Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne National Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center in DuPage County, Illinois, founded in 1946, sponsored by the United States Department of Energy and operated by the University of Chicago through UChicago Argonne LLC. It began as the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, formed in part to carry out Enrico Fermi's work on nuclear reactors for the Manhattan Project, and was designated the first national laboratory in the United States on 1 July 1946. Nearly all operating commercial nuclear power plants around the world have roots in Argonne research, and more than 1,000 scientists work there on energy storage, renewable energy, physics, chemistry and materials science. With General Electric it developed the boiling water reactor in the mid 1950s.