United States Department Of Energy National Laboratories

The United States Department of Energy National Laboratories and Technology Centers is a system of facilities and laboratories overseen by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) for scientific and technological research. Sixteen of the seventeen DOE national laboratories are federally funded research and development centers administered, managed, operated and staffed by private-sector organizations under management and operating (M&O) contract with DOE (with the National Energy Technology Laboratory being the exception).

History

The system of centralized national laboratories grew out of the massive scientific endeavors of World War II, in which new technologies such as radar, the computer, the proximity fuse, and the atomic bomb proved decisive for the Allied victory. Though the United States government had begun seriously investing in scientific research for national security in World War I, it was only in late 1930s and 1940s that monumental amounts of resources were committed or coordinated to wartime scientific problems, under the auspices first of the National Defense Research Committee, and later the Office of Scientific Research and Development, organized and administered by the MIT engineer Vannevar Bush.

During the Second World War, centralized sites such as the Radiation Laboratory at MIT and Ernest O. Lawrence's laboratory at Berkeley and the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago allowed for a large number of expert scientists to collaborate towards defined goals as never before, and with virtually unlimited government resources at their disposal.

In the course of the war, the Allied nuclear effort, the Manhattan Project, created several secret sites for the purpose of bomb research and material development, including a laboratory in the mountains of New Mexico directed by Robert Oppenheimer ( Los Alamos), and sites at Hanford, Washington and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Hanford and Oak Ridge were administered by private companies, and Los Alamos was administered by a public university (the University of California). Additional success was had at the University of Chicago in reactor research, leading to the creation of Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, and at other academic institutions spread across the country.

After the war and its scientific successes, the newly created Atomic Energy Commission took over the future of the wartime laboratories, extending their lives indefinitely (they were originally thought of as temporary creations). Funding and infrastructure were secured to sponsor other "national laboratories" for both classified and basic research, especially in physics, with each national laboratory centered around one or many expensive machines (such as particle accelerators or nuclear reactors).

Most national laboratories maintained staffs of local researchers as well as allowing for visiting researchers to use their equipment, though priority to local or visiting researchers often varied from lab to lab. With their centralization of resources (both monetary and intellectual), the national labs serve as an exemplar for Big Science.

Elements of both competition and cooperation were encouraged in the laboratories. Often two laboratories with similar missions were created (such as Lawrence Livermore which was designed to compete with Los Alamos) with the hope that competition over funding would create a culture of high quality work. Laboratories which did not have overlapping missions would cooperate with each other (for example, Lawrence Livermore would cooperate with the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, which itself was often in competition with Brookhaven National Laboratory). The idea of regional laboratories to work with local universities for nuclear development originated with Arthur Compton and Charles Allen Thomas, though Leslie Groves later claimed the idea as his own.

The national laboratory system, administered first by the Atomic Energy Commission, then the Energy Research and Development Administration, and currently the Department of Energy, is one of the largest (if not the largest) scientific research systems in the world. The DOE provides about a third of the total national funding for physics, chemistry, materials science, and other areas of the physical sciences. Many are locally managed by private companies, while others are managed by academic universities, and as a system they form one of the overarching and far-reaching components in what is known as the " iron triangle" of military, academia, and industry.

The National Labs can work directly with private industry through Laboratory Directed Research & Development (LDRD) agreements.

List

National Laboratories

The United States Department of Energy currently operates seventeen national laboratories which fall under six of the department's divisions:

Technology Centers

* Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory* at West Mifflin (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania (1949)
* Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory* at Niskayuna, New York (1946)
: In addition Knolls operates the Kenneth A. Kesselring site at West Milton, New York
* New Brunswick Laboratory**, at Argonne National Laboratory
* Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education* at Oak Ridge, Tennessee
* Radiological and Environmental Sciences Laboratory**
* Savannah River Ecology Laboratory*
* GOCO (Government-owned, Contractor-operated)

** GOGO (Government-owned, Government-operated)

List of scientific user facilities

* Accelerator Test Facility
* Advanced Light Source
* Advanced Photon Source
* Alcator C-Mod
* Argonne Leadership Computing Facility: IBM Mira
* Argonne Tandem Linear Accelerator System
* Atmospheric Radiation Measurement
* B-Factory
* Bates Linear Accelerator Center
* Booster Neutrino
* Center for Functional Nanomaterials
* Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies
* Center for Microanalysis of Materials
* Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences
* Center for Nanoscale Materials
* Combustion Research Facility
* Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility
* DIII-D Tokamak Facility
* Electron Microscopy Center for Materials Research
* Energy Sciences Network
* Energy Systems Integration Facility
* Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory
* Final Focus Test Beam
* Free Air CO₂ Experiment
* High Flux Isotope Reactor Center for Neutron Scattering
* Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility
* James R. Macdonald Laboratory
* Joint Genome Institute
* Linac Coherent Light Source
* Main Injector
* Laboratory for Laser Energetics
* Los Alamos Neutron Science Center
* Manuel Lujan Jr. Neutron Scattering Center
* Materials Preparation Center
* Molecular Foundry
* National Center for Electron Microscopy
* National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
* National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
* National Ignition Facility
* National Spherical Torus Experiment
* National Synchrotron Light Source
* National Transportation Research Center
* Next Linear Collider Test Accelerator
* Neutrinos at the Main Injector
* Notre Dame Radiation Laboratory
* Pulse Radiolysis Facility
* Radiochemical Engineering Development Center
* Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
* Shared Research Equipment Program
* Spallation Neutron Source
* Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory
* Structural Biology Center
* Synchrotron Radiation Center
* Tevatron collider
* Texas A&M Cyclotron Institute
* Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory
* University of Washington Tandem Van de Graaff
* Yale University Tandem Van de Graaff

In popular culture

* In the Netflix web series '' Stranger Things'', a fictional laboratory called Hawkins National Laboratory run by the DOE is located in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana. The laboratory is later shut down after it is revealed that a portal to another dimension called the "Upside Down" is opened and inhumane experiments are performed on children to turn them into weapons against the USSR.
* In the AMC show '' Breaking Bad'', Walter White works for Sandia National Laboratories prior to Season One.

See also

* University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System

References

Further reading

* Westwick, Peter J. (2003)
''The National Labs: Science in an American System, 1947–1974''
Cambridge: Harvard University Press. .

External links

Energy.gov: Department of Energy National Laboratories website

Science.energy.gov: U.S. Department of Energy; Ten-Year Plans for the Office of Science's National Laboratories

Energy.gov: DOE Budget Page, with link to National Laboratories budgets

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