UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY NATIONAL LABORATORIES

(Redirected from United States Department of Energy National Labs)
The DOE is one of the largest funders of science research in the US

The 'United States Department of Energy National Laboratories and Technology Centers' are a system of facilities and laboratories overseen by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) for the purpose of advancing science and helping promote the economic and defensive national interests of the United States of America. Most of the DOE national laboratories are actually federally funded research and development centers administered, managed, operated and staffed by private corporations and academic universities under contract to DOE. The 2005 NASA Authorization Act designated the U.S segment of the International Space Station as a national laboratory with a goal to increase the utilization of the ISS by other Federal entities and the private sector.

Contents
History
List of DOE National Laboratories and Technology Centers
National Laboratories
Technology Centers
List of scientific user facilities
External links
Further reading

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 fuze, 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 since 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 the University of California, Berkeley 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 desert 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. Each national laboratory would generally be 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 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 more than 40% 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 other 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.
==List of NASA National Laboratories==

★ U.S segment of the International Space Station

List of DOE National Laboratories and Technology Centers


National Laboratories


Argonne National Laboratory
★ at DuPage County, Illinois

Brookhaven National Laboratory
★ at Upton, New York

Idaho National Laboratory
★ between Arco and Idaho Falls, Idaho

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
★ at Berkeley, California

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
★ at Batavia, Illinois

National Renewable Energy Laboratory
★ at Golden, Colorado

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
★ at Livermore, California

Los Alamos National Laboratory
★ at Los Alamos, New Mexico

Oak Ridge National Laboratory
★ at Oak Ridge, Tennessee

National Energy Technology Laboratory

★ at Albany, Oregon, Fairbanks, Alaska, Morgantown, West Virginia, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Tulsa, Oklahoma

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
★ at Richland, Washington

Sandia National Laboratories
★ at Albuquerque, New Mexico and Livermore, California
Technology Centers


Ames Laboratory
★ at Ames, Iowa

New Brunswick Laboratory

★ , at Argonne National Laboratory

Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education
★ at Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
★ at Princeton, New Jersey

Radiological & Environmental Sciences Laboratory



Savannah River Ecology Laboratory


Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
★ at Menlo Park, California

Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
★ at Newport News, Virginia

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 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

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

Intense Pulsed Neutron Source

James R. Macdonald Laboratory

Joint Genome Institute

Linac Coherent Light Source

Main Injector

Los Alamos Neutron Science Center

Manuel Lujan Jr. Neutron Scattering Center

Materials Preparation Center

Molecular Foundry

National Center for Electron Microscopy

National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center

National Spherical Torus Experiment

National Synchrotron Light Source

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

Tevatron Collider

Texas A&M Cyclotron Institute

Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory

University of Washington Tandem Van de Graaff

Yale University Tandem Van de Graaff

External links



DOE page about the national labs

DOE Budget Page, including link to lab budget table

Further reading



★ Westwick, Peter J. ''The National Labs: Science in an American System, 1947-1974.'' Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

This article provided by Wikipedia. To edit the contents of this article, click here for original source.

psst.. try this: add to faves
United States Department of Energy National Laboratories Travel Deals