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Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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A unique combination of federal, state and private funds is providing $300 million for the construction of 13 facilities on ORNL's newly revitalized main campus. Included among these new facilities will be the Laboratory for Comparative and Functional Genomics, the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, the Advanced Microscopy Laboratory, and the joint institutes for computational sciences, biological sciences, and neutron sciences.
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A unique combination of federal, state and private funds is providing $300 million for the construction of 13 facilities on ORNL's newly revitalized main campus. Included among these new facilities will be the Laboratory for Comparative and Functional Genomics, the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, the Advanced Microscopy Laboratory, and the joint institutes for computational sciences, biological sciences, and neutron sciences.

[Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)] is a multiprogram science and technology national laboratory managed for the United States Department of Energy by [UT-Battelle, LLC]. ORNL is located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, near Knoxville. Scientists and engineers at ORNL conduct basic and applied research and development to create scientific knowledge and technological solutions that build the nation's expertise in key areas of science; increase the availability of clean, abundant energy; restore and protect the natural environment; and contribute to national security.

ORNL also performs other work for the Department of Energy, including isotope production, information management, and technical program management, and provides research and technical assistance to other organizations.

Contents

Research Programs

ORNL conducts research and development activities that span a wide range of scientific disciplines. The laboratory's major research areas are described briefly below.

Research Facilities

Oak Ridge National Laboratory is home to a number of highly sophisticated experimental research facilities. These research laboratories are designed to serve staff scientists and engineers, as well as researchers from universities, industry, foreign institutions, and other government laboratories. For more information about these facilities, see the laboratory's [research facilities] website.

User Facilities

Some ORNL research facilities have been designated as "user facilities" by the U.S. Department of Energy. Work at user facilities may be conducted on a nonproprietary or proprietary basis. More information on these facilities and how to gain access to them, is available on laboratory's [user facilities website].

Facts and Figures

ORNL has a staff of more than 4,000, including 1500 scientists and engineers. The laboratory annually hosts approximately 3,000 [guest researchers] who spend two weeks or longer in Oak Ridge; about 25 percent of these [visitors] are from industry. ORNL receives 30,000 visitors each year, plus another 10,000 precollege students.

ORNL funding for FY 2005 exceeds $1 billion; 80 percent of that amount comes from the Department of Energy, and 20 percent is from other federal and private customers. UT-Battelle, the laboratory's management and operating contractor, has provided more than $6 million in support of math and science education, economic development and other projects in the greater Oak Ridge region. The laboratory occupies about 58 square miles (150 km²), and the replacement cost of it's buildings is estimated to be about $7 billion.

History

Created as part of the Manhattan Project in 1943, Oak Ridge National Laboratory was established during World War II when American scientists feared that Nazi Germany was rapidly developing an atomic bomb. Built by the United States Army Corps of Engineers in less than a year on isolated farmland in the mountains of East Tennessee, Oak Ridge became a "secret city" that within two years housed more than 75,000 residents.

The goal of the Manhattan Project was to separate and produce uranium and plutonium for use in developing a nuclear weapon. This work was carried out in three facilities, code-named Y-12, X-10 (later to become Oak Ridge National Laboratory), and K-25. K-25 was a gaseous diffusion plant designed to separate U-235 from U-238. Y-12 was dedicated to the electromagnetic separation of U-235. X-10 was a demonstration plant for the process to produce plutonium from uranium by nuclear bombardment.

Working under assumed names in the X-10 Graphite Reactor, Enrico Fermi and his colleagues developed the world's first sustained nuclear reaction, leading to the atomic bomb that ended the war.

ORNL's involvement with nuclear weapons ended after the war. The laboratory's scientific expertise shifted in the 1950s and 1960s to peacetime research in medicine, biology, materials and physics. During this period the Graphite Reactor was used to produce the world's first medical radioisotopes for treating cancer. Following the creation of the U.S. Department of Energy in 1977, ORNL's mission broadened to include research in energy production, transmission and consumption. The end of the Cold War and the growth of international terrorism led to a further expansion of research into a range of national security-related technologies. As the laboratory entered the 21st Century, new cross-disciplinary programs in nanophase materials, computational sciences and biology has led to the term "nano-info-bio" to describe the emerging synthesis in ORNL's research agenda.

See also

External links

General Information

Facts and Figures

Research Programs

Research Facilities

Research Divisions

History

Related Organizations and Facilities

Additional Resources

 

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