At long last I’ve made it to Argonne. The 1,700-acre national laboratory has been an enigma to me ever since I started exploring the forest preserves around it ten years ago. There’s something about the way it’s tucked into the bottom-right-hand corner of Du Page County on my Tribune-McNally Chicagoland map, about the way it’s colored the shade of pink mapmakers use for industrial areas and medical centers, about the way the lab grounds form a large, misshapen watermelon encircled by the green rind of the Waterfall Glen Forest Preserve. On the ground Argonne’s property is separated from Waterfall Glen by a high fence, and perhaps I would have been allowed inside years ago if I’d ever taken the time to ask the public-affairs office. But I never did. It took an invitation from Ron Sundell, a biogeographer at Argonne, to get me into the inner sanctum.
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Argonne National Laboratory is a research facility operated by the University of Chicago for the Department of Energy. Established in 1946 as a way to retain the scientific expertise that created the nuclear bomb, Argonne was assigned the job of developing a nuclear reactor capable of producing electricity, which it accomplished in 1951. About 1,300 scientists are at work at Argonne today, though many of their projects and jobs are threatened by government cutbacks.
Sundell showed me a copy of the prototype that’s up and running at Fort Riley, Kansas, where troops are trained to operate tanks and heavy artillery, among other things. Not surprisingly, tanks aren’t exactly gentle on the land, and Fort Riley’s managers face a great challenge in keeping the area from turning into something that resembles the surface of the moon. They’re not just worried about wrecking the environment; a moonscape bears little resemblance to the terrain troops would be likely to encounter in combat.
Elemental research is impenetrable except to those working in the field. Just to appreciate the significance of a tool like the Advanced Photon Source requires a level of expertise I don’t possess. I can picture myself at a cocktail party throwing out something about having visited the site of the Advanced Photon Source, and I know that if the person I was blabbing to was genuinely interested I’d be squirming and sweating by his third question. (This assumes I would ever be at the kind of party where someone would be interested in Advanced Photon Sources.)
