The foundation of a successful research institution lies in its people. To facilitate collaboration and synergy among colleagues is to foster research outcomes that make a difference in an evolving science and security landscape. Part of creating this synergy involves ensuring that the infrastructure for employees and their work is modern, flexible, and thoughtful.
Since its establishment in 1952, Lawrence Livermore has been a mainstay of Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories, but some of its facilities still reflect the institution’s needs from earlier in its history and mission. The Laboratory sits on a set square mile of land with no room for outward expansion. However, recent hallmark achievements in exascale computing, AI, and fusion ignition have carved science priorities into Livermore’s plans: more high-performance computing (HPC) power, new beamline strategies, and more effective collaboration to maximize the potential for research breakthroughs. The Laboratory must work within its borders to advance these frontiers.
Efforts are ongoing to decommission and modernize older facilities to make room for the new and planned spaces necessary to move the mission forward. (See S&TR, June 2024, A Legacy of Research.) These efforts, along with the vision and support of Laboratory Director Kimberly Budil, have enabled the Laboratory Infrastructure (LI) team to shift its focus many years ahead and think bigger about how Lawrence Livermore will need to look—literally and figuratively—by 2050 to meet the needs of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and address emerging national security challenges. “The evolving global situation requires us to be agile, be bold, and push the boundaries of what was thought possible,” says Budil in the Laboratory’s 2026 Site Development Plan. “We are planning ahead to equip our exceptional workforce with the facilities needed to meet future challenges.” Adds Nathan Benedict, the LI program director for Strategic Campus Capabilities, “Infrastructure impacts how the Laboratory works in many ways, from interactions and team science—making sure buildings are co-located to spur innovation—to the employee experience while onsite.”
The Vision Comes to Life
Beyond creating new facilities and revamping old ones, Director Budil’s vision for future Laboratory infrastructure includes a revamp of the site’s organization on a fundamental level. “Much of what we derived from the vision of Carl Haussmann, who was an influential associate director in the Laboratory’s early days, was in his early site plans to give the Laboratory a campus look and feel,” says LI Director Cliff Shang. “We work to ensure that our future plans align with NNSA’s vision and plans for the entire Nuclear Security Enterprise.”
Despite being constrained by the Laboratory’s physical borders, expansive is an appropriate description of how the site will develop over the next few decades. To organize the entire site in a cohesive manner, facilities will be grouped into neighborhoods containing suites of buildings themed around research adjacencies. For example, computing, fusion, advanced materials and manufacturing (AMM), and national security–focused efforts will each have centralized locations in particular neighborhoods, as will general employee-oriented facilities. The neighborhoods will be connected to allow a better flow of traffic—both on foot and via vehicles—with improved pedestrian and bicycle paths and parking. Implementation of this concept is underway with construction of the new Employee Center, which is nearing completion and will serve as an integral part of Neighborhood One at the center of campus.
A new Employee Center is a key priority as employee activities and collaboration have been spread throughout the site for several decades. Expected to be operational in late 2026, the center is meant to benefit all employees onsite. “The number one motivation comes from our director. This new building is something that she recognizes as being important for employees, in terms of both recruiting and retention,” says Melissa Sale, Employee Engagement leader in Human Resources. “We’ve been offering many amenities to our employees for more than 70 years, but the new Employee Center offers an effective way of maintaining this standard.”
The facility will serve as a hub for employee activities that have historically not been unified on campus, bringing together exercise resources, areas for networking groups and employee engagement communities, indoor and outdoor work spaces, among other amenities, all in one place. The center will support and include fitness classes, a gym with fixed and free weights, cardio machines, and locker room facilities with day-use lockers and showers.
The Employee Center’s location at the heart of the campus alongside the Central Café, Research Library, and Lake Haussmann rounds out a core neighborhood that will encourage employees to fuel their bodies and minds during the workday. To blend smoothly into the natural space around it, the Employee Center includes bird-safe glass coverings on its windows facing the lake, ensuring the wellbeing of the birds in the area. “I’m excited to see what we can do in this space and how we can engage people in a new way,” says Sale. “We’ve made sure to consider the future use of the building even beyond 2050 so that it remains functional and flexible, and it will meet the needs of the future Livermore workforce.” Adds Shang, “Consider a small town, which usually has a dedicated central area. Livermore’s main site has never had its own town center, and Neighborhood One will serve that function for us. We aim to shift the population density from the southwest quadrant of the Laboratory towards this center.”
