Lura Powell would not have taken the job as director of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory if she had realized how much and how difficult the travel demands would be, she said.

"But I would have missed out on a lot," she said as she prepared recently to pack up her office. "I feel very good about the things that have happened since I have been here."

Powell retires from the Department of Energy's national lab in Richland at the end of the month. But she won't be leaving the Tri-Cities.

One of the things she would have missed was moving from the well-established government corridor on the East Coast to experience life in a relatively young and growing area like the Tri-Cities.

"I got so engaged in the community as director," she said. "I was engaged in the planning effort. I've gotten very passionate about building a diversified economy."

A particular interest is developing a four-year university with graduate studies in the Tri-Cities.

She and her husband, Art King, are forming a corporation and plan to join the Tri-City Industrial Development Council. King will lead Three Rivers Marketing, a manufacturer's representative for commercial plumbing products, and Powell will lead a consulting firm.

She's also looking forward to having more time for other community work, such as serving on the Kadlec Medical Center board.

She has no consulting work lined up -- and won't until she gets some rest at the first of the year. But she has accepted a position on the board of Avista, a Spokane-based energy corporation.

Since she's spent her career in government-related work, it's the first chance she's had to serve on the board of a publicly traded corporation.

"Far from retiring, I will be active. But it will be a different type of activity," she said. And it will involve far less travel.

She had been used to traveling as director of the Advanced Technology Program at the Department of Commerce National Institute of Standards and Technology. There, she was responsible for selection and management of a technology investment portfolio exceeding $2 billion.

Living in Maryland, she usually could travel to a meeting and return in a single day.

But in Eastern Washington, she often found herself spending two or three days of travel time to attend one- or two-hour meetings in places like Washington, D.C., or Columbus, Ohio, where Battelle is based. Battelle operates the lab for DOE.

Even regional travel came as a surprise. A recent trip to Oregon State University required four planes and hours of car travel.

"I was away far too much," she said. "It was not the quality of life I wanted for me and my family." She has two daughters, one in college and one in high school.

She's been asked if she would have made the same decision if she was a man, and she's said yes. Everyone has to set priorities in life, she said.

Without the heavy travel schedule she could not have accomplished what she did since taking over leadership of the lab in April 2000.

This month DOE headquarters gave her its Distinguished Associate Award for outstanding performance and for "laying the groundwork for innovative strategies for 21st century contracts" between DOE and its major laboratories.

She's also raised the profile of the lab regionally and built collaborations with other leading research programs by forging new partnerships with Northwest universities.

The lab has formed a broad research alliance with public and private universities in Oregon, is working on nanotechnology projects with the University of Washington and is part of new regional partnerships for energy collaborations and to develop bioproducts from farm waste.

She'll leave the lab with two new pieces of world-class equipment -- a $24.5 million supercomputer and the world's first 900-megahertz wide-bore nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer, which allows scientists to see cells and molecules.

The future should bring a new biosciences laboratory in collaboration with Washington State University Tri-Cities.

She has made one suggestion to help whomever is named as her replacement. Battelle plans to provide more training and mentoring to help its new director learn quickly about the job and the community.

"You will always have challenges as a lab director," Powell said. "But I think the lab is extremely well positioned. It's the best staff of people anyone would want."