Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico

Los Alamos National Lab is one of the three principal diversified Department of Energy nuclear research and development labs, along with Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Labs. It employs around 12,000 people, occupies 43 square miles and consumes over two billion dollars per year. The lab was established in 1943 as Project Y in the Manhattan Engineer District, the headquarters of the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb. Most of the Lab facilities from that era are gone, though the main hall of the Ranch School, Fuller Lodge, which was used as the guest and dining quarters for the lab's VIPs, remains, restored and open to the public. After the war, the lab began moving much of its operations out of the town of Los Alamos to nearby mesa. The town was eventually opened to normal commercial development. Research continued and facilities expanded with the pursuit of the hydrogen, or thermonuclear bomb (finally tested in 1952), nuclear rocket programs, and further nuclear weapons development and testing. Los Alamos Lab continues to pursue military and nuclear research and development, field testing its technologies at its secure and heavily contaminated test facilities near Los Alamos, on the Pajarito Plateau, and along with Lawrence Livermore and Sandia, at the Nevada Test Site. Los Alamos designed most of the nuclear weapons in the US arsenal, and safeguards the largest collection of plutonium on the planet. Like Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos was operated by the University of California from its inception until 2006. UC is now one of four entities that control the LLC that operates the lab for the DOE, Los Alamos National Security, LLC (LANS). The three other entities are Bechtel (the notorious San Francisco-based engineering firm that built about half of the nuclear plants in the world, as well as the oil infrastructure of Saudi Arabia); BWX Technologies (better known as Babcock and Wilcox, a famous old weapons and engineering company that is owned by McDermott, the Houston-based oil industry engineering company); and URS (the San Francisco-based owner of the Washington Group, an engineering company operated by Dennis Washington that owns the famous Boise-based engineering firm Morrison-Knudsen, as well as the Berkely Pit in Butte, Montana).