Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - Origins

Origins

LLNL was established in 1952 as the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore as an offshoot of the existing University of California Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. It was intended to spur innovation and provide competition to the nuclear weapon design laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, home of the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic weapons. Edward Teller and Ernest O. Lawrence, director of the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, are regarded as the co-founders of the Livermore Laboratory.

The new laboratory was sited at a former Naval Air Base and training station in Livermore, California. The site was already home to several University of California Radiation Laboratory projects that were too large for its location in the hills above the Berkeley campus, including one of the first experiments in the magnetic approach to confined thermonuclear reactions (i.e. fusion).

E.O. Lawrence tapped 32-year-old Herbert York, a former graduate student of his, to run the Livermore Laboratory. Under York, the Lab had four main programs: Project Sherwood (the Magnetic Fusion Program), Project Whitney (the weapons design program), diagnostic weapon experiments (both for the Los Alamos and Livermore laboratories) and a basic physics program. York also saw to it that the new lab embraced the E.O. Lawrence “big science” approach, tackling challenging projects with physicists, chemists, engineers, and computational scientists working together in multidisciplinary teams.

Historically, the Berkeley and Livermore laboratories have had very close relationships on research projects, business operations and staff. The Livermore Lab was established initially as a branch of the Berkeley Laboratory. Both labs are named after E.O. Lawrence, and the Livermore Lab was not officially severed administratively from the Berkeley Lab until the early 1970s. To this day, in official planning documents and records, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is designated as Site 100, Lawrence Livermore National Lab as Site 200, and LLNL's remote test location as Site 300.

The laboratory became known as the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in 1971.

On March 14, 2011, the City of Livermore officially expanded the city's boundaries to annex LLNL and move it within the city limits. The unanimous vote by the Livermore City Council expanded Livermore’s southeastern boundaries to cover 15 land parcels covering 1,057 acres (4.28 km2) that comprise the LLNL site. Prior to this, the site was in an unincorporated area of Alameda County. The LLNL campus continues to be owned by the federal government.