US National Labs: Energy labs need to rethink their missions

The US Department of Energy runs some of the most famous physics laboratories in the world – Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. The DOE spends some $6bn every year on ten multipurpose labs which are home to a variety of accelerators, lasers, neutron sources, supercomputers and synchrotrons, not to mention a wide range of environmental and nuclear weapons research).