PLENTIFUL ENERGY

faced a nightmarish combination of national and local politics, academic rivalries
with Midwestern universities, intergovernmental disagreements, staffing
difficulties, and on top of this, the technical problems that had to be solved. A new
Argonne site had to be established, one that was out of the Argonne forest, isolated
from population centers, but accessible for commuting and possible evacuations.
Only after bitter quarrels, protests from some two hundred land owners, and
political scores that had to be settled, were the 3667 acres assembled for the new
laboratory. It took a strong and demanding director, and in Walter Zinn the
Laboratory had the right man, for Zinn was a person to be reckoned with. [9]
Walter Zinn was a Canadian émigré, naturalized a U.S. citizen in 1938. He had
come to the University of Chicago from Columbia with Enrico Fermi in 1942. He
and Herb Anderson, another of Fermi‘s protégés, had then used the squash court
under the west stands to build exponential piles—pieces of a reactor, really—that
give accurate information on important reactor characteristics, and in particular the
characteristics that the CP-1 would have. He had been Fermi‘s deputy in directing
the construction of the next reactor, CP-3 on Site A. (CP-2 was CP-1 reassembled
on Site A.) Alvin Weinberg, Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, noted later
that Zinn was close to Fermi, was intelligent and was tough, and commented, ―Zinn
was a model of what a director of the then-emerging national laboratories should
be: sensitive to the aspirations of both contractor (University of Chicago) and fund
provider (Atomic Energy Commission), but confident enough to prevail (over both)
when this was necessary.‖ [10] Attentive to the need for science programs and to
the needs of the scientific personnel, Zinn strove to make Argonne the laboratory it
became.
The AEC regarded Zinn as the nation‘s leading expert on reactors and the work
at Argonne as the most promising, in addition to the work being the first
historically. In 1947 ―Zinn‘s Breeder‖ was approved for construction, and going
one step further, the AEC decided all reactor development would be concentrated at
Argonne; Zinn was not consulted. The more reactor-focused the lab would be, the
more the AEC would lean toward universities for its basic science, Zinn thought,
and this very decidedly did not please him. Zinn accepted the exclusivity of the
reactor role only on the promise that basic research at Argonne would be helped by
it. Alvin Weinberg wasn‘t in agreement with the whole idea either. Weinberg and
Zinn circumvented the centralization as early as the spring of 1948, by sharing the
responsibility for the design of the high flux reactor. This reactor, conceived and
guided in design by Eugene Wigner, was one of the three selected by the newly
established Atomic Energy Commission for immediate construction. It became the
Materials Test Reactor on the Idaho site, the workhorse for studying the effects of
radiation on all kinds of materials for decades thereafter. With all this going on, it
was 1948 before Zinn got any buildings, Quonset huts to house the engineering
division actually doing the reactor design work. And an uneasy arrangement was set
up that brought Midwestern universities in as a board of governors.
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