A joint venture of Battelle Memorial Institute of Columbus, Ohio, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook has been selected by the Department of Energy to take over management of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, beginning in January 1998. The joint venture, known as Brookhaven Science Associates, won a five-year, $2 billion contract to manage the national laboratory. In Spring 1997, Energy Secretary Frederico Peña terminated Brookhaven’s contract with Associated Universities Inc, which had managed the lab for nearly 50 years, following a number of incidents and a failure to adequately deal with leaks of tritium. In awarding the contract, Peña cited Battelle’s experience operating the DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland for the past 32 years. No decision has been reached regarding Brookhaven’s research reactor, which is currently off-line.
