The end of the Cold War, coupled with President Clinton's desire to make federally funded research a better engine for national competitiveness, has left the Department of Energy's three weapons laboratories searching for new missions. While weapons development is down, nuclear nonproliferation research is growing, as are environmental and energy research. And Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs), which allow the national labs to join with industrial partners to solve high-technology problems, are increasing at a rapid pace.
There are now more than 100 of these CRADAs linking the automobile, aerospace, textile, and other industries with the three weapons development labs--Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. These three labs in total receive about half of the $6.5 billion budgeted for the 30 R&D labs managed by DOE in 1993. Each of them operates on budgets in excess of $1 billion and each has about ...
