The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World (2 page)

O
ne might fairly ask why Wan was allowed to visit Argonne. The perverse rationale was that the United States
was
so far behind. The Americans resembled the Japanese in the 1970s and the Chinese in the 1990s—they were very much at the bottom of a learning curve others had scaled before. Given that reality, the shrewdest path was to humbly work with the best in the world, glean what you could in visits such as Wan’s, then trust in intellectual brawn to push through to victory.

The global meltdown of 2008 and 2009 had put a scare into Americans, who were determined to build a fresh economy on a foundation of substance and not financial, real estate, or dot-com bubbles. Europeans were similarly fearful and determined not to be left out of such a new frontier. Asia’s export-propelled economies knew they, too, had to find another way. History told Wan Gang that global financial crises breed the type of fundamental technological discoveries that move economies. He observed before him the makings of just such a breakthrough in energy technology. Like the Americans and Europeans, Wan said that powerful, affordable batteries and the cars they propelled were bound to initiate the next great economic boom. Batteries were an underappreciated technology—they were already enabling the revolution in electronic devices, he said, and now were on the cusp of much more.

Others focused on how a transformed battery could shake up geopolitics. An electric age would puncture the demand for oil and thus rattle petroleum powers such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Saudi Arabia’s ruling family, and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries as a whole, stripped of tens of billions of dollars in income. China could put its population in electric cars, shun gasoline propulsion, and clean up its air. Generally speaking, the world might spend less on oil and worry less about climate change.

The numbers behind all this maneuvering were large. Forecasts of the annual market for advanced batteries in 2020 were about $25 billion, half the 2012 gross revenue of Google.
1
That sum would double in the likely event that oil prices settled near or in the triple digits per barrel and drove more motorists away from gasoline propulsion. Battery-enabled hybrid and electric vehicles would command sales of $78 billion by 2020.
2
If large-scale batteries could economically store electricity made by windmills and solar cells, that would be tens of billions more in annual sales.

Yet those figures accounted only for the
current
decade. The general thinking was that, after 2020, the new industries would be even more gargantuan, on the scale of today’s ExxonMobil, General Electric, and Toyota, the kind of rare, high-value enterprises capable of firing up an entire future economy. By 2030, advanced battery companies would swell into a $100 billion-a-year industry and the electric car business into several $100 billion-a-year behemoth corporations.
3

When you sought justification for this enthusiasm, you heard a mainstream assumption that hybrid and pure electric vehicles would make up 13 to 15 percent of all cars produced around the world by 2020; a decade or two later, they would reach about 50 percent.
4
These estimates did not seem unreasonable when you considered the twenty- and thirty-year-long sales trajectories of previous consumer juggernauts like laptops and cellular phones.

Regardless of the care with which they were calculated, the sums were mischievous—no one could accurately project the market for products that did not yet exist. But the leaders of most of the world’s industrialized countries—Japan and South Korea, Brazil, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Malaysia, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, not to mention the United States and China—decided it was a race, and so it was. In the words of a French government minister, it was a “battle of the electric car.”
5

Because of its record for executing goals at large scale, China loomed over the contest. Yet the Argonne guys felt comfort in that China was not there yet. For one thing, it was still cranking out second-rate technology. Japanese companies, with their two-decade manufacturing lead, conversely enjoyed a commanding 43 percent of the global market for lithium-ion batteries. South Korea held another 23 percent. As for the United States, some people counted it out, but not many. Because lithium-ion had theoretical room for more or less double its current performance, and the United States had both serious scientists and a large market, it still had considerable room to try.

A senior Argonne scientist said that when Wan toured the lab, the undercurrent was, “How can we benefit from this visit?” This created a double intelligence game. Lab managers focused deliberately on the snippets of conversation in which Wan might tip his hand. Yet they could push the boundaries of politesse. During his turn at the podium, for instance, Chamberlain mentioned a clutch of German, Japanese, and South Korean companies—BASF, Panasonic, Samsung, LG Chemical—that were reconfiguring their batteries with the NMC. They were seeking twice the energy of the lithium-iron-phosphate compound favored by Chinese battery makers. Chamberlain was sure that Wan already knew this, making the remark simple candor. If Wan perceived a dig at Chinese strategy, his expression did not betray it. Having gained privileged access to the lab, he rather seemed extraordinarily attentive as he listened to Argonne’s history and inspected some of its crown jewels.

