The National laboratory of Lawrence Livermore (in English Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , LLNL) is a national laboratory of the Département of the Energy of the United States. Located at Livermore, in the State of California, it is managed by the the University of California. It is with the National laboratory of Los Alamos one of the two laboratories of the United States whose mission was to create nuclear weapons. The field of application of the laboratory extended to the energy questions in general like with biomedecine and environmental science.

The site rests on an old basis of drive of naval used during the Second world war. It is originally used to accommodate projects of the Radiation Laboratory which were too broad for its site of Berkeley, California. In 1949 Edward Teller suggests with Ernest Orlando Lawrence, the person in charge of the laboratory of Berkeley, that a second laboratory of weapons must be created to cause a competition with that of Los Alamos. Teller sees there also an answer to the lack of interest which its bomb with hydrogen in Los Alamos meets. In 1951 he asks the creation of the laboratory the Atomic Energy Commission and it is in September 1952 that he is founded. In spite of the wish of Teller, the bomb with hydrogen was mainly created in Los Alamos.

Herbert York, 32 years old, becomes the first director of the laboratory. York develops the program of the laboratory and creates four elements:

1. Project Sherwood the magnetic merge program
2. the diagnosis of experiments of weapons (in common with Los Alamos)
3. the study of thermonuclear weapons
4. and a program of physics

The two installations are a building accommodating the most recent electronic computer, a UNIVAC I, the other a technical building having a central bay to raise heavy equipment.

The laboratory must receive in 2005 the most powerful computer of the world: Blue obstructs.

Internal bonds

• National Ignition Facility

External bonds

• Official site