The National Laboratories’ ‘Horizon Scan’:  A Strategic Roadmap for U.S. Competitiveness and Security

Session Overview

In this era of disruption and discontinuity, the United States holds a significant advantage in the global pursuit of new opportunities: the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Laboratories, which have among the world’s most highly skilled, mission-driven multidisciplinary workforces and advanced scientific infrastructure. How can the nation best leverage these assets to enhance economic competitiveness while still fulfilling the laboratories’ primary missions of ensuring national security by addressing energy, environmental, and nuclear challenges? Leaders of five of the seventeen national laboratories sat down to discuss the future of the national laboratory enterprise, as outlined in the National Laboratory Directors Council’s 2024 Horizon Scan.

Key Session Insights

Leading off the discussion of the national laboratory enterprise, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Director Kimberly Budil laid out the framework of the national laboratory system and its place, both conceptually and geographically, in the American innovation ecosystem. Growing out of the Manhattan Project, the national laboratories have for eight decades created and deployed technologies critical for national security and competitiveness. Eighty thousand people across seventeen national laboratories in thirteen states operate under the Department of Energy on various missions, ranging from scientific inquiry to nuclear weapons to energy investigations and engineering and technical projects. Each of the labs has large, interdisciplinary workforces, geared toward tackling challenges that may have time horizons too distant to make them attractive for private investment.

The national laboratories fill a critical "middle space" between the fundamental research primarily conducted by universities and the commercialization efforts pursued by industry. In this role, these laboratories serve as essential conduits for long-term, practical research. To achieve this, they rely on partnerships with universities and private enterprises. Universities contribute foundational research and supply much of the scientific talent that supports the national laboratories' operations. Conversely, the laboratories offer facilities where industry can test innovative technologies at scale before full deployment, such as the one-hundred-kilowatt grid managed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Despite this crucial role, the purpose and breadth of the national laboratories’ mission is too often little understood by those not in their immediate orbit. While Budil credited the Council and its members with introducing the work of the labs to a wider audience of innovation leaders, she made clear the entire nation would benefit from a greater understanding of the labs, and how to engage with them.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Director Steven Ashby shared the role of the national laboratories was too often a “secret” that made communicating their role in the wider innovation economy difficult. While the laboratories recently got a boost in public image with the move Oppenheimer, too many people do not understand the laboratories’ place in the broader context of U.S. innovation.

Dr. Ashby pointed out the national laboratories’ abilities to act as technological disruptors, introducing and advancing innovations and techniques that have the potential to radically change industries. By investing in potentially disruptive technologies that are difficult to finance from other sources, the national laboratories accelerate the development and deployment of innovations. The national laboratories’ investments in high performance computing (HPC) are a good example of how the system expands and strengthens the capacity and capability of the U.S. innovation ecosystem.

Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Thom Mason noted how, as one of the three National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) labs, Los Alamos is intimately familiar with the research to deployment pipeline. The nuclear weapons developed by his lab, and by the other two NNSA labs, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories, are the backbone of U.S. nuclear deterrence, the oldest and perhaps most important of the laboratories’ national security missions. But in creating these weapons over time, Mason noted the laboratories had built up expertise in other technology areas like space. Recognizing the value of these additional competencies, in the 1960s, the federal government set up a system of “Strategic Partnerships” for laboratories to make these skills available to the rest of the federal government, avoiding duplicative effort and boosting the technical skills available across agencies.

The value of the national laboratories for U.S. security is astonishing. They have provided the arms necessary for the strategic stability that kept the Cold War cold, allowing for competition between the United States and the U.S.S.R to move to the economic and technological realms. There, too, the national laboratories helped the United States ultimately to triumph in the Cold War and enjoy some thirty years of strategic stability as the sole global power. However, today, strategic stability is less certain given the growth of adversarial powers like China and Russia, meaning that military competition will now join economic and technological competition as a means of global competition. The role of the national laboratories is as important today as it has been in decades.

