Los Alamos National Laboratory

Battery Customer

Innovative Battery Manufacturing Facilities Construction management consultancy for building innovative battery manufacturing facilities in the United States. Bechtel is at the forefront of constructing innovative battery manufacturing facilities in the U.S. Our expert team ensures compliance with local codes and…

U.S. National Laboratories

The United States Department of Energy’s National Laboratories have served among the world’s leading institutions for scientific innovation for more than seventy years. Their breakthroughs have global impact in areas from national security to advanced manufacturing, cosmology, and materials science.

In partnership with University of California, Bechtel was the senior industrial partner on a team managing Los Alamos National Laboratory from 2006 to 2018.

The partnerships bring best practices from industry to enable world-class science for the benefit of U.S. national security. The parent organizations provide oversight through a board of governors, and the corporate partners share with the labs their processes, systems, and tools. The contracts were separate, but the partnerships worked toward economies of scale and shared best practices that benefitted both laboratories.

Los Alamos helps maintain the safety, security, and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear stockpile. It also conducts research for new defense programs as well as for a wide range of global security missions. The laboratory, near Santa Fe in northern New Mexico, addresses such problems as energy security, climate change, terrorism, and nuclear weapons proliferation. Focus areas include space exploration, geophysics, materials science, supercomputing, medicine, and nanotechnology.

Researchers investigate details of an astronomical simulation in the CAVE at the Los Alamos SuperComputing Center.

Technical expertise

The labs have expertise in nearly every scientific discipline. Personnel, including leading scientists in numerous fields of study, work to maintain and enhance national security and advance such crucial efforts as understanding climate change and developing sustainable sources of energy.

Technical staff from both Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos combined to win more than 220 prestigious R&D 100 Awards, presented annually by R&D Magazine to recognize the top 100 technology innovations of the year.

In 2020, Livermore researchers won four R&D 100 Awards. The awards included a low-density polymer foam plug for occluding blood vessels, a multilevel checkpointing system for improved simulation performance on supercomputers, a faster open-source software package manager, and a novel portable neutron multiplicity detector.

Accomplishments

Repeatedly recognized by the customer for achievements in sustainability and waste minimization, earning more sustainability awards in 2018 than any other DOE site
Improved worker safety to the Laboratory’s best levels in its 75-year history
Achieved “Star” Status in the Department of Energy Voluntary Protection Program, a grass-roots worker safety program
Enabled completion of the Lab’s principal mission each year: the certification to the U.S. president of the nuclear weapons stockpile as safe, secure, and effective – and all of the scientific work behind those annual certifications
Completed or installed three of the world’s fastest supercomputers: Roadrunner, Cielo, and Trinity, for computer simulations of complex systems such as climate modeling and nuclear defense. Trinity is capable of 41-thousand-million operations per second, or 41 petaflops.
Completed major capital infrastructure improvement projects including the Radiological Laboratory Utility Office Building, the new Transuranic Waste Facility, a multi-layer perimeter security safeguards system and major seismic safety improvements for the Laboratory’s plutonium facility, and a low-level waste facility
Contributed an average of $3 million per year of corporate fee to education, economic development, and charitable giving to northern New Mexico communities
Hired and developed thousands of new employees with high-level security clearances to strengthen a talent pipeline facing a wave of retirements
Maintained or improved rates of scholarly publication to scientific journals

Venture Acceleration Fund

With our partners at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, we launched the Venture Acceleration Fund to help local entrepreneurs create new businesses, grow existing ones, and diversify the local economy. The fund garnered the entrepreneurship award from the International Economic Development Council, the world’s largest membership organization promoting economic development.

The primary mission of the lab remains the U.S. nuclear deterrent. At the same time, society benefits from an extremely wide range of science, technology, and engineering innovation. The work from each of these laboratories advances everything from industrial efficiency to medicine to energy security.