Shortly after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military needed a safe location for performing maintenance on the Navy's most powerful turreted guns.

According to AP news reports in April 2018, a single barrel of "radioactive sludge" ruptured while being prepared for transport to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Southeast New Mexico for permanent storage.

[7] In the Snake River Plain, most of INL is high desert with scrub vegetation and a number of facilities scattered throughout the area; the average elevation of the complex is 5,000 feet (1,520 m) above sea level.

And the NGNP would use a high-temperature gas reactor,[8] which would have redundant safety systems that rely on natural physical processes more than human or mechanical intervention.

The Multiphysics Methods Group (MMG) is a program at Idaho National Laboratory (under the United States Department of Energy) begun in 2004.

It uses applications based on the multiphysics and modeling framework MOOSE to simulate complex physical and chemical reactions inside nuclear reactors .

The ultimate goal of the program is to use these simulation tools to enable more efficient use of nuclear fuel, resulting in lower electricity costs and less waste products.

INL's National and Homeland Security division focuses on two main areas: protecting critical infrastructures such as electricity transmission lines, utilities and wireless communications networks, and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

INL staff members are frequently asked to provide guidance and leadership to standards organizations, regulatory agencies and national policy committees.

[18] The Times article was later disputed by other journalists, including Forbes blogger Jeffrey Carr, as being both sensational and lacking verifiable facts.

In fact, our focus is to protect and defend control systems and critical infrastructures from cyber threats like Stuxnet and we are all well recognized for these efforts.

Agricultural waste products—such as wheat straw; corncobs,[26][27] stalks or leaves; or bioenergy crops such as switchgrass or miscanthus—could be used to create cellulosic biofuels.

The Biological Systems department is housed in 15 laboratories with a total of 12,000 square feet (1,100 m2) at the INL Research Center in Idaho Falls.

Funding goes toward scholarship programs for high school graduates, technical college students and teachers who want to integrate more hands-on science activities into their lessons.

INL also provides thousands of dollars worth of classroom grants to teachers seeking to upgrade their science equipment or lab infrastructure.

In addition to subcontracting more than $100 million worth of work from Idaho's small businesses,[40] INL technologies are often licensed to new or existing companies for commercialization.

INL is using this technique to remove the sodium metal from Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II) fuel rods so they can be safely stored in a national repository.

The center's laboratories are equipped with research instruments and tools, including a Local Electrode Atom Probe (LEAP) and a Computer Assisted Virtual Environment (CAVE).

Using light mineral oil, the facility allows researchers to use fused quartz models built to scale to study the flow of liquids inside and around objects with complicated geometries, such as the core of a nuclear reactor.

Special lasers perform "Doppler velocimetry", that produces a three-dimensional image allowing inspection of an object's flow properties.

[49][50] INL's geocentrifuge helps researchers, among other efforts, improve models of how liquids and contaminants move through engineered caps and barriers used in underground waste disposal facilities.

[51] The centrifuge, located next to the INL Research Center in Idaho Falls, can be operated remotely by computer and is capable of applying 130 times the force of earth's gravity on a sample.

[52] Many of the experiments that use the geocentrifuge require it to run for hundreds of hours in order to correctly simulate several years' worth of gravitational effects.

[55] More central to EBR-I's purpose than just generating electricity, however, was its role in proving that a reactor could create more nuclear fuel as a by-product than it consumed during operation.

In a landmark test on April 3, 1986, such systems in EBR-II demonstrated that nuclear power plants could be designed to be inherently safe from severe accidents.

When the nuclear industry was just getting started in the early 1950s, it was difficult to predict exactly how different kinds of metals and other materials would be affected by being used in a reactor for prolonged periods of time.

The Information Operations and Research Center and the Shelley-New Sweden Park and Ride lot is one of fourteen Federal properties listed for disposal by the Public Buildings Reform Board in their 2019 recommendations.

[64] In April 2018, four canisters of depleted uranium sludge suddenly overpressurized and ejected their lids at a US Department of Energy facility at Idaho National Laboratory.

"[66] In November 2023 hacktivist group SiegedSec breached the Oracle HR system of the Idaho National Laboratory and posted information of 45,047 former and current employees on their Telegram channel.

[67][68] The group demanded the laboratory research the creation of female cat-human hybrids, "catgirls", in exchange for the removal of the post containing the stolen data.