Brookhaven National Laboratory: Difference between revisions

{{Use mdy dates|date=September 2011}}'''Brookhaven National Laboratory''' ('''BNL''') is a [[United States Department of Energy national laboratories|United States Department of Energy national laboratory]] located in [[Upton, New York]], a hamlet of the [[Brookhaven, New York|Town of Brookhaven]]. It was formally established in 1947 at the site of [[Camp Upton]], a former [[List of United States Army installations|U.S. Army base]] on [[Long Island]]. Located approximately 60 miles east of New York City, it is managed by [[Stony Brook University]] and [[Battelle Memorial Institute]].

Following [[World War II]], the [[United States Atomic Energy Commission|US Atomic Energy Commission]] was created to support government-sponsored peacetime research on atomic energy. The effort to build a [[nuclear reactor]] in the American northeast was fostered largely by physicists [[Isidor Isaac Rabi]] and [[Norman Foster Ramsey Jr.]], who during the war witnessed many of their colleagues at [[Columbia University]] leave for new remote research sites following the departure of the [[Manhattan Project]] from its campus. Their effort to house this reactor near New York City was rivalled by a similar effort at the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] to have a facility near [[Boston, Massachusetts|Boston]]. Involvement was quickly solicited from representatives of northeastern universities to the south and west of New York City such that this city would be at their geographic center. In March 1946 a nonprofit corporation was established that consisted of representatives from nine major research universities — [[Columbia University|Columbia]], [[Cornell University|Cornell]], [[Harvard University|Harvard]], [[Johns Hopkins University|Johns Hopkins]], [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology|MIT]], [[Princeton University|Princeton]], [[University of Pennsylvania]], [[University of Rochester]], and [[Yale University]].<ref>{{cite book |last=Crease |first=Robert P. |date= 1999|title= Making Physics: A Biography of Brookhaven National Laboratory}}</ref>