Flexibility is another facet of the planned updates to the Livermore site, with each construction and renovation project thoughtfully considering how needs may change in the future. “We’re building more modular facilities that have flexibility incorporated into them from the beginning,” says Benedict. “For example, a building could have a dry lab today but could be flipped to a chemistry lab quickly if needed. We’re trying not to pigeonhole ourselves so we can avoid having to totally gut a facility if the mission changes. We know these buildings may go through multiple uses in their lifetimes.”
The Employee Center and successes of other recently completed projects such as the Digital Infrastructure Capability Expansion, the Emergency Operations Center, and the Exascale Computing Facility Modernization have paved the way for the larger-scale transformative projects to come. “We are focused on establishing many sub-campuses onsite,” says Shang. “We’ve gained a reputation for delivering projects under cost and on schedule, and now we are going to be given a chance to scale up.”
National Security Focus
Tasked with meeting new challenges and needs in stockpile modernization, the National Security Innovation Center (NSIC) is a large-scale project that will begin in the next several years. In tandem with updates to infrastructure at Livermore’s Site 300 test facility and modernizing the Superblock facility, the construction of NSIC will provide a hub for national security work, co-locating core weapons personnel with leadership in the Strategic Deterrence (SD) Principal Directorate and the Director’s Office.
National security staff from physicists to engineers are currently spread across the Laboratory, located in 22 different facilities onsite. Since these employees work closely with one another and with institutions external to the Laboratory, such as the Department of War (DOW) and NNSA partners, a unified location will bring together conversations and efforts on the high-priority national security problems they address every day. “NSIC has been a long time coming, and the facility is much needed to deliver the national security mission at the highest level,” says Elliot Zhang, the senior director for Capital Planning in LI.
Designed to meet anticipated SD needs, NSIC will consist of 800 workstations for employees, as well as secondary spaces, including classified spaces to facilitate secure communications with sponsors and the completion of sensitive work. NSIC will house the core weapons program and round out Neighborhood One at the Laboratory’s Center. The building will also contain a variety of conference rooms to support collaboration and discussions from individual team meetings to program-wide all-hands meetings. Totaling more than 27,000 square meters over four stories, NSIC will serve as a hub for the many facets of Livermore’s national security work. “NSIC will enable staff to work together in the same building and to collaborate with our sponsors in NNSA and DOW effectively,” says Zhang. “Having the right setup in terms of communication technology and security level is crucial.”
NSIC’s proximity to Neighborhood One’s key program elements, including HPC and other conveniences such as the Central Café, will enhance collaboration and contribute to centralizing the Laboratory's population. “I can’t tell you how excited and grateful I am to be part of this project, which Director Budil described as once-in-a-generation,” says Zhang. “NSIC will be a place where we bring together our multidisciplinary teams to envision solutions to the most important national security challenges facing the nation and the world, as well as a place where people are inspired, where they interact, challenge each other, and bring big ideas to life.”
Fusion Energy Gets a LIFT
After Livermore’s historic ignition achievement, the Laboratory is continuing to improve fusion technologies and advance the field. (See S&TR, July/August 2025, The Future of Ignition.) The newly established Livermore Institute for Fusion Technology (LIFT) will connect the Laboratory’s world-leading science and technology with outside partners, including in industry, academia, and the international community. Livermore will optimize development of the underlying technologies that can be transferred into the fusion energy space. “We’re meant to be a hub and portal to drive things forward in this new way,” says Tammy Ma, founding director of LIFT. “Part of doing so means finding new mechanisms to make these partnerships possible, and one of those ways is through a new fusion campus.”
