DOE's Neglected Environmental Parks Reawaken With An Expanded Role

The dedication last month of Fermi National Laboratory as a National Environmental Research Park may mark the resurgence of an obscure, 20-year-old Department of Energy program to study the environment. In the past three months the program has gained, along with Fermilab’s unique prairie acreage, a catchy new name—ParkNet—and a mandate to use DOE computer networks to expand collaborative research on the environment. DOE officials say that the new name and the emphasis on computing highlight the department’s desire to play a leading role in understanding global climate change. They say it is merely a coincidence that the $5 million program is taking on a higher profile at the same time the department is under sharp attack for the environmental consequences of its 45 years of managing the nation’s nuclear weapons facilities. “It is my hope that DOE will become the world leader in environmental technology, and a valuable resource for environmental restoration,” Energy Secretary James Watkins told Congress in April. The DOE environmental park program was created in response to a 1969 congressional edict that “unique, unusual, and expensive-to-duplicate facilities at federal laboratories . . . should be made available to the national scientific community” for environmental research. But progress toward that goal often has been impeded by inadequate funding and a lack of direction from DOE, says Walt Conley, director of the Fermilab program. Until recently, he says, “the parks have been operating as orphans. It hasn’t been a coordinated effort.” ParkNet’s new director, Helen McCammon, agrees that heightened concem about the environment gives the program a new sense of urgency. “Up till now, each park worked individually,” says McCammon, sponsoring small research projects on the plants, wildlife, and soil indigenous to the local region. “Now, with the problem of global warming, we’re hying to determine trends on a regional scale.” Understanding those trends will require cooperation between the parks and easy access to the 40 years of environmental data stored at the individual sites. Included in that data, says McCammon, are most of the earliest studies on the ability of soil to buffer acid rain (research that dates back to 1968) and seminal studies of the “carbon cycle” in soil that may prove essential to anticipating the effects of CO2 build-up in the atmosphere. McCammon hopes that scientists at the parks will increase their use of the labs’ computing facilities to share existing and new data. “What we’re hying to do is bring the [program’s] visibility up,” she says. But perhaps most germane to DOE, an agency that now faces a clean-up bill of as much as $150 billion over the next 20 years to bring its nuclear production facilities into compliance with environmental regulations, is the fact that four of the six parks are on the sites of seriously polluted facilities. The worst offender in the DOE production. network is the 570-square-mile Hanford (Wash.) Reservation, where over the past 40 years, nine nuclear reactors have released 4 million kilograms of plutonium and billions of gallons of less radioactive liquid waste into the surrounding ground. Designated a National Environmental Research Park in 1975. Hanford offers a unique opportunity to study the impact of such vast quantities of radioactive waste on the local ecology. As a 1985 DOE report delicately puts it, “Over the 40 years of operational history, low levels of radionuclides have been gradually released to the terrestrial environment, ponds, streams, and rivers of the site. These radionuclides have afforded researchers with the opportunity to follow specific radionuclides into and through many types of ecosystems, providing insights into the structure and function of these systems. While the first park was dedicated in 1972, and four others were added in subsequent years, the largest single ecological region in the country—the midcontinental prairie—remained unrepresented until Fermilab - officials suggested their site to DOE four years ago, Conley says. The four-year delay before the lab became an official park was intended to “avoid the suspicion that [selection as a park] would give Fermilab an unfair advantage [in the race] for the superconducting supercollider,” he explains. Last November, however, a Texas site was selected for the SSC, and the department moved ahead with the Fermilab proposal. Fermilab, the 6,800-acre site of the Tevatron particle accelerator, is home to some of the last unadulterated prairie land in the United States. Grazing on the lab’s long prairie grass inside the Tevatron’s main ring is a herd of about 100 buffalo. Nationwide, less than five square miles of natural prairie remain. “We’re trying to take a snapshot of what we have left,” Conley says. A half-mile public trail gives a taste of the last illinois prairie. Conley believes that ParkNet will need a larger budget, however, if it hopes to contribute solutions to the world’s - pressing environmental problems. "Only about $500,000 of the program’s $5 million budget is used to operate the parks themselves," he says, "with the rest available for research teaching by faculty.” Hosler admits that such restrictions “would be a shocker” for the nation’s major research universities. But he believes that they “have brought the problem on themselves by growing out of proportion to the resources they had available.” Stanford’s Robert Byer vice provost and dean of research at one of those universities, doesn,t agree that cutting out academic-year salaries from federal grants would be a good thing. And she certainly doesn’t agree that universities such as his have contributed to the problem of producing an adequate supply of scientists. “The idea of limiting salaries is a good exampre of NSF’s thinking that it can get something for nothing,” says Byer, who has received NSF grants for his work as a laser physicist. “If you want to get the best bang for the buck in basic research, then you should set up a system of competitive grants and let, the faculty decide how best to use the funds that you award them.” Byer says that the proposed change is another example of NSF’s desire to share the cost of research with those universities that receive its funds. And he’s not very happy with the idea. “Universities operate under very tight budget constraints,” he says, “and when you shift the burden, you have to ask where the funds are going to come from. NSF’s attempts to micromanage research, by specifying how much can be spent in each part of the grant, has caused us a great deal of distress. It wastes a lot of time, and it’s not an effective way to generate high-quality research.” Byer’s views are echoed by administrators at other major research universities. George Dummers, director of sponsored programs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that “a rather substantial sum would have to be diverted” from other university accounts if NSF and other federal agencies eliminated support for academic-year salaries. “MIT expects that its faculty will charge an appropriate amount [of their salaries] to the external sponsor, he says estimating that 25% to 30% is a typical figure for most scientific and engineering disciplines. "MIT is trying to wean itself from its reliance on federal funds for salary support," Dummers says. But he acknowledges that it’s an awfully difficult process. Last months airing of the issue by the science board is expected to. be only the first of many debates. Good characterizes the board’s brief conversation as “serious,” and says that she expects further discussion once NSF staff has dug out additional information on the issue. Duderstadt calls for “extensive discussion” by the board’s committee on education and human resources before any formal proposal is submitted for review. The process is expected to take several months. Nobody thinks that the problem will be resolved easily. F. Albert Cotton, a member of the science board and a professor of chemistry at Texas A&M University, sides with Good on the idea of sending a message to universities about the importance of research. But he expects financial issues to play a major role in the debate. “A policy ,of providing portions of regular-year salaries is difficult to defend at a time when there is an insufficient amount of money to meet the direct costs of research," he says. “But you have to remember that this problem didn’t arise over night. Once the federal goverment decided to support research, universities saw an opportunity to build up their faculties, and the foundation was willing to go along. As long as somebody is willing to give you money, why shouldn’t you ask for it?”

DOE's Neglected Environmental Parks Reawaken With An Expanded Role

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