A
lthough venture capitalists and other titans of Silicon Valley could belittle government-run science, they spoke differently about the Department of Energy’s seventeen national laboratories. Argonne commanded particular respect because of its past. It went back to 1942, when Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi traveled to Chicago as the Manhattan Project was getting under way. Fermi set up a makeshift laboratory underneath the Stagg Field football stadium at the University of Chicago and called it the “Met Lab,” for Metallurgical Laboratory. Obsessed with secrecy, he and his collaborators kept even their wives uninformed of the big breakthrough—Fermi’s creation of the world’s first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction, which began the nuclear age. Their sole disclosure went in code to the project leader: “The Italian navigator has just landed in the New World.”

“Were the natives friendly?” came the planned reply.

“Everyone landed safe and happy.”
1

Fermi then moved on to Los Alamos to help build the world’s first atomic bombs and the Met Lab went on without him.

 • • • 

Eighty-nine-year-old Dieter Gruen had worked at Argonne for six decades, since almost the beginning of the Stagg Field days. “That’s Glenn Seaborg,” he said in his office, pointing to a framed photo of the cocreator of plutonium. Gruen was smallish and wore a silk, herringbone blazer. When he was fourteen, Gruen and his older brother fled Nazi Germany and made it to the United States. Gruen ended up attending high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, then Northwestern University, where he studied physics. In 1944, he turned up at Stagg Field with a bachelor’s degree. He was twenty-one. World War II was at a critical stage—D-Day had just happened—and young people like him were in high demand by Manhattan Project managers. He was dispatched immediately to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to help produce sufficient uranium-235 for shipment to the bomb makers at Los Alamos, an effort that was behind schedule.

Gruen found some thirty thousand people already at Oak Ridge. The town had been built practically overnight just for them. There was a sea of mud. Construction was everywhere. Gruen slept in a barracks known as West Village 54. Enormous machines called calutrons had been built to produce uranium-235. Oak Ridge had been chosen because it was near powerful Norris Dam, the first big project of FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority, which could provide the immense volume of electricity that the calutrons required.

So it went for eighteen months, until the war ended with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The work at Oak Ridge wound down. Gruen returned to Stagg Field while beginning graduate studies at the University of Chicago—the Met had been named the country’s first national laboratory and had plenty for him to do. There was so much activity, in fact, that the Met felt cramped for space. Lab scouts began to hunt for a new home. They settled on a place called Tulgey Wood, a two-hundred-acre spit of farmland twenty-four miles southwest of the city along Route 66.

 • • • 

In 1936, Erwin O. Freund, a sausage titan who invented the skinless hot dog, named Tulgey Wood, his new estate, after the forest in
Alice in Wonderland
. Freund was extravagant and eccentric. He placed small, painted carvings of Tweedledee, Tweedledum, and other Lewis Carroll characters along bark trails through the property. He kept two pet chimps plus sheep and peacocks, raised championship boxers in an air-conditioned kennel, and dug limestone-lined lakes for boating in summer and ice-skating in winter. When a clothier friend gave Freund seven fallow deer—a species called
Dama dama
, which are born tan but in adulthood turn completely white—he cared for them, too.

Freund put up a fight when he learned that the Met scouts had settled on Tulgey Wood as the lab’s new home. He decided to employ “every means at my command for as long as necessary to prevent its being seized from me.”
2
The government’s intent was to buy, not seize, the property, yet Freund battled to keep his estate. The dispute went on for a year, when, in 1947, Freund died of a sudden heart attack, allowing the federal acquisition to proceed.

The boxers were easy to move, but the deer would have to go to game parks. Some simply could not be captured and were left behind to wander. Over time, the scientists noticed the herd growing back, “glimpsed along the tree line through a morning fog, found on a knoll during an evening rain, or spotted in headlights near a road at night.”
3
They became an enduring remnant of Erwin Freund’s grand project.

