PLENTIFUL ENERGY

“A first rate R&D laboratory staff can be led only by indirection; the
leadership must lead, not order. External factors like education and training
and extensive experience cannot modify genius much. Management must have
the respect of creative scientists, and to have this, management must have
risen through the ranks. Further, management must provide a buffer between
the creative scientists and bureaucratic non-essentials. Security and financial
freedom must be provided to allow freedom to think, free from coercion,
distraction or fear, so the staff can judge and plan purely on scientific
grounds. Recognition of creative stature will always be the chief motivator. It
is the people who are important, not the facilities.” [9]
These were policies that established Argonne National Laboratory as the
laboratory its management intended it to be. Controversy and confrontation were
continuous. But the policies for managing the laboratory‘s staff outlined by
Hilberry in the passage above were just what I found them to be when I arrived in
1963. I don‘t think any of my colleagues had any notion of events at the top of the
laboratory, in the confrontations to establish and maintain laboratory programs. The
description of my early days at Argonne in Chapter 3 will make this even clearer.
Remarkably enough, through all this the laboratory was advancing reactor
technology very rapidly. The management policies came to be tested later, and were
tested particularly severely in the decade from 1965 on. But we‘ll come to that in
due time, so let‘s now catch up with Argonne‘s fast breeder reactor development
program.
1.5 Fast Breeder Reactor Technology at Argonne: The Early Years,
1946 to 1964
The first thing that needs to be said is that the IFR came from a distinguished
past. It was based on ideas, concepts, discoveries, developments, and technical
approaches that reached back to Argonne‘s earliest days. Argonne‘s first reactor
was almost the personal product of Argonne‘s first laboratory director, and a fast
breeder reactor as well. It began it all. The Experimental Breeder Reactor Number 1
(EBR-I) was to start the world along the path to develop a commercial breeder
technology, and to do it in the earliest years of nuclear development. But the path
ended, suddenly, in the mid-sixties, uncompleted, its technology no longer pursued,
no longer in fashion. The technology existed, of course, in the minds of those who
took part in it, and, if you knew where to look, in papers and proceedings of the
conferences of earlier years.
It existed most tangibly and undeniably in the existence of EBR-II. In May of
1954 Zinn had proposed a new reactor, an Experimental Breeder Reactor-II, which
was big enough to test full-scale components and applications. EBR-II eventually
became an Argonne triumph. It was a small but complete fast reactor power plant. It
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