The Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) is the applied research and development laboratory at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Savannah River Site (SRS) near Aiken, South Carolina. SRNL was founded in 1951 as the Savannah River Laboratory. It was certified as a national laboratory on May 7, 2004.

SRNL research topics include environmental remediation, technologies for the hydrogen economy, handling of hazardous materials, and technologies for prevention of nuclear proliferation. The laboratory has specific experience in vitrification of nuclear waste and hydrogen storage initially developed to support production of tritium and plutonium at the Savannah River Site during the Cold War. SRNL is a founding member of the South Carolina Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Alliance (SCHFCA).

The laboratory employs 945 people and has an annual budget of 210 million U.S. Dollars (2010).

Savannah River National Laboratory has been operated by Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy since 2008. Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, LLC is a partnership consisting of Fluor Daniel, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

The United States Department of Energy National Laboratories and Technology Centers are a system of facilities and laboratories overseen by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) for the purpose of advancing science and helping promote the economic and defensive national interests of the United States of America. Most of the DOE national laboratories are actually federally funded research and development centers administered, managed, operated and staffed by private corporations and academic universities under contract to DOE. The 2005 NASA Authorization Act designated the U.S. segment of the International Space Station as a national laboratory with a goal to increase the utilization of the ISS by other Federal entities and the private sector.

The system of centralized national laboratories grew out of the massive scientific endeavors of World War II, in which new technologies such as radar, the computer, the proximity fuze, and the atomic bomb proved decisive for the Allied victory. Though the United States government had begun seriously investing in scientific research for national security since World War I, it was only in late 1930s and 1940s that monumental amounts of resources were committed or coordinated to wartime scientific problems, under the auspices first of the National Defense Research Committee, and later the Office of Scientific Research and Development, organized and administered by the MIT engineer Vannevar Bush.

The Savannah River is a major river in the southeastern United States, forming most of the border between the states of South Carolina and Georgia. Two tributaries of the Savannah, the Tugaloo River and the Chattooga River, form the northernmost part of the border. The Savannah River drainage basin extends into the southeastern side of the Appalachian Mountains just inside North Carolina, bounded by the Eastern Continental Divide. The river is around 301 miles (484 km) long. It is formed by the confluence of the Tugaloo River and the Seneca River. Today this confluence is submerged beneath Lake Hartwell. The Tallulah Gorge is located on the Tallulah River, a tributary of the Tugaloo River that forms the northwest branch of the Savannah River.

Two major cities are located along the Savannah River: Savannah, Georgia, and Augusta, Georgia. They were nuclei of early English settlements during the Colonial period of American history.

Through the building of several locks and dams, and upstream reservoirs like Lake Hartwell, also, the Savannah River was once navigable by freight barges between Augusta, Georgia (on the Fall Line) and the Atlantic Ocean; maintenance of this channel for commercