My second EE job, the Lawrence Livermore National Lab

Looking for a job back in California
Disliking the swamp-like weather of Washington, D.C. and feeling homesick for California, I began searching job opportunities in California in July 1966. Initially I was hoping to find a position at a U.S. Navy facility such as NEL near San Diego or some other Navy laboratory. However, electronics development work at the Navy labs in California seemed a big step down from NRL, the Navy's main scientific and engineering development laboratory. So I began looking at alternatives and it seemed like the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (LRL) in Livermore had good opportunities in electronics development. LRL was renamed to the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (LLL or LLNL) in 1971 and later became one of the seventeen Atomic Energy Commission's (now the Department of Energy, DoE) National Laboratories. It is located in northern California and at that time was closely connected to my Alma Mater, the University of California. LLNL and the Los Alamos National Laboratory are best known for their nuclear weapons defense work. LLNL's defense work seemed to be a smooth transition from my work at NRL as I am a strong believer in contributing to our Nation's defense as best I can. NRL and LLNL are both federally funded research and development facilities whereas LLNL is under a civilian federal department, the DoE, and NRL is the corporate research laboratory for the Navy. From Wikipedia's LLNL article: LLNL is self-described as "a premier research and development institution for science and technology applied to national security." Its principal responsibility is ensuring the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons through the application of advanced science, engineering and technology. The Laboratory also applies its special expertise and multidisciplinary capabilities to preventing theproliferation and use of weapons of mass destruction, bolstering homeland security and solving other nationally important problems, including energy and environmental security, basic science and economic competitiveness.

Also an LLNL website "What We Do" description and other LLNL information and surprisingly there are even Yelp reviews of LLNL.

So I contacted the then Lawrence Radiation Laboratory to see if they had any job openings in their Electronics Department. Sure enough, the Electronics Department had openings and were interested in interviewing me for jobs in the Computation Electronics Division, the Chemistry Electronics Division and the Magnetic Fusion Electronics Division. So I traveled to Livermore, California to meet with interviewers. I brought photos of the TRSSCOM work at NRL with me, showing photographs of the ships that I had worked on, developing and installing the computer systems for steering the 16 ft dish to point at the Moon. Fortunately the LRL interviewers were interested in hiring me and quickly sent me an offer. The Chemistry Division job seemed most attractive with their Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) minicomputer equipment being used for data acquisition and control work. So I promptly accepted and resigned from NRL, telling my wife Celia that we were moving to Livermore.

LLNL aerial view in 2014.

Moving to Livermore
After getting a moving company to take our furniture and stuff to California and getting maps and information from the local AAA office for our cross-country trip, we loaded into our Plymouth Valiant and I drove us (Celia, our 27 month-old son John William and myself) leisurely across the U.S. in seven days, taking a day longer than the LRL travel department had allocated as we made a vacation of it, driving only about 400 miles per day and stopping at nice motels that had a swimming pool. I had warned Celia that there was only one gas station, one church and three or four trees in Livermore, so arriving at Livermore, she was pleasantly surprised to find that there were three or so gas stations and churches plus many trees, although the area and climate was primarily desert-like. At the time in 1966, the population was 24,000 and there was a single stop light in the center of town. We learned that it was a "cow town" and besides LRL and the Sandia Lab, Livermore was and is "Wine Country" having many vineyards and wineries, mostly famous for white wine.

