The Department of Energy operates seventeen major national laboratories and thirteen minor facilities in the United States that carry out energy research and development, basic science, and defense weapons work. The combined budgets for these laboratories exceed $6 billion annually, with a scientific and technical staff of more than thirty-thousand.

Each of these laboratories is a governmentowned/contractor-operated facility selected from industry, academia, and university consortia. As of 1999, the most prominent civilian contractor was Lockheed Martin, the operator of Oak Ridge and Sandia, and the major academic institution was the University of California, administrator of Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley, and Lawrence Livermore.

Atomic Energy Commission Years

The origins of the national laboratory network can be traced back to the late 1940s and the beginning of the atomic age. At the end of World War II, the scientific community, particularly the staffs from the Manhattan Project...