United States Department of Energy National Laboratories

Map of the National Laboratories of the US Department of Energy.
Map of the 17 DOE National Laboratories.

The United States Department of Energy National Laboratories and Technology Centers is a system of laboratories overseen by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) for scientific and technological research. The primary mission of the DOE national laboratories is to conduct research and development (R&D) addressing national priorities: energy and climate, the environment, national security, and health. 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) contracts with the DOE.

The laboratories and their research mission

The DOE is the nation's largest sponsor of research in the physical sciences and engineering, and is second to the Department of Defense in supporting computer sciences and mathematics. Most of that research is performed by the national laboratories.

Although the national laboratories form an integrated system, each of them has its individual mission, capabilities, and structure.

The Department of Energy executes the research to support its missions through 17 national laboratories.

The chart shows the nature of the research done at each laboratory.

  • Each multipurpose science laboratory possesses a number of core capabilities and facilities that enable a wide range of multidisciplinary research.
  • Each of the single program science laboratories focuses its research on fundamental research in a particular field of physical science.
  • Three multipurpose security labs principally support the nuclear security mission, while also using their capabilities to perform a wide range of research.
  • Each of the three energy technology labs focuses its research on a particular sector of energy technologies.
  • One multipurpose environmental laboratory focuses on the research supporting the DOE's environmental management work.

All 17 of the laboratories are listed below, along with the location, establishment date, and the organization that currently operates each.

Name Location & Establishment date Operating organization Number of employees/ Annual budget (FY2021)
Office of Science
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) Berkeley, California, 1931 University of California (since 1931) 3,395
US$1,051,000,000
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1943

UT–Battelle (since April 2000)

4,368
US$2,130,000,000
Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) DuPage County, Illinois, 1946 UChicago Argonne, LLC 3,532
US$1,100,000,000
Ames National Laboratory Ames, Iowa, 1947 Iowa State University (since 1947) 310
US$58,000,000
Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) Upton, New York, 1947

Brookhaven Science Associates (since 1998)

2,989
US$572,000,000
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) Princeton, New Jersey, 1951 Princeton University (since 1951) 414
US$83,000,000
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory Menlo Park, California, 1962 Stanford University (since 1962) 1,684
US$434,000,000
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) Richland, Washington, 1965 Battelle Memorial Institute (since 1965) 4,100
US$727,000,000
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL) Batavia, Illinois, 1967 Fermi Research Alliance (since 2007) 1,757
US$596,000,000
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF) Newport News, Virginia, 1984 Jefferson Science Associates, LLC (since 2006) 759
US$135,000,000
National Nuclear Security Administration
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Los Alamos, New Mexico, 1943

Triad National Security, LLC (Since 2018)

14,150
US$3,648,000,000
Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1948

Honeywell International (since 2017)

13,400
US$2,813,000,000
Livermore, California, 1956
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Livermore, California, 1952

Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC (since 2007)

8,000
US$2,217,000,000
Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Golden, Colorado, 1977 Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC (since 2008) 2685
US$393,000,000
Office of Environmental Management
Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) Aiken, South Carolina, 1952

Battelle Savannah River Alliance (Since 2021)

900
US$400,000,000
Office of Fossil Energy & Carbon Management
National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1910 Department of Energy 1,400
US$681,000,000
Morgantown, West Virginia, 1946
Albany, Oregon, 2005
Office of Nuclear Energy
Idaho National Laboratory (INL) Idaho Falls, Idaho, 1949

Battelle Memorial Institute (since 2005)

5,700
US$1,818,000,000

National Scientific User Facilities

The DOE Office of Science operates an extensive network of 28 national scientific user facilities. A total of over 30,000 scientific users from universities, national laboratories, and technology companies use these facilities to advance their research and development. The staff of experts at each facility who build and operate the associated instruments and work with visiting scientists to mount experiments with them. This access and support is provided without charge to qualified scientific groups, with priority based on recommendations by expert review panels. All six research offices support scientific user facilities at national laboratories.

Office of Science National Scientific User Facilities
Sponsoring program office Type of facility User facility name & laboratory Number of staff (approx.)/ number of scientific users (2021)
Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) High-performance computing (HPC) facilities Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) @ ANL 170/1,168
National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) @ LBNL 130/8,751
Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) @ ORNL 180/1,696
High-performance research network Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) @ LBNL 135/
Biological and Environmental Research(BER)

Facility for atmospheric observations

Atmospheric Radiation Measurement facility (ARM) @ PNNL (lead lab) 100/960

Facility for environmental molecular sciences

Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) @ PNNL 180/801

Facility for integrative genomic science

The Joint Genome Institute (JGI) @ LBNL 250/2,180
Basic Energy Sciences (BES) X-ray light source facilities The Advanced Light Source (ALS) @ LBNL 200/1,159
The Advanced Photon Source (APS) @ ANL 450/3,686
National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) @ BNL 375/1,022
The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) @ SLAC 326/720
The Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) @ SLAC 150/1030
Nanoscale Science Research Centers (NSRCs) The Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) @ BNL 65/571
The Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT) @ LANL & SNL 100/721
The Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM) @ ANL 54/702
The Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS) @ ORNL 108/656
The Molecular Foundry (TMF) @ LBNL 67/654
Neutron Scattering Facilities The High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) @ ORNL 100/202
The Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) @ ORNL 450/483
Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) Fusion Facilities The DIII-D (tokamak) National Fusion Facility @ General Atomics NA/429
National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) @ PPPL 300/358
High Energy Physics (HEP) Accelerator complex supporting physics experiments The Fermilab Accelerator Complex @ FNAL 500/1,725
Accelerator test facilities The Accelerator Test Facility @ BNL 16/80
The Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests (FACET) @ SLAC 25/111

History

The official seal of the U.S. Department of Energy.

The system of national laboratories started with the massive scientific endeavors of World War II, in which several new technologies, especially 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 this wartime period that significant resources were committed to 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 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 government resources of unprecedented scale 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.

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.

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This page was last updated at 2023-10-31 06:50 UTC. Update now. View original page.

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