Berkeley Lab
Projects
infrastructure
Advanced Light Source Support Building
Total Project Cost: $35.1 million
ARRA funding: $14.7 million
The Advanced Light Source (ALS) User Support Building is a three-story, 30,928 gross-square-foot building that will house user-support operations at the ALS. It will include office and lab space for some 80 researchers. The $35-million project is funded by the DOE Office of Science. It will house experiment assembly spaces, conference rooms, and labs. The project is scheduled to be completed in 2011. Go here for more information.
Bevatron demolition
Total Project Cost: $50 million
ARRA funding: $14.3 million
Building 51, which houses the Bevatron, is an approximately 125,000 gross-square-foot, steel-frame structure built in the early 1950s. The building is located in the west-central part of Berkeley Lab and occupies approximately 2.25 acres. During its operation from 1954 until 1993, the Bevatron was among the world’s leading particle accelerators, and during the 1950s and 1960s, four Nobel Prizes were awarded for work conducted in whole or in part there.
The objective of the project is to remove a substandard building and its contents. Neither the Bevatron nor Building 51 are needed by the Lab. Building 51 is seismically inadequate, old, and deteriorating. Demolition would free up the site for future development, although no specific plan or project has been identified. The demolition began in August 2008 and was scheduled to last until October 2011; the ARRA funding will allow the project to finish ahead of schedule. Go here for more information. Go here for an FAQ. This funding comes to Berkeley Lab from the DOE Office of Science.
Building 2 (research infrastructure)
Total Project Cost: $2.9 million
ARRA funding: $2.9 million
Building 2 is one of Berkeley Lab’s primary research buildings, standing four stories tall with 85,000 square feet of space. It houses researchers from the Chemical Sciences Division studying x-ray science; specifically, they are using high-powered laser systems to create new sources of ultrafast femto-second (10-15) and atto-second (10-18) x-rays. Also in the building are scientists from the Materials Science Division using the Nanowriter to make the world’s highest-resolution x-ray microscopes and other x-ray equipment to conduct studies at the frontiers of atomic physics.
With increasing use of more powerful computers, lasers and other equipment, a stable cooling system is essential for the stability and resolution of experiments. This project will upgrade the cooling system in this 1988 building. This funding comes to Berkeley Lab from the DOE Office of Science. The project is scheduled to be completed in July 2010.
Building 6 (upgrade air handlers)
Total Project Cost: $1.5 million
ARRA funding: $1.5 million
Building 6 is the home of the Advanced Light Source, a national user facility that generates intense light for scientific and technological research. As one of the world’s brightest sources of ultraviolet and soft x-ray beams, the ALS’ 40 beam lines makes previously impossible studies possible. This project will replace three aging air handling units that had some vibration issues, negatively impacting the scientific studies, with higher capacity and higher efficiency units.
This funding comes to Berkeley Lab from the DOE Office of Science. The project is scheduled to be completed in September 2010.
Building 62 (lab space and infrastructure)
Total Project Cost: $2.9 million
ARRA funding: $2.9 million
Approximately 4,200 gross square feet of general purpose laboratories and infrastructure will be upgraded on the third floor of Building 62 to consolidate the significant strengths in the area of batteries and energy storage under one roof. Batteries are an enabling technology that can reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and allow for significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. With increased emphasis in all areas of battery research and development, Berkeley Lab will be playing a greater role in ensuring that the fundamental research leads to development of new energy storage devices that can reach the marketplace and have a tangible impact on the problems of global climate change.
Creating state-of-the-art research facilities for existing and new initiatives in the electrochemical energy storage and conversion area will help bring the necessary resources for discovery and development of new advanced battery and fuel cell systems. This research facility will allow for a significant impact in connecting the fundamental developments in energy storage research to the real world problems that prevent these batteries from being used in commercial large-scale applications. We envision consolidating the various synthesis and diagnostic tools to allow these facilities to be open for use to researchers from Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley, and industry.