Livermore will dedicate a portion of the main site to an additional campus oriented around fusion technology and partnership development. This fusion campus will bring together internal staff working on fusion energy who are currently scattered across the Laboratory. The space will be housed in the north buffer zone of the Livermore site that provides the option of lower security restrictions, enabling more streamlined interaction with external partners. Connected to the Livermore Valley Open Campus, the new campus would be in Neighborhood Four along with the National Ignition Facility (NIF). “Proximity to NIF is useful because we anticipate subsystems such as tritium or fuel waste stream that we can share. The campus will also grow the Laboratory's fusion portfolio and centralize project areas that have significant overlap,” says Ma.
As NIF continues to generate the large amounts of neutrons necessary for stockpile modernization and high-energy-density (HED) science (see S&TR, March 2025, Sustaining the National Ignition Facility's Bright Future), the facility is undergoing a lengthy period of sustainment and upgrade efforts. Simultaneously, a high-yield facility is being planned to support program goals. Both NIF and the high-yield facility will continue to shoot at a rate of once a day or more. Alternatively, the new fusion campus will pursue fusion energy technologies, requiring a much higher repetition rate.
The campus is flexibly planned to include at least three main components: a new laser facility to house a state-of-the-art, high-energy, high-repetition-rate beamline and potential expansions to include a target chamber and target injector; an office building to contain workspaces and an auditorium for visitor and staff collaborators; and a second generation of the Jupiter Laser Facility to foster novel ideas in HED science. The new beamline will achieve significantly higher average power in a smaller footprint than a NIF-type beam. Diode-pumped solid-state lasers are an option being studied at Livermore for this advanced laser architecture. (See S&TR, March 2026, pp. 4–12.) The addition of a target chamber and injector will enable the pursuit of the research and development needed to meet the 10 targets-per-second demands and allow for a user facility to study the physics of inertial fusion energy.
Livermore’s fusion energy staff have further proposed other buildings and spaces to include in the complex if funding allows: a fusion neutron source, AMM space for target production, an optics design laboratory, remote control rooms for international fusion experiments, and a diagnostics laboratory. With a goal to break ground later this decade or in the early 2030s, this campus is one of Budil’s highest priority planned developments and will pave the way for potential fusion energy as a power source of the future. “We’ve taken it upon ourselves as a Laboratory to be a technical focal point in moving fusion energy towards reality,” says Wayne Miller, the LIFT operations lead. “We have credibility from ignition, and this campus would increase capabilities and understanding of what it takes for fusion energy for the entire ecosystem.” Adds Ma, “Having this kind of campus on national laboratory property is very important because fusion is a long-term challenge requiring large-scale science. A fusion campus here at Livermore is a signal, even internationally, that we are serious about putting in the long-term investments to make fusion happen.”
Next-Generation Computing
Livermore’s computing prowess has garnered attention with the installation of El Capitan, the nation’s most powerful supercomputer. (See S&TR, December 2024, Introducing El Capitan) As computational needs and requirements continue to grow, especially in the era of AI, Livermore needs to adapt and grow with them. The building that houses El Capitan and will also hold its successor is approaching capacity. A new hub is necessary to maintain flexibility and scalability to allow the Laboratory to site emerging technologies and systems as they come in. “We’re planning for the big question of what’s beyond exascale, which we’re referring to as ‘next generation,’” says Brad Davis, Livermore's HPC Program project manager. “Technology grows and changes much faster than facilities do, so we have to remain flexible and able to adapt.”
With agility in mind, Davis and the team must consider their lack of certainty about exactly what will go into the new Computing hub, starting with identifying options and risks and conducting studies onsite to determine how potential facilities may be repurposed in a changing environment. They analyzed trends over previous decades for a general sense of what will be needed: more power, more cooling, and denser compute (significant computing power packed into a small space). Meeting these needs is not a simple task considering the Laboratory’s geographical restrictions, so the team is seeking ways to creatively maximize output. “We want to do something that will last. We don’t want to keep building data centers and computing facilities,” says Davis. “We want something that will serve the program and the mission for decades. Right now, we’re focusing on a solution that could be the last data center we build onsite for many years.”
