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Los Alamos disbands division following accelerator success

At midnight on Saturday (April 3), the Laboratory will have one less division, with the end of most of Los Alamos' design and engineering work for the nation's largest civilian science construction project.

All 130 regular and subcontract employees in the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) Division are moving to other jobs within the Laboratory, including the skeleton crew of 35 who have been handling final details for the $1.4 billion project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Sponsored by the Department of Energy's Office of Science, the SNS is scheduled for completion in 2006.

The SNS eventually will produce eight times more neutrons than the most powerful sources available today. This will allow researchers to take brighter, more detailed snapshots of material structures and even enable them to make "movies" of molecules in motion.

"Professionally, this was the job of a lifetime: being able to contribute to DOE Office of Science's biggest project," said SNS Division Leader Don Rej.

"When the Laboratory established the SNS division in August 1999, we had been placed on the Secretary of Energy's watchlist and were under intense scrutiny," Rej said. "The excitement of working on big projects like this one comes from solving a seemingly endless string of insoluble problems, and solving them within budget and schedule constraints."

The entire SNS project continuously receives the rigorous peer review that routinely accompanies all major DOE Office of Science projects. These reviews have kept the project lean and focused on performance within cost and schedule requirements, Rej said. In addition, each line-item construction project receives detailed, direct scrutiny from Congress.

Rej attributed the success of Los Alamos' part of the SNS to the talent and dedication of the staff members, technicians and support professionals assigned to the project.

"They consistently rose to the occasion to deliver world class hardware. Their accomplishment is now being recognized worldwide," Rej said.

Laboratory Deputy Director for Science and Technology Bill Press said the SNS accelerator work would bring credit to Los Alamos for decades. "Our innovative yet solid design work already is being recognized as the new world state of the art," Press said. "Walking the SNS tunnel in Oak Ridge, I'm filled with pride by the [Laboratory] logos on the equipment, and the successful multidisciplinary approach that they represent."

Oak Ridge National Laboratory is leading the effort, and Los Alamos' share of the work totals about $200 million. The SNS consists of an ion source and a radio frequency quadrupole linear accelerator, built by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and successfully completed and tested in late 2002; the 10 Los Alamos linacs and one-of-a-kind superconducting niobium linac cavities designed by the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility; an accumulator ring from Brookhaven National Laboratory; a mercury spallation target designed by Oak Ridge; and a suite of neutron scattering detection instruments from Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge. SNS' accelerated ion beam will strike a mercury target and will generate neutrons for research.

Los Alamos had complete technical responsibility for the design, engineering and manufacturing of components and subsystems of the SNS accelerator, including six drift-tube linear accelerator tanks components, four coupled-cavity linacs, in addition to the high-voltage pulsed-power systems, high-power radio frequency systems and control systems for the entire linac, plus the overall linac physics, including beam dynamics and diagnostics.

"Construction of the SNS is an unprecedented joint venture of six DOE national labs in four time zones," Rej said. "All of us worked closely together to solve each other's technical and schedule problems in a timely manner. I would say we went beyond peer review and peer pressure to peer partnership, due to which the national SNS project is 80 percent complete overall, on schedule and on budget."

Most of Los Alamos' SNS personnel have moved into back into their original organizations, mostly the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) and the Engineering Sciences and Applications (ESA) Division. But others have seeded key groups at the Laboratory. Key players in the SNS success are designing satellites, helping complete the Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test Facility, supporting proton radiography techniques, helping with stockpile certification and providing their expertise to other divisions.

-- Jim Danneskiold

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