The United States Department of Energy National Laboratories are a system of research facilities and laboratories funded and controlled by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) for the purpose advancing science and aiding in the economic and defensive national interests of the United States of America.

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, 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 a 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 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, while 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 national laboratories

1. Ames Laboratory
2. Argonne National Laboratory
3. Argonne National Laboratory (West)
4. Brookhaven National Laboratory
5. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
6. Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory
7. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
8. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
9. Los Alamos National Laboratory
10. National Energy Technology Laboratory
11. National Renewable Energy Laboratory
12. Oak Ridge National Laboratory
13. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
14. Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
15. Radiological & Environmental Sciences Laboratory
16. Sandia National Laboratories
17. Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
18. Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility

External links

• DOE page about the national labs

Further reading

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