On the energy side of the laboratories’ mission, Idaho National Laboratory Director John Wagner has focused on working with private companies to prepare technologies, especially nuclear energy technologies, for deployment nationwide. In partnering with private companies looking to develop and deploy new technologies for energy systems like new reactor designs, Idaho National Laboratory provides expertise and technical assistance that would be difficult to find elsewhere. Alongside spinning out their own designs for commercialization, his lab provides technical resources to companies looking to refine existing technologies or put the finishing touches on novel ones. By providing services as varied as developing novel nuclear fuels to guiding them through federal regulatory processes, INL can facilitate the development and deployment of energy technologies that would otherwise be stymied by high development costs and timeframes. This is another prime example of the national labs filling the “middle” of the development curve for promising but complex new technologies, allowing them to make the difficult transition from theoretical to commercial viability.

The importance of partnerships in the work of the national laboratories was echoed by Dr. Stephen Streiffer, Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. However, as a federal body, the national laboratories have inherent restrictions on how they collaborate. While universities and industry move nimbly and quickly, the laboratories must adhere to stringent federal requirements. Dr. Streiffer stressed that, for the labs to deliver their full potential for the innovation ecosystem, they had to move at the speed of industry, not the speed of government, something Dr. Budil predicted would become a common area of focus among the labs in the coming years.

Dr. Mason then turned to the criticality of research security. As the national laboratory system came online after World War II, the United States’s economy and research enterprise was not just the world’s largest, but eclipsed the rest of the world put together, and the benefits from technological advancements made by national laboratories flowed to the American taxpayers who had funded them. Today, however, ROI from these investments is no longer certain. With competitors like China, technologies developed in the United States may end up commercialized overseas.

In response, there has been a growing debate over how to govern collaboration among researchers in critical technologies. During the crafting of the CHIPS & Science Act, while laboratories and industry successfully made the case that innovation investments were critical to national success, Congress had concerns over how the benefits of these investments would be directed to the United States.

Dr. Mason warned while the United States has clearly benefited from an open research ecosystem, it risks shooting itself in the foot by being overly restrictive in its efforts to prevent IP from falling into the wrong hands. He acknowledged that, based on what was being researched, he had varying levels of comfort working with outside collaborators, with anything of immediate military or economic importance worth being restrictive. But he warned that, while national laboratories could control who did and did not use their facilities, for example, universities would need to be more proactive in assessing their own vulnerability, especially as they continued to rely on federal research grants.

Dr. Ashby agreed that a balance between security and collaboration was essential for the laboratories’ continued success. His lab, with a mission spanning both national security and basic research, employs thousands of interns, many of whom come from abroad. They bring with them intellectual diversity and increase the laboratory’s intellectual vitality, and many go on to become American citizens and contribute to the nation for decades to come. But those same interns may work across the street from a place where highly sensitive research is being conducted. Dr. Ashby argues basic steps like controlling access, background checks, and keeping tabs on student work can help the labs safeguard critical intellectual property without shutting off the pipeline of skilled talent from overseas. 

To conclude, Dr. Budil asked each of the laboratory directors for a final thought or insight about the national laboratories. Dr. Ashby reiterated though the national laboratories have a wide footprint, they remain relatively unknown. He encouraged participants to find labs near them and begin seeking out partnerships. Dr. Mason added that the Horizon Scan from the National Laboratory Directors’ Council was a great look into the work of the national laboratories and how they were planning for the future beyond the short term. He encouraged those not familiar with the laboratories’ mission to read it, hoping to expand the public knowledge of the labs’ work.

Dr. Streiffer added while the national laboratories fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of Energy, their mission is far, far wider than energy. Basic research, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, materials science, and everything in between are fields to which the labs contribute heavily. Dr. Wagner further notes too many people mistakenly believe the national laboratories are closed boxes foreign nationals or non-classified research cannot penetrate. Making sure people are aware of the breadth of the national laboratories’ research, and their openness in a secure context, will be a key to expanding the system’s reach and impact.

To close, Dr. Budil notes a range of incredible national laboratory achievements in addition to the Manhattan Project: the Human Genome Project, advanced lithography, and computing for biology. By expanding the public perceptions of what the labs do and are, their ability to enhance U.S. competitiveness and innovation will continue to grow.