Without question, the most consequential investment Sandia has made in its 75-year history is the construction and support of the California site.

Sandia California was founded March 8, 1956, under the leadership of then-President James W. McRae. It was built on land that was once Naval Air Station Livermore, across the street from the University of California Radiation Laboratory Livermore — now Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

McRae transferred personnel from Albuquerque to Livermore to work closely with their peers across East Avenue in developing nuclear weapons that employed hydrogen fusion. That work and close collaboration continues to this day, but the story of Sandia California is one of evolution through innovation.

Keeping the nation safe

Sandia’s primary mission of ensuring the U.S. nuclear arsenal is safe, secure and reliable — and can fully support our nation’s deterrence policy — relies on close work with Lawrence Livermore.

The first decade at the Livermore site was largely devoted to weapons design and development projects, a dozen of which made it to the stockpile. Sandia California provided early critical support functions in safety, use control, reliability, testing and analysis.

One of the largest and most successful programs during this time was the W47 warhead for the Polaris missile. Environmental testing and systems studies were initiated during this time. The site also assumed responsibility for gas bottles and obtained its first computer system, the Elecom 125, to calculate flight trajectories and stress analyses.

Early in the 1960s, the number of stockpile weapons rose as Cold War tensions mounted. The site developed expertise in welding and microelectronics.

As the engineering arm of the U.S. nuclear weapons enterprise, Sandia’s responsibility is to ensure that every part of the nuclear deterrent is designed and maintained to the highest standard. In the 1990s, the weapons program changed its focus from designing new warheads to science-based stockpile stewardship and to maintaining and refurbishing existing warheads.

Sandia California continues to play a key role in life extension programs for multiple weapons systems, including the W87-1 and W80-4.

Combustion Research Facility

Research on gas transfer in weapons systems led directly to work that changed the American and international auto industry for decades. Almost a quarter-century to the day after Sandia California was established, the Labs demonstrated impressive foresight when it established the Combustion Research Facility on March 6, 1981.

The facility may have come from the throes of the energy crisis of the 1970s — when the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries embargoed oil exports to the United States, causing a surge in gasoline prices and shortage of supply — but the prescience of the Labs has been proven many times over. Contributions that have come from the Combustion Research Facility include new alternative vehicle and aviation fuels, precision laser instruments, constantly evolving ways to model combustion using supercomputing and 40 patents.

Sandia’s work on hydrogen fuel cells has spurred millions of dollars in investment in a newly launched, hydrogen-powered ferry on the San Francisco Bay as well as the design of the world’s first hydrogen-powered research vessel by Scripps Oceanographic Institute.

Researchers at Sandia California combined several fields of study, using instrumentation found only in the Combustion Research Facility and algae growth beds, to create renewable biofuels to power the next generations of vehicles and aircraft.

Cyber pioneers grown at Sandia California

In 1999, when the internet was young and cybersecurity was in its infancy, Sandia California established the Center for Cyber Defenders to cultivate, train and get inspiration from new generations of cybersecurity experts who have brought ingenuity to defending the nation.

Since its launch in Livermore, more than 800 interns have worked in the center in New Mexico and California, at least 200 of whom were hired as full-time researchers — with 153 of them still employed today and working on the toughest national security problems facing the nation.

Open campus, unlimited future

In 2012, at the dawn of the 21st century, Sandia California embraced the culture of innovation and exploration in the Bay Area by partnering with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in setting aside 10% of its property to create the Livermore Valley Open Campus. The goal of the campus is simply stated but powerfully futuristic: create unprecedented collaboration in an open research and development space.

By leveraging the combined intellectual might of both labs and the entrepreneurial ethos of Silicon Valley, the campus is home to the Combustion Research Facility, the Center for Infrastructure Research and Innovation, and the Biotech Collaboration Center.

In this ever-expanding village of advanced scientific and engineering centers, researchers from private industry and academia collaborate freely with lab personnel to contribute to the next generation of big ideas — ideas that will solve the critical and seemingly intractable challenges faced by the nation.