Anyhow, we arrived safe and sound in Livermore, checking in to the Sands Motel and began looking for an apartment to rent since that's what we did in Alexandria VA and Oxon Hill MD. However it seemed like all the apartments were rented out, probably largely because of the "summer students," college students who had obtained summer jobs at LRL. So then we started looking at homes to rent or buy. First we checked with a local real estate agent who said, when I told him where I would be working, "Oh, the Country Club!" I didn't know what he meant but found later that LRL, affectionately called "the Lab" and the "Rad Lab" had a very large swimming pool on the site for employees to use. Many employees used the pool during their lunch-time hours and the Lab provided life-guards and swimming teachers. The pool was left over from the days when previously the 1-mile square site was a Naval Air Station and would be used by employees until around 2010 when leaks were discovered and it was decided to close the pool instead of paying for very expensive repairs. Later on I would hear LLNL-ers joke that LLNLwas welfare for scientists and engineers! Several of the NAS buildings were used for many years by LRL and then LLNL. We were interested in buying one of the houses that we found on the west side of town in Masud Mehran's Sunset development but then found a brand-new Sunset home in a new development just a block away from elementary and middle schools. Since I hadn't yet become vested in the NRL civil service retirement system, the NRL retirement system sent me a check for nearly $2000 which was sufficient as a down payment on our new $21,950 1500 sq ft 3-bedroom Sunset home with hardwood floors throughout but no air conditioning. It was an incredibly low price since nowadays homes in the Livermore Valley are costing up to $1 million.

The Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-7 Computer.

Starting out at the Rad Lab
The following Monday I showed up for work at LRL, often called the Rad Lab, anxious to get started doing high-tech stuff and after the ordeal of paperwork that stated all that I had developed would be the property of the University of California and other such forms to sign, I learned that my office, or actually my desk, would be in "the Cooler," Bldg 116, where new uncleared employees were situated and that I wouldn't be allowed in most areas of the Lab for three whole months until the AEC would check me out and issue a Q clearance, the AEC's security clearance that is "sort of" equivalent to the military top-secret clearance. Well, I'll tell you, I was really upset by this news that I would be isolated from almost all of the LRL work areas and I was considering tendering my resignation. While I was pondering this for day or two, I was contacted by Gary Richardson, then the Group Leader for the General Chemistry Electronics group. Richardson asked if I would help them out with some design projects. Eager to have some real work to do, I immediately agreed to help them and he got me started with some level-converter circuit design projects that would be used for their DEC PDP-7 computer system and a magnetic tape drive that they wanted to interface to the PDP-7. I wouldn't be allowed to see or touch the PDP-7 since it was in a Q-Cleared security area but I was happy to get started on the design work. The magnetic tape drive used positive voltage logic circuits but the DEC machines at the time used negative logic circuits, 0 and -3V for logic 0 and logic 1 respectively. So level conversion circuits were needed for the PDP-7 to be able to communicate with the magnetic tape drive's electronics. Fortunately the Electronics Loan Department was located in the same building where I was housed, B116 (now renumbered to B141), and I had access to all sorts of equipment such as power supplies and oscilloscopes. Also I could go to the Stores building where I could obtain transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors of all types and values. So I could immediately begin developing the level conversion circuits which Richardson's group could turn into printed circuit boards for their PDP-7. Before I knew it, the three months or so passed and my Q clearance was issued to me, so then I could go to almost all areas in the Lab, riding a Lab-provided bicycle all over the 1-mile site. Of course, right away I visited the General Chemistry department to see the PDP-7 computer and meet engineers and technicians in the electronics group. I had really appreciated Richardson giving me some work to do. Several other newly hired engineers were also housed in B116 and most had no work to do, idly passing time while awaiting their Q-clearance to be issued. During that time, the Scientific American magazine had a paper airplane contest, and a few of the fellows (all male engineers of course, back then) were spending their time making paper airplanes to enter the contest since they had nothing else to do and couldn't even get to the Lab's library as the library was in a Q area, as was almost all of the Lab. Check out the designs in the Paper Airplane Contest Book.