Berkeley Lab will also be expanding its efforts in various areas of battery research with new subcontracts at various universities and national labs, and with hiring within the Lab. Further expansions in both personnel and equipment are expected in the next few years, in keeping with the increase in emphasis on energy storage research.
This funding comes to Berkeley Lab from the DOE Office of Science. The project is scheduled to be completed in September 2010.
Building 66 (lab space and infrastructure)
Total Project Cost: $4.0 million
ARRA funding: $4.0 million
Approximately 12,000 gross square feet of general purpose laboratories and offices will be upgraded on the second and third floors of Building 66. Renovated space will have ultralow vibration, ultralow electromagnetic field, and ultralow acoustic noise space for instrumentation capable of imaging individual atoms and their properties and interactions.
The space will be used to house research on “meta-materials,” engineered materials whose underlying structure can alter the overall response to electrical and magnetic fields. Berkeley Lab scientists are working on nanoscale lasers and other metamaterials that could behave as a “superlens,” useful in imaging objects with detail finer than allowed by the diffraction limit, or a “cloaking device” to render objects invisible to a specific wavelength of light, paving the way for more powerful microscopes and faster computers.
This funding comes to Berkeley Lab from the DOE Office of Science. The project is scheduled to be completed in September 2010.
Grizzly Substation (modernize transformer bank)
Total Project Cost: $5.1 million
ARRA funding: $5.0 million
This project will replace the aged and failing transformer bank at the Grizzly Substation, which serves the entire Berkeley Lab, with a modern, high-energy efficient transformer. This funding comes to Berkeley Lab from the DOE Office of Science. The project is scheduled to be completed in July 2010.
Seismic Upgrade: Phase 2
Total Project Cost: $97.1 million
ARRA funding: $15.0 million
The Seismic Phase 2 project includes four main components: modernization of Building 74, the Life Sciences Building, including upgrades to building systems and 28,000 to 45,382 gross square feet (gsf) of laboratory/office space; construction of a new 35,000 to 43,000 gsf General Purpose Laboratory for Life Sciences, which will be LEED Gold certified; seismic stabilization of Building 85, the Hazardous Waste Handling Facility; and demolition of seismically “very poor” and “poor” (University of California Seismic Rating) space to offset the new construction square footage.
The Recovery Act funding will be used for the modernization of Building 74, which is scheduled to be completed in July 2012. The entire seismic upgrade is scheduled to be completed in January 2015. This funding comes to Berkeley Lab from the DOE Office of Science.
computing
Advanced Networking Initiative (ESnet)
Total Project Cost: $61.8 million
ARRA funding: $61.8 million
ESnet, the Department of Energy’s high-performance networking facility managed by Berkeley Lab, is receiving $62 million for the Advanced Networking Initiative. ESnet will develop a prototype 100 gigbits per second (Gbps) Ethernet network to connect DOE supercomputer centers at speeds 10 times faster than current technology. As part of the Advanced Network Initiative’s approximately $59 million investment in new networking equipment and services, about $8 million to $9 million will go towards a national-scale network test bed for use by the research community and industry to test out new technologies, protocols and applications. The test bed will consist of advanced network devices and components assembled to give network and middleware researchers the capabilities to prototype ESnet capabilities anticipated in the next decade. As host of the test bed, ESnet will develop strategies to move mature technologies from testing mode to production service. For more information, click here.
Climate 100
Total Project Cost: $201,000
ARRA funding: $201,000
As global climate change researchers generate increasingly large amounts of data, sharing the data efficiently and reliably becomes a growing challenge. Climate 100 will bring together middleware and network researchers at Berkeley Lab to develop the needed tools and techniques for moving unprecedented amounts of data and effectively using planned high-speed networks of 100 gigabits per second being developed under the Advanced Networking Initiative. For more information, click here.
Cloud Computing (Magellan)
Total Project Cost: $16.4 million
ARRA funding: $16.4 million
Cloud computing is gaining traction in the commercial world, but can such an approach also meet the computing and data storage demands of the nation’s scientific community? This new program will examine cloud computing as a cost-effective and energy-efficient computing paradigm for scientists to accelerate discoveries in a variety of disciplines, including analysis of scientific data sets in biology, climate change and physics.
