Battelle Laboratory Columbus, Ohio

An industrial laboratory and office complex a few miles outside of downtown Columbus that is the main lab and headquarters for Battelle, a nonprofit R&D lab. Battelle partners with companies to develop new technologies, and has been involved in numerous commercial projects, including the application of the product bar-code, and the invention of the photocopier. But the lab's work has been, and is still, primarily with the Department of Energy and its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission. Atomic energy R&D has been performed at the Columbus lab since as early as the Manhattan Project. Battelle is also the operator, for the DOE, of the Pacific Northwest Lab (PNL), in Richland, Washington, where the lab has the second of its two major US lab sites (a third is in Switzerland), and where the lab has been involved since the Manhattan Project as well. Battelle is the co-manager of the DOE's Oak Ridge Lab in Tennessee, the National Renewable Energy Lab (with Bechtel), and the Brookhaven nuclear lab in New York. Battelle is also a major Defense Department contractor, especially in the realm of biological and chemical weapons detection, disposal, and defenses.