After I was issued my Q Clearance
I was rather annoyed that my future electronics Group Leader hadn't even come to our building to meet me. I hadn't met him during my interviews, so didn't know who would be my new Group Leader and what sort of work and projects they would have for me. Perhaps my new Group Leader knew that Richardson had brought me work to do but I still believe he should have made the small effort to visit me and shake my hand. When my Q clearance was issued, I didn't contact him and instead started going to the General Chemistry building, hoping that they would take me on and give me more work. But soon I was told that I was to go to a different chemistry building, Bldg 231, that did work for the Metallurgy, Plastics and Chemical Engineering Sections of the Chemistry Department. I was issued a special security badge to enter the Metallurgy/Plastics/Chemical Engineering building and area. The Plastics area was in the main building and the Metallurgy and Chemical Engineering facilities were in portable buildings outside and on the east side of the main building. I was to share office space in the main building with another group member. My Group Leader, Bill Dent, was housed in a trailer building to the east of the main building. I was given projects to work on for the Plastics Section and then worked on an E-Beam Welder for the Metallurgy Section. I objected to that task, thinking that a welder was below my electronics knowledge and skills, but I began working on it and found that the E-Beam Welder was very interesting and provided some difficult electronics challenges to control the beam in order to make good pit-free welds. I enjoyed working with the Metallurgy technicians as they were striving to improve the instrument and welcomed my involvement in their work. The Plastics Section had a project for me to develop a data acquisition and magnetic tape recording system. I had become interested in the asynchronous operating features of the DEC PDP-16 Register Transfer Modules (RTM) and wanted to apply RTM's to the Plastics Section task. However, DEC didn't have interface modules for the magnetic tape drive and other interface modules that I would need. So I designed my own RTM circuit boards and built the system for the Plastics Section. However, my main project was for the Chemical Engineering Section to purchase a minicomputer system and get it to operate several control systems doing testing of various rock material. I wrote the specification and eventually purchased a DEC PDP-9 minicomputer, loaded with all of 16,784 18-bit words of magnetic core memory, DEC DECtape magnetic tape drives and a digital voltmeter with an analog scanner subsystem. As shown in the photo from some other lab, the user entry device was either a KSR-33 or ASR-33 Teletype machine to program  the PDP-9 or run programs.

One of the Chemical Engineers, John Grens, developed a single-user control and data acquisition program using the DEC Fortran compiler. Grens' program was quite usable but it was only a single-use program and since there were several experimental setups to control and from which to acquire data, I decided to use DEC's FOCAL multiuser software package. FOCAL was an interpreter that wasn't particularly fast but I or the engineers or technicians in the Chemical Engineering Section could program it for their tasks and so it was ideal for the slow operating experiments. Accordingly, I obtained the Four-User PDP-9 version of FOCAL, adding software to control my-designed digital-to-analog-converter (DAC) modules and to enable use of the system's digital voltmeter and scanner. I ended up developing all the control and data acquisition programs for the Chemical Engineering Sections experiments and was happy to do so as the linear control aspects were particularly interesting to me and also by developing the programs, I could find and correct problems with my implementation of the Four-User FOCAL software system. The Chemical Engineering experiments were located variously in their laboratory space, each with cables for the DAC analog control signals and to feed sensor voltages back to the scanning voltmeter system plus a KSR-33 Teletype for the user to control the experiment, entering necessary parameters into the control programs via the KSR-33's. One of the projects was to control pressure for a permeability test on various rock materials. Roland Quong and I reported on the work in a report to the DoE titled "COMPUTER CONTROLLED APPARATUS FOR PERMEABILITY MEASUREMENTS...." Listings of the FOCAL program for controlling the apparatus and acquiring data are included in the report. A hardware block diagram of the control and data acquisition system is shown below.

We added several experimental setups to the PDP-9 and used it several years until Richard Heckman, the Chemical Engineering Section Leader, decided that it was time to upgrade to DEC's LSI-11 minicomputer systems, then DEC's hot new minicomputer. Switching to the LSI-11's gave me considerably more work to do but the Lab stocked standard DEC modules and backplanes including DAC and analog-to-digital-converter (ADC) modules. A single LSI-11 minicomputer would be dedicated to each experiment and consequently higher speed Fortran IV programs could be developed for each experimental setup. We had easy access to all the modules and software from the Lab's Stores. Then we shipped off the PDP-9 computer to a computer scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) who happily took the PDP-9 off our hands for use in his lab.


