By John Edwards

June 27, 2011—Since long before Japan's nuclear disaster focused the world's attention on the potential dangers of nuclear energy, managers and researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) facility, have been concerned about tracking nuclear materials. The stakes are almost unimaginably high. If terrorists were to get their hands on just a single container of nuclear materials, it could conceivably result in the destruction of a major city.

Argonne National Laboratory, approximately 25 miles southwest of Chicago in the Argonne Forest section of the Cook County Forest Preserve, is a direct descendant of the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory, part of the World War II Manhattan Project. At the Met Lab, on Dec. 2, 1942, Enrico Fermi and some 50 colleagues created the world's first controlled nuclear chain reaction. In 1946, the Argonne Lab, as it was then called, became the country's first national laboratory, given the mission of developing nuclear reactors for peaceful purposes. Argonne designed, built and tested the prototypes for the commercial reactors that currently produce 20 percent of the nation's electricity.


Today, Argonne employs approximately 3,200 staffers, including roughly 1,000 scientists and engineers. The lab's three general research areas are energy storage, alternative energy and nuclear energy. In 2005, Argonne researchers began laying the groundwork for using radio frequency identification to accurately track and monitor storage containers of nuclear materials at multiple DOE sites.