Brookhaven Lab Added Over $40 Million to the Long Island Economy in 2007

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Contacts: Diane Greenberg, (631) 344-2347 or Mona S. Rowe, (631) 344-5056

Brookhaven Lab Added Over $40 Million to the Long Island Economy in 2007

January 28, 2008

UPTON, NY - Brookhaven National Laboratory purchased $40.2 million worth of supplies and services from Long Island businesses in fiscal year (FY) 2007, a period from October 1, 2006 to September 30, 2007.

In addition to Brookhaven's buying goods and services from Long Island vendors, most of the Laboratory's approximately 2,700 employees live in Suffolk County and shop on Long Island. All told, employee salaries, wages and fringe benefits amounted to $283.8 million, or 55.6 percent of the Laboratory's total budget of $510.2 million in FY2007.

Owned and primarily funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Laboratory creates and operates major facilities available to university, industrial, and government personnel for basic and applied research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, and energy technologies.

Brookhaven's total procurement budget in FY2007 was approximately $181.5 million. Out of that amount, the Laboratory spent about $13.8 million on 467 purchases in Nassau County, and $26.4 million on 2,786 purchases in Suffolk County.

Mary-Faith Healey, manager of Brookhaven's Procurement and Property Management Office, which handles purchasing for the Laboratory, said, "We try to do business locally whenever we can. The significant amount that the Lab spends on goods and services each year can certainly help to bolster the local economy."

Brookhaven's top three vendors in FY2007 were E.W. Howell Co., Inc., of Woodbury; H.O. Penn Machinery Co. of Holtsville; and Advanced Energy Systems, Inc. of Medford. E.W. Howell received by far the largest amount - over $10 million - for completing the construction of the 94,500-sqare-foot Center for Functional Nanomaterials. Begun in 2005, construction of the $81 million facility, which will enhance scientists' ability to investigate the properties of materials at nanoscale dimensions, was completed in May 2007. It is expected to be fully operating, with all state-of-the-art scientific equipment installed, within the first half of this year.

The Laboratory purchased a generator and uninterrupted power supply from H.O. Penn Machinery for approximately $1.59 million to provide power to the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer located on its site if the regular supply of electricity is interrupted. Known as New York Blue, the supercomputer is the world's fastest for general users, capable of performing up to 100 trillion calculations per second. The supercomputer is the centerpiece of the New York Center for Computational Sciences, which fosters research collaborations among research institutions, universities and companies throughout New York State.

Brookhaven Lab paid the third top vendor in FY2007 - Advanced Energy Systems, Inc. - approximately $1.58 million for providing detailed engineering and fabrication support on a superconducting radiofrequency (RF) cavity and a cryomodule for a superconducting RF electron gun that generates a high-power, high-brightness electron beam for use in energy-recovery linear accelerators. Brookhaven's Collider-Accelerator Department is building a prototype of this electron gun to demonstrate that it can efficiently accelerate electrons and recycle energy for use in the eRHIC collider, a planned upgrade to Brookhaven's giant particle accelerator, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

Number: 08-07 | BNL Media & Communications Office