientists] vote with their feet.”

Some already have. Ian S. Anderson, who worked at ILL in France, is currently working with SNS director Thom Mason. Other recent transplants from Europe include Georg Ehlers and Dean Myles. But it remains to be seen whether executives would want to come to Oak Ridge and stay to build companies in cooperation with local scientists.

“Anytime you try to locate a business in Oak Ridge, you’re swimming upstream because businesses like to be located shoulder to shoulder, and ORNL wasn’t built for that. It was intended to be far away from everything,” says former Trivelpiece aide Appleton.

One thing is certain: SNS gives Oak Ridge, as well the United States, some 10 to 15 years of lead time in neutron science, during which ORNL can consider itself the world’s foremost research authority in the fields of chemistry, materials science, geology, engineering and biology. Moreover, the existence of the new Center for Nanophase Material Science in the same building with SNS gives more cause to believe that there will be plenty of fodder for business ideas once scientists get cracking on filing those patents based on their discoveries.

Some may consider 10 to 15 years a short lead, but in the world of neutron science, where 15 minutes make or break the experiment, it seems satisfactory for now. “SNS is a real phoenix, a great example of the whole of America coming together to build it,” says Bob Cywinski, a British neutron scientist who was involved in building ISIS in England and is currently spearheading efforts to one-up America with a yet more powerful neutron source in Europe. Still, Cywinski says those efforts are in the beginning stages, so Oak Ridge should remain the world’s top neutron source site for the next 10 years, at least. “Many neutron scatterers in Europe are now saying: Our big brother has one; can we get one too?” For now, if they want to play with the shiniest toy, interact with the blue ribbon-winning science fair project, or just use the world’s largest nutcracker, they’ll have to come to East Tennessee.

Thom Mason the Wunderkind

One of the smarter things Bill [Appleton] and I did was hire Thom Mason.” So says Alvin Trivelpiece, the former grand strategist of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Research. Mason’s performance over the last seven years supports Trivelpiece’s assessment. Mason, a native Nova Scotian, was hired in 1998 at the age of 34 to be groomed as director of the Spallation Neutron Source. But his managerial chops got tested much earlier than anticipated when previous director David Moncton left to return to Argonne National Laboratory less than three years after had he had arrived to manage the $1.5 billion project. Some at Oak Ridge speculate that the project proved too much for Moncton. In a DoE budget hearing in 1999, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, one of the project’s more prominent critics, questioned Moncton’s ability to oversee the involvement of other national laboratories in the SNS project in Oak Ridge. “This is a complex project which, as proposed, requires an unprecedented level of cooperation among five different DOE labs operated by four different contractors,” said Sensenbrenner, according to a Library of Congress transcript of the hearing. “Although a draft memorandum of agreement with the labs has been floated by DOE, it remains unsigned, and until this MOA is legally binding, I’m concerned that Mr. Monkton [sic], the Director of the SNS project, who is a good person, won’t have authority over the other participating labs’ employees.” Enter Mason. Five years later, the largest civilian science project on earth is on budget and on time, an accomplishment worth a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records. Prior to moving to Oak Ridge in 1998, Mason, who has a doctorate in condensed matter physics, was a mere faculty member at the University of Toronto. He had worked in neutron science as a researcher but had no prior record of managing a giant project such as SNS. But as Mason points out, the very nature of the project makes it difficult to find anyone with prior experience. “Building something like this happens every 40 years,” he says. “There’s not a lot of opportunity to do this more than once.”

Buddy, Can You Spare a Cement Mixer?

A frustrated Oak Ridge resident complained to a friend in 2001 that it was impossible to find a contractor to pave a driveway because ORNL was building its Spallation Neutron Source. Indeed, the shielding over the tunnel into the target facility at SNS (where mercury is shot with a proton beam to produce neutrons) consists of seven feet of steel and two feet of concrete, while the target facility floor is five feet thick. That means area contractors had to produce 12 million pounds of steel shielding for the monolith alone, plus some four million pounds of concrete. That certainly put Oak Ridge homeowners in a bind for a while, says Carl Strawbridge, deputy project director of SNS. But subcontractors could not have been happier. By that time, subcontracting opportunities exceeded $100 million while total salaries involved in the project were above $300 million. All that steel and concrete is necessary to make the SNS target facility as strong as possible due to the increase in the intensity of neutrons produced there from 10- to 100-fold. Due to that intensity the target becomes radioactive, so all maintenance operations inside the target, even changing light bulbs, will be performed remotely, with state-of-the-art robotic manipulators. SNS is the first facility to use a pure mercury target to produce neutrons. An average mercury nucleus is rich in neutrons, containing some 120 of them, thus the target’s 20 tons of mercury is only one cubic meter in size. To get the research under way, SNS requires some 42 megawatts of electricity to generate 1.4 megawatts of beam power in the linac, or enough energy to power 1,400 homes. At current estimates, the total SNS electric bill will be $10 million a year, or enough to light a town of 30,000 for the same period.