Cloud computing centralizes resources to gain efficiency of scale and permit scientists to scale up to solve larger science problems while still allowing system software to be configured as needed for individual application requirements. To test cloud computing for scientific capability, DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley Lab and the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) will install similar mid-range computing hardware, but will offer different computing environments. DOE will fund the project at $32 million over a three-year period, with the money divided about equally between Argonne National Laboratory and Berkeley Lab.
The combined set of systems will create a cloud testbed that scientists can use for their computations while also testing the effectiveness of cloud computing for their particular research problems. Since the project is exploratory, it’s been named Magellan in honor of the Portuguese explorer who led the first effort to sail around the globe. For more information, click here.
Computational Science and Engineering Petascale Initiative
Total Project Cost: $3.1 million
ARRA funding: $3.1 million
As chip manufacturers are turning more towards multi-core architectures, which pack increasing numbers of cores onto the chip, programmers must rethink the basic models of algorithm development and parallel programming. The new architectures have distinct differences in memory capacity and hierarchies that are causing researchers to consider new programming models and languages as a means to effectively exploit the power afforded by millions of cores.
DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is receiving $3.125 million to develop the Computational Science and Engineering Petascale Initiative. As part of this program, NERSC will hire eight post-doctoral researchers to help design and modify modeling codes in key research areas such as energy technologies, fusion and biosciences to run on emerging many-core systems. For more information, click here.
health
Life Sciences: Developmental Changes in RNA Splicing
Total Project Cost: $1.4 million
ARRA funding: $710,579
Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division is receiving $1.4 million over two years (funded for the first year at $710,579) for research into basic mechanisms that control gene expression during production of red blood cells in the bone marrow. In particular, these studies focus on understanding a molecular switch in RNA splicing that occurs in red cell precursors. This splicing switch insures synthesis of protein isoforms that provide strength and flexibility required for red cell integrity in the circulation, without which the cells may fall apart, leading to hemolytic anemia. Understanding RNA splicing is important more generally because proper splicing is essential for normal development; conversely, aberrant splicing is a common cause of genetic disease and a factor in many human cancers.
This grant was awarded to Berkeley Lab by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health.
Life Sciences: Huntington's Disease research
Total Project Cost: $1.3 million
ARRA funding: $611,104
Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division is receiving $1.3 million over two years (funded for the first year at $611,104) for research into mechanisms that prevent or delay onset and progression of Huntington’s disease (HD). HD is a neurodegenerative disease that is expected to affect 200,000 Americans in the next decade, yet no effective long-term approaches to therapy are currently available. This project will build on and explore recent discoveries that DNA oxidative damage causes the somatic expansion in HD that is observed with age and governs onset that begins around mid-life, and that loss of expansion is accompanied by an unforeseen amelioration or delay of pathophysiology.
This grant was awarded to Berkeley Lab by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health.
energy
Energy Efficiency for Department of Defense
Total Project Cost: $663,000
ARRA funding: $445,000
Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division is receiving $663,000 from the Department of Defense, of which $445,000 is through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to test a whole-building monitoring system at two DOD sites in partnership with the Navy and the Air Force. Berkeley Lab researchers, working with United Technologies Research Center, will develop a system that will continuously acquire performance measurements of HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), lighting and water usage, and compare these measurements in real time to a reference simulation model that represents the design intent for each building.
The comparison will allow building operators to identify and quantify sub-optimal performance. With this information, they can compare alternative corrective actions using whole building metrics and have a means to validate improved performance once corrective actions have been taken. The two facilities scheduled for the demonstration are a building at the Naval Facilities Engineering Center in Port Hueneme, California, and a facility at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. For more information, click here.
