Operation
Brookhaven, which originally was owned by the Atomic Energy Commission, is now owned by the Commission's successor, the United States Department of Energy, which subcontracts the actual research and operation to universities and research organizations. It is currently operated by Brookhaven Science Associates LLC, which is an equal partnership of Stony Brook University and Battelle Memorial Institute. It was operated by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), from 1947 until 1998 when Associated lost the contract in the wake of a scandal when tritium leaked into the Long Island Central Pine Barrens groundwater on which it sits.
Co-located with the laboratory is the Upton, New York forecast office of the National Weather Service.
BNL is staffed by approximately 3,000 scientists, engineers, technicians, and support personnel, and hosts 4,000 guest investigators every year. Discoveries made at the lab have won seven Nobel Prizes.
The laboratory has its own police station, fire department, and postal code (11973). In total, the lab spans a 5,265-acre (21 km2) area. BNL is served by a rail spur operated as-needed by the New York and Atlantic Railway.
Read more about this topic: Brookhaven National Laboratory
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.”
—Francis Bacon (1560–1626)
“You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don’t have, at the back of your minds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Waiting for the race to become official, he began to feel as if he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbo jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design. Only the addition of the missing fragments of the puzzle would reveal if the picture was as he guessed it would be.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)