NTS Chimney Permeability
I occasionally had a project at the AEC's Nevada Test Site. One of the environmental concerns was how fast the gases would escape from a nuclear test through a chimney such as shown in the schematic below.

Chimney sketch.

For example, see the NNSA document on the environmental impact of underground nuclear testing in "Underground Nuclear Testing." We had a project for determining the permeability by measuring the air pressure above ground and also in the cavity. I developed a system using the aforementioned DEC PDP-16 RTM modules, acquiring barometric pressure data and transmitting the data to a Computer Automation (C/A) Alpha minicomputer at our LLL site. We, David F. Snoeberger, Charles J. Morris, Rudolf B. Rozsa and I reported results in an internal UCID document "Permeability of a Nuclear Chimney and Surface Alluvium at the AEC Nevada Test Site."

Energy Projects
Around this time in 1976 I also had been involved in the Lab's Coal Gasification Project near Gillette, WY. I had previously purchased a Computer Automation (C/A) Alpha minicomputer with a magnetic tape drive. John Grens had developed an interpreter software system that I used to develop the software for the system. After developing the data acquisition program for the C/A computer and getting the system operational, I turned it over to another EE for him to take to the Coal Gasification site. Another project that had been involved in with John Grens was at the geothermal well site at the Salton Sea area in the Imperial Valley. We were to do pressure measurements at a well during its gushing and also collect well-water samples for analysis at Livermore. Power companies were beginning to generate electric power from the geothermal wells but a major problem was with the acidic brine and mineral content of the well-water. Later, LLNL scientists would build a system at the Livermore site and were able to find methods to neutralize the acidity of and also to extract minerals from the brine, improving the usability of geothermal wells for power production. See the Scientific American article on Lithium extraction from the brine and a CalEnergy article on the Salton Sea geothermal power development at the Salton Sea. I always enjoyed working with Grens. He was a very capable and energetic Chemical Engineer plus he was a particularly skillful and inventive software developer. For the geothermal project, I designed and developed a microcomputer system using the brand-new Intel 8080 microprocessor and a small digital tape recorder that we used to gather and record the geothermal pressure data as the well gushed periodically. Others in the Lab's Electronics Department had developed a set of boards for the 8080, enabling us EE's to build microcomputer systems for a great many Lab projects.

This looks like the area where we did our geothermal well tests.

EE Group Leader job in the Radiochemistry Department
Soon after I got the C/A computer system operational for the Coal Gasification project in 1976, I was tapped by my Electronics Department Division Leader, Alex Stripeika, to become the Electronics Group Leader of the Lab's Radiochemistry Department, later renamed to the Nuclear Chemistry Department. Although it would be a promotion and higher pay, I didn't want to take the job, preferring to stay at being a regular Electrical Engineer and enjoying my work for the Chemical Engineering Section. However Stripeika twisted my arm and I decided to give it a try. Phil Siemens, the previous Electronics Group Leader for the Radiochemistry Department, had been selected to become an Electronics Division Leader for some other department. He had just gotten started on the Lab's part of the National Uranium Evaluation Project (NURE). So for the next four years NURE was my main project along with supervising a large group of EE's and technicians. I was sad, and actually had to fight off tears when I was given a going away party by the folks with whom I had been working for ten years in the Metallurgy/Plastics/Chemical Engineering EE Group. They were great guys, all men of course back then, and wonderful to work with.