But what to officially call the Met now that it occupied a new place? Someone suggested Fermi Lab, but since such dedications ordinarily honored the deceased and the scientist was still living, the name of a local town was selected—Argonne.

The government purchased additional surrounding farmland. Argonne now covered 4,100 acres. To fill it in, workers planted about a million pine seedlings, which thrived and created a massive home for the growing deer herd. Argonne still looked like a military base, dotted with Quonset huts erected as offices. In the 1950s, red brick structures were added. They were given numbers instead of names. Building 205 was finished in 1951. The two-story structure would become home to Argonne’s Battery Department.

 • • • 

Many of Argonne’s first scientists commuted from Chicago aboard a shuttle bus for thirty-five cents’ fare. The lab provided the service because nearly all its staff lived in the city. Some called Hyde Park “Little Argonne” because of the number of residents employed by the lab. The ride took ninety minutes and passed streets dense with factories, warehouses, and rail yards before giving way to an expanse of farmland. It might seem long, but the driver, an amateur ventriloquist, entertained as he went. In one trick, he would startle boarding passengers with a voice that suggested someone shouting from behind to get on. But gradually the shuttle was discontinued as the scientists gave up the city and sought homes in nascent suburbs such as Aurora, Naperville, and Downers Grove. These communities, with roots stretching back to the 1830s, often resisted newcomers, and Argonne would have to vouch for their character before they could move in. Yet eventually most were accepted and some even found themselves embraced. Among the latter was Stephen Lawroski, head of the Chemicals Technology Division, whom tony Naperville dubbed “the Professor” and honored with a regular invitation to a daily breakfast club of local dignitaries at a downtown drugstore.

Dieter Gruen was awarded his doctorate in 1951. Graduates with his background had many choices. Fundamental research was under way across American industry. He interviewed at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories and heard of positions at General Electric, Ford, and General Motors. Universities, too, were hiring professors and basic researchers. But Gruen remained drawn to Argonne, where he was already known and still proud to work. Argonne was already one of the world’s premier research facilities. Experimentalists enjoyed a free flow of funding from Washington and tremendous liberty to research what interested them. Gruen accepted badge number 1989 and an office in Building 205.

At first, Gruen was assigned to a team building a nuclear submarine under the direction of Captain Hyman Rickover. His task was to figure out how to eliminate hafnium from zirconium, needed in combination with uranium to fuel the subs. The regime was strict. Virtually everything was top secret given that Argonne’s primary function was to create sensitive nuclear technology. Gruen felt the danger. Scientists wore special yellow shoes and provided regular urine samples, both precautions against radiation contamination. An eight-foot fence surrounded the building, accessible only through a guard post. Every office contained a red wastepaper basket with bold all-capital lettering:
BURN
. They were for the classified papers that were no longer wanted. You weren’t supposed to incinerate such documents yourself—the label was aimed at the disposal staff. But at least once, a scientist took the designation literally, setting his wastepaper basket afire and sending smoke into the hallway.

A couple of hundred people were already working in Building 205. Most of them were in their twenties and thirties, a mix of men and women, the latter mostly secretaries, and many were single. At lunch, the men bet over rounds of pinochle in the basement and through the day frequented coffee groups organized along every corridor. On weekends, the scientists visited one another’s homes and numerous couples ultimately married. But generally speaking, Argonne seemed organized for the work conducted there without regard for the conditions under which it was carried out. Only rooms that absolutely required air conditioning were equipped with it, which meant that in the humid summer, moisture collected on overhead water lines and dripped onto the scientists. Some of them draped their equipment with protective plastic but they themselves still often got wet. At departmental meetings, overheated researchers regularly fell asleep.

Gruen didn’t find it at all like Oak Ridge—the intensity was not there. After all, the war had ended. If you ignored the dangerous and classified projects under way, the lab seemed ordinary. Scientists worked from nine to five. In 1956, Gruen and his wife moved to Downers Grove, which had become another Little Argonne. “We didn’t think anybody lived in Downers Grove except people who worked at Argonne,” one of their children remarked.

Yet Gruen also noticed the envy of university friends. He had the use of rare and advanced equipment. If you were a “hotshot,” which he was—he was his team’s youngest senior scientist and assigned his own research group—you were smart to be at Argonne.