Building 205 Named Nuclear Historic Landmark

By Elizabeth Quill

American Nuclear Society president Jim Tulenko (right) and CMT Division Director David Lewis unveil a plaque designating Building 205 a nuclear historic landmark.

The American Nuclear Society named Argonne's Building 205, home to the Chemical Engineering Division, a Nuclear Historic Landmark at a courtyard ceremony Monday, July 19, 2004.

The award, presented by ANS President Jim Tulenko, recognizes sites and facilities that have significantly contributed to the development, implementation and peaceful use of nuclear technology.

"Nuclear energy for the power industry started here at Argonne," said David Lewis, director of the Chemical Engineering Division. "We're part of that."

In the 1960s, Building 205's Laboratory J134 was the site for the development of the processes and equipment used in Experimental Breeder Reactor-II. The facility demonstrated the melt refining process developed as part of closed fuel cycling. More than five metric tons of metal fuel were reprocessed and recycled to the reactor before 1969. Fewer than 20 years later, just down the hall in Room J118, the electrorefining process was invented for the Integral Fast Reactor.

Lewis said techniques developed in Building 205 are still used in Europe and Japan to separate spent fuel and make fresh fuel. However, the United States stopped using Argonne's procedures during the Carter Administration.

The award may recognize the building, he said, but it's these techniques that transformed nuclear technology.

"This is not a spectacular building," Lewis said. "It's bricks. It's mortar. It isn't even particularly efficient. But the people who worked here for the last 50 some years have been brilliant. It's a 'who's who' of chemical engineering applied to the nuclear industry."

Bill Miller (CMT) has worked at Argonne since 1959. Two years before his arrival, Argonne began the EBR-II project to build a fast reactor fuel-cycle facility. The purpose: to clean the fuel so that it could be reused.

"The fuel was made here," Miller said, "the process to reprocess it was developed here, and a lot of the components of the cell — the manipulator, the shielding windows — were put together and developed here."

Lewis said the nuclear industry would not be the same if it weren't for Argonne's accomplishments. The division continues to conduct spent-fuel analysis in addition to working to close the fuel cycle for the Generation IV reactors.

"This is the mothership for nuclear energy," Lewis said. "It is a big part of who we are, who we've been, and who we'll continue to be."

Building 205 is the eighth Argonne facility to be named a Nuclear Historic Landmark. The others are Chicago Pile-1 and -5, Experimental Breeder Reactor-I and _II, Experimental Boiling Water Reactor, the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source and the Materials Testing Reactor.

--Argonne News, August 2, 2004