The National Uranium Evaluation Program (NURE)
Siemens had already roughed out the NURE system design. The LLL part of the multi-laboratory project included an Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA) system, an Optical Emission Spectroscopy (OES) system and an Automated Chloride-Sulfate Analyses (CS) system. Although we provided electronics support to the OES system, our main project was the INAA system. From the Gary H. Higgins 1980 report:

We developed the INAA system in Bldg 281, utilizing the 3 MW Livermore Pool Type Reactor (LPTR) to irradiate samples. The automated INAA utilized cast-polyethylene capsules called "rabbits" as sample containers. The rabbits, each containing 1 to 2 g of sample, were blown by compressed nitrogen through polyethylene tubing into and out of the reactor core area, into and out of a delayed neutron counter, to one of four gamma ray detectors, and finally to storage. The activation analysis was controlled by computers which identified each rabbit and routed it successively into the reactor for a short irradiation—to the delayed neutron counter for uranium determination—to the delay station to allow decay of short-lived isotopes—to one of the ganma detectors coupled to pulse height analyzers—back to the reactor for a longer irradiation—and finally to storage. The computers also wrote the data—rabbit number, reactor flux, irradiation tines, delayed neutron count, and gamma spectrum—on a recorder disk. It took 33 minutes for a rabbit to go through the entire sequence, but a rabbit was entering and leaving the system every 2.5 minutes. The computers tracked and controlled an average of 13 rabbits at any one time. After storage for one week the gamma spectra of the rabbits were again examined for longer-lived nuclides. The combined first and second gamma spectra comprised the INAA data source. One thousand INAA analyses could routinely be performed in a week. Nearly 70,000 spectra were processed during the program.

Our INAA system was very complex consisting of a central "Master" DEC LSI-11 minicomputer as the overall system controller and four "Slave" LSI-11's that acquired data from the germanium gamma detector systems. The central LSI-11 controlled the nitrogen pneumatic system for blowing the sealed rabbit capsules into the reactor. After a short period of neutron radiation in the reactor, the rabbit capsules were then blown out of the reactor and to one of four gamma detector systems where detailed radiation spectral counting would be done, the gamma spectra data acquired in the  LSI-11 attached to the gamma detector system. Then as Higgins states, after gamma counting the irradiated capsule would be blown to a delay station etc, for further gamma detection. A young EE, Rich Jesse, did all the LSI-11 programming for our INAA system. It was a tremendous job, the multicomputer system, and a job very well done by Jesse. Also Steve Bourret worked on various aspects of the project. In particular, Bourret designed and developed the system for encoding a binary code on the rabbit capsules and reading it back when the capsules arrived at each of the four gamma detector systems. Howard Spracklen was the EE at the reactor, developer of the control systems for the reactor and a vital member of our INAA electronics team contributing significantly to the development of our INAA system. I also wanted a little design and software work, so I was given the task of designing/developing the interface board for communicating between the Master LSI-11 and the Slave LSI-11's, The interface board was software compatible with the DEC LSI-11 serial interface board but was a parallel 8-bit design for much faster communication than the DEC serial board. Also I was given the software task of controlling the machine that Bourret had designed for drilling a binary code into the periphery of each rabbit capsule. Like I say, our INAA system was tremendously complex and Rich Jesse and Steve Bourret did a terrific job with the overall design and the software development. I was and am quite proud of our development of the INAA system.

A floor plan of B281 is shown below. The 3 MW reactor core was at the center of the circular area on the right side of the floor plan and I believe our INAA system was installed in Room 1307, called the Bio-physics lab in the floor plan. I believe the rabbit capsules were loaded with the 1 to 2 gm samples in the Hot Chemistry Lab, Room 1311, and then shot by the nitrogen pneumatic system deep into reactor core area, irradiated and then brought back by the pneumatic system to the gamma detectors in Room 1307 where the spectra from each irradiated sample was acquired into an LSI-11 microcomputer etc as described above.

Floor plan of the Livermore Pool Type Reactor, Building 281.

Once we had the INAA system operational, Steve Bourret left the Lab to work at the Los Alamos Laboratory and Rich Jesse left to a private SF Bay Area company. I wanted more design and development work and so looked for other projects where I could go back to being a regular EE. My boss, our EE Division Leader Bill Gieri, suggested other EE Group Leader jobs such as the Biology Department EE Group Leader position but instead I chose to become EE Project Leader of LLL's Liquefied Gaseous Fuels (LGF) Project.