With developments in AI, quantum computing, modeling, and simulation unfolding at a rapid pace and the growing need to explore new power and cooling technologies and efficiencies, a large data center onsite would be leveraged in a variety of ways to achieve mission impact. “If we can secure more computing space, it can be adapted for many different uses, which is the goal going back to our flexibility and scalability mindset,” says Davis.
Building a next-generation computing center could also be well-suited for public–private partnerships, especially in the AI industry. DOE has emphasized the need for these partnerships between national laboratories and private sector companies, and the team is considering the possibility of another building in the north buffer zone leveraging partnerships to deliver a new HPC data center facility of the future.
Advancing Manufacturing
Most directly applicable to Livermore’s stockpile modernization mission is the integration of all aspects of work related to new and replacement stockpile materials into the VIPRE (Vertically Integrated Prototype Realization Enclave) complex. With three facilities focused on materials discovery and manufacturing development (VIPRE-Discovery), manufacturing technology maturation (VIPRE-TechMat), and system-level testing (VIPRE-Impact), this campus will enhance the Laboratory’s AMM capabilities and enable the rapid deployment of new national security systems. The site of VIPRE will replace industrial buildings that pre-date the founding of the Laboratory, representing a shift toward the future.
The VIPRE-Discovery facility will house the early phases of materials discovery and manufacturing development, focusing on research into the appropriate material solutions for problems of national importance. The proposed facility will consolidate all work being done in this research space at Livermore, as well as provide the additional room needed to transform research by incorporating new capabilities such as robotics, automation, and on-machine inspection into experimental workflows. “Direct ink write polymers are a good example of new materials where the chemical and physical properties of the material were co-developed with the associated manufacturing method,” says April Sawvel, the program leader for Scientific Capabilities Infrastructure. “With VIPRE-Discovery, we intend to extend those co-development efforts to broader classes of materials that would be appropriate for the stockpile.”
The progression of new manufacturing processes to higher levels of technical maturity requires the ability to create component-level prototypes, which will take place in the VIPRE-TechMat facility. Once candidate materials and manufacturing methods are down-selected for national security applications, they are ready to undergo maturation on a larger pilot scale, from intermediate-scale processing all the way to knowledge transfer between Livermore and potential production agency partners. The VIPRE-TechMat facility readies the technology for its transfer to production and will extend the Laboratory’s enclave concept to wider classes of materials.
VIPRE-Impact will serve all missions at the Laboratory and be the home for testing system-level properties and performance of national security solutions, including space payloads and energy systems. This work includes assembly and environmental testing of complete systems, much of which occurs already at Site 300. (See S&TR, March 2026, Site 300 Strong.) The VIPRE-Impact facility will bring together the work occurring at the Livermore site, expand the Laboratory’s capabilities in this area, and foster collaboration between employees in other Laboratory programs working on materials development, testing, and applications.
Consolidating and co-locating the existing capabilities at Livermore into VIPRE, equipped with the area needed to operate efficiently and effectively, would offer a huge boon to AMM for the Laboratory’s stockpile modernization mission. New activities to be stood up as needed will also be enabled by the extra footprint. Sawvel says, “We’re working hard to get this and other infrastructure projects moving forward. Once these facilities are up and running, they will have tremendous impact on the efficiency and the scope of the work we can do.”
A Mission-Worthy Laboratory
Livermore’s planned large-scale facilities development and neighborhood structuring efforts will be complemented and connected by pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly roadways, updates to the landscape, a larger total number of parking spaces, and more intuitive distribution of parking areas and amenities. While some of the major facility additions may not be completed for close to 15 years, other changes are right on the doorstep, such as the opening of the Employee Center, cross-site pedestrian corridors, and demolition of old facilities to make room for the new. “These site amenities are hopefully on every employee’s short-term horizon here at Livermore,” says Benedict.
Together these changes will empower the workforce with not only the physical spaces and tools but also the momentum to move the mission forward to the best of the Laboratory’s ability, making the future at Livermore look brighter and more cohesive than ever. “The Site Development Plan envisions the Laboratory as something built for the mission and the people that matter the most,” says Shang.
—Lilly Ackerman
For further information contact Cliff Shang (925) 422-4477 (shang1 [at] llnl.gov (shang1[at]llnl[dot]gov)).
