Located approximately 60 miles east of New York City, it is managed by Stony Brook University and Battelle Memorial Institute.

The 5,300 acre campus contains several large research facilities, including the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and National Synchrotron Light Source II.

[1] BNL operations are overseen by a Department of Energy Site office, is staffed by approximately 2,750 scientists, engineers, technicians, and support personnel, and hosts 4,000 guest investigators every year.

It is currently operated by Brookhaven Science Associates LLC, which is an equal partnership of Stony Brook University and Battelle Memorial Institute.

The effort to build a nuclear reactor in the American northeast was fostered largely by physicists Isidor Isaac Rabi and Norman Foster Ramsey Jr., who during the war witnessed many of their colleagues at Columbia University leave for new remote research sites following the departure of the Manhattan Project from its campus.

[12] Out of 17 considered sites in the Boston-Washington corridor, Camp Upton on Long Island was eventually chosen as the most suitable in consideration of space, transportation, and availability.

The AGS was used in research that resulted in three Nobel Prizes, including the discovery of the muon neutrino, the charm quark, and CP violation.

[citation needed] In 1970 in BNL started the ISABELLE project to develop and build two proton intersecting storage rings.

[34] Brookhaven was also responsible for the design of the SNS accumulator ring in partnership with Spallation Neutron Source in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

The public access program is referred to as 'Summer Sundays' and takes place in July, and features a science show and a tour of the lab's major facilities.

The Lab estimates that each year it enhances the science education of roughly 35,000 K-12 students on Long Island, more than 200 undergraduates, and 550 teachers from across the United States.

The tritium was found to be leaking from the laboratory's High Flux Beam Reactor's spent-fuel pool into the aquifer that provides drinking water for nearby Suffolk County residents.

Brookhaven officials repeatedly treated the need for installing monitoring wells that would have detected the tritium leak as a low priority despite public concern and the laboratory's agreement to follow local environmental regulations.

Since 1993, DOE has spent more than US$580 million on remediating soil and groundwater contamination at the lab site and completed several high-profile projects.

The CAC sets its own agenda, brings forth issues important to the community, and works to provide consensus recommendations to Laboratory management.