Energy Frontier Research Center Support
Total Project Cost: $172,362
ARRA funding: $172,362
Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry is receiving $172,362 to collaborate on a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center project at Cornell University. The aim of the project is to better develop new electrodes, based on complex oxide nanostructures, for fuel cells, batteries, solar photovoltaics, and catalysts. This research seeks to develop new oxide-based materials for cheap, efficient, and environmentally benign energy generation, conversion, and storage technologies.
The White House announced in April 2009 that the DOE Office of Science would invest $777 million over five years to establish 46 new Energy Frontier Research Centers across the country, including one at Berkeley Lab.
Enhanced Geothermal Systems
Total Project Cost: $7.0 million
ARRA funding: $2.1 million
Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division has been awarded $7 million over three years for research projects that seek to advance Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS), which is capable of harnessing the Earth’s heat where conventional geothermal technologies cannot. Whereas conventional geothermal is limited to locations with particular geological characteristics, EGS can enhance or engineer a fracture network to allow for heat mining. The four EGS projects will seek to improve the ability to image fluids deep underground, estimate changes in the fracture surface area, build better models of fluid flow and investigate using carbon dioxide as a heat transmission fluid instead of water. For more information click here.
Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) Infrastructure
Total Project Cost: $4.0 million
ARRA funding: $4.0 million
The Joint BioEnergy Institute, one of three DOE Bioenergy Research Centers and located in Emeryville, California, is receiving $4 million to purchase equipment to enhance two areas of research: the study of conversion of plant biomass to biofuels and the study of sorghum as a bioenergy feedstock crop. Deconstruction of lignocellulosic biomass remains the most difficult and costly step in the conversion of biomass to transportation fuels. To address the most significant opportunities for understanding the physicochemical mechanisms involved in biomass deconstruction, JBEI will acquire several pieces of advanced imaging equipment. To advance its research on the cell wall structure of rice, switchgrass, Arabidopsis, and tobacco, which is used as an expression system, JBEI will add greenhouses and chambers for study of these four species.
JBEI is a scientific partnership led by Berkeley Lab and including the Sandia National Laboratories, the University of California (UC) campuses of Berkeley and Davis, the Carnegie Institution for Science and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). This funding comes from the DOE Office of Science.
Joint Genome Institute (JGI) Infrastructure/Equipment
Total Project Cost: $13.1 million
ARRA funding: $13.1 million
The DOE’s Joint Genome Institute, located in Walnut Creek, California, is receiving $13.1 million for various IT infrastructure and equipment purchases. About $11 million will go towards IT, including upgrades of computing, storage, and networking capabilities, $1.1 million towards sequencing reagents to help accelerate the sequencing of three plant genomes, and $1 million to buy the latest next-generation sequencing technology. The upgrades will accelerate the ability of scientists to identify plant traits that facilitate conversion to carbon-neutral biofuels.
The JGI, funded by the DOE Office of Science, is the only federally funded, large-scale center targeting the sequencing and analysis of plant and microbial genomes relevant to the DOE missions of bioenergy, carbon cycling, and biogeochemistry.
NDCX-II (Neutralized Drift Compression Experiment facility)
Total Project Cost: $11.0 million
ARRA funding: $11.0 million
Berkeley Lab’s Accelerator and Fusion Research Division will receive $11 million to construct a new induction linear accelerator (linac) as a facility for conducting research into the physics of high energy density laboratory plasmas. This facility, called NDCX-II, will be capable of producing intense, short-pulse ion beams for heating matter uniformly. NDCX-II is part of the roadmap of experiments for heavy ion fusion research and will pave the way towards making inertial fusion energy an affordable and environmentally attractive means of producing commercial electricity. LBNL is the leading partner in the U.S. Heavy Ion Fusion Science Virtual National Laboratory (HIFS-VNL), which also includes Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. NDCX-II is being developed in collaboration with the other VNL laboratories. For more about heavy ion fusion science, click here. For more about NCDX-II, click here.
The construction project is scheduled to start in July 2009 and end in March 2012. This funding comes to Berkeley Lab from the DOE Office of Science.
