Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which currently sits on just 200 acres, is starting to make plans for a second facility. Increases in funding and projects has meant that the lab’s physical space cannot keep up with its growth.
Most of the lab’s 4200 employees work at the main location in the Berkeley Hills area of California, but about 20 percent of them work around the East Bay in four complementary facilities: The Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) in Emeryville, the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) in Walnut Creek, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in Oakland and much of the Life Sciences Division in West Berkeley. The distance between these labs and the main lab makes it more difficult to accommodate growth, as well as to foster closer interaction among researchers.
The lab’s Chief Operations Officer Jim Krupnick met with community members who form the Community Advisory Group (CAG) to discuss the rationale for opening a second campus and to present a preliminary outline of the plan to locate and obtain approval for the new site. He said the second site would need to be expandable to 750,000 to 2 million gross square feet and would need to be no more than 20 minutes from the lab’s main site. Affordability, accessibility, good amenities and public support were also important attributes that lab officials are aiming for in their search for a second site. Community members strongly support the decision to expand.
Berkeley Lab plans to issue a Request for Proposals by the end of the year, with the hopes of constructing the facility for occupancy as early as 2015.