Production of Advanced Coatings for Solar Cells
Total Project Cost: $24,969
ARRA funding: $24,969
Berkeley Lab’s Solar Energy Materials Research Group is receiving $24,969 to conduct testing on solar cell coupon samples prepared by Acree Technologies. Acree Technologies is developing new transparent, conducting oxide materials for solar cell applications. These results from Berkeley Lab will be used by Acree to optimize thin film deposition process for improved solar cell performance. This Recovery Act funding comes to Berkeley Lab as a subaward from Acree Technologies based in Concord, California.
Smart Grid Technology
Total Project Cost: $875,000
ARRA funding: $875,000
Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division is receiving $875,000 for mathematical analysis related to the development of Smart Grid technology. The current U.S. power grid is increasingly vulnerable as the system grows more complex. Present practices and policies limit its ability to respond to more than one failure at a time, whereas the 2003 blackout was sparked by three simultaneous failures. In this project, mathematicians and power engineers will build on previous work to develop optimization algorithms that can detect vulnerabilities, analyze cascading outages and perform resource allocation across multiple locations and times. For more information, click here.
Support for Recovery Act Program
Total Project Cost: $200,000
ARRA funding: $200,000
The Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Berkeley Lab will provide technical assistance related to the DOE's Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant Program (EECBG), which provides $2.7 billion in block grants to U.S. states, territories, local governments, and Indian tribes to develop and implement projects to improve energy efficiency and reduce energy use and fossil fuel emissions in their communities. (Click here for more information on EECBG.) This funding comes to Berkeley Lab from the Office of Weatherization and Intergovernmental Programs in DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
Technical Assistance to the Federal Energy Management Program
Total Project Cost: $1.4 million
ARRA funding: $1.4 million
Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division is receiving $1.4 million to provide technical assistance to eight projects under the Department of Energy’s Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP). Berkeley Lab experts will provide training and assessment tools to help five federal agencies and all of the Armed Services to reduce their energy use and meet renewable energy goals. The projects emphasize EETD’s unique expertise in efficient lighting technologies, renewable power, advanced control systems that facilitate “smart” buildings, energy efficient practices in high-technology buildings (laboratories and data centers), and achieving energy efficiency by leveraging private sector capital through Energy Savings Performance Contracts (ESPCs).
In one project, EETD experts will assist the National Institutes of Health with advanced applications of LED lighting, including studying optimization of health and productivity with spectral and temporal programming of solid-state LED light sources. In another, the Army’s Fort Detrick will receive from Berkeley Lab an assessment of the viability of supplying all or part of the electric load in selected areas with photovoltaic solar panels. For more information, click here.
science
Advanced Light Source Accelerator Improvement and Equipment
Total Project Cost: $11.3 million
ARRA funding: $11.3 million
Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS) is receiving $11.3 million to help it maintain its position as one of the world’s premier soft x-ray light sources. The ALS is a national user facility serving more than 1,900 scientists annually doing research in a wide variety of fields, from biology and earth science to the study of optics and semiconductors; they use the light sources to examine structures on the atomic and molecular level.
First, the ALS will receive $5.8 million to acquire sextupole magnets to increase brightness by a factor of two to three, keeping the ALS at the cutting edge of soft x-ray science. Second, ALS will receive $2 million to construct and install an elliptically polarizing undulator to provide a new x-ray source for the femtosecond soft x-ray beamline 6.0.2, effectively doubling the capacity of this facility by enabling soft and hard x-ray branchlines to operate simultaneously. This will allow new research on complex materials, such as superconductors, nanostructures, and transition-metal oxides.
Third, ALS will receive $2 million to equip its beamlines with advanced CCD-based detectors developed at the ALS to enhance the reach and productivity of the beamlines. Lastly, ALS will receive $1.5 million to develop a unique superconducting magnet for a beamline, allowing experiments leading to novel insights into the magnetic structure of engineered magnetic nanostructures and materials not accessible by any other technique. For more information, click here.
Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA)
Total Project Cost: $28.4 million
ARRA funding: $17.0 million
When completed in about four years, the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator, or BELLA, will be one of the most powerful lasers in the world, capable of accelerating electron beams to energies exceeding 10 GeV, or 10 billion electron volts, in a distance of just 1 meter. It will be useful not only for physicists but also chemists and biologists who need to observe ultrashort phenomenon; it may also have applications in medicine and homeland security. BELLA is a $28.4-million project, of which $20.7 million will be funded by the DOE Office of Science under the Recovery Act. For more information, click here.
High Temperature Superconductor Magnet Technology
Total Project Cost: $201,000
ARRA funding: $201,000
Berkeley Lab’s Superconducting Magnet Program in the Accelerator and Fusion Research Division is receiving $201,000 for the first year as part of a two-year, $4-million ARRA-funded program to develop extremely high field magnets for high energy physics (HEP). Berkeley Lab is a key contributor to the collaboration, which includes seven universities and national laboratories as well as industry.
HEP has been at the forefront of engineering superconductors into practical wires, which enabled large accelerators in the United States and Europe and in the process provided vital development for many other applications, foremost among them being Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). But the Niobium-base materials, Niobium-Titanium and Niobium-Tin, upon which all this technology depends, cannot provide fields greater than 18 Tesla in dipole magnets and 20-22 T in solenoids. A switch is therefore required to a new material with a significantly larger magnetic field potential.
The most promising candidate material is the High Temperature Superconductor (HTS) Bi-2212, which can commercially be obtained in the form of round wires. This research program will develop the magnet technology for Bi-2212. This multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, multi-sector collaboration brings key players together in a program that can serve the vital needs of future HEP accelerators and broadly break out the capability of HTS materials to a very wide range of applications, including MRI, NMR, and many science applications, as well as those not yet dreamed of.
Molecular Foundry Equipment
Total Project Cost: $5.9 million
ARRA funding: $5.9 million
Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry is receiving $5.9 million to purchase four pieces of equipment to advance research on the nanoscale, with applications in the fields of energy science, information technology and medicine. A transmission electron microscope and multi-mode surface analysis system will help researchers to better understand the structure and chemistry of nanoscale materials. A robotic biopolymer purification analysis system will enable rapid processing of synthetic nanostructures, allowing users to fully exploit the unique high-throughput capabilities of the Molecular Foundry.
A new computer cluster will meet the new and increasing computational scale of Molecular Foundry Theory Facility user projects, while simultaneously facilitating more than a doubling of the number of projects that the Foundry can accommodate in this area of nanoscience. The proposed machine would enable entirely new capabilities in nanoscale self-assembly and energy-related nanoscience, and provide a strong platform for development of highly parallel algorithms that build on existing strengths in computational nanoscience.
The Molecular Foundry is one of five DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers, which together serve more than 1,200 scientific users annually. This funding comes from the DOE Office of Science.
Nuclear Data Program Initiative
Total Project Cost: $950,000
ARRA funding: $950,000
As part of an effort to revitalize the workforce of the DOE’s National Nuclear Data Center at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Nuclear Science Division of Berkeley Lab will receive $950,000 to support a staff scientist. This is a five-year project to evaluate nuclear structure and decay data for a variety of applications, from homeland security to nuclear medicine to basic research.
88-Inch Cyclotron Accelerator Improvement Project
Total Project Cost: $1.9 million
ARRA funding: $1.7 million
The 88-Inch Cyclotron of the Nuclear Science Division of Berkeley Lab is a versatile accelerator used by nuclear physicists and chemists to study the properties of the nucleus. Scientists and engineers from both industry and the government also use the facility to study the effects of cosmic rays on electronic components for satellites and spacecraft. The project will upgrade the cyclotron’s high-voltage injection system to provide more intense heavy-ion beams for the research programs. In addition, the radio frequency amplifier, which provides the accelerating voltage, will be modernized to improve the performance and reliability of the accelerator. The $1.88-million project is funded by the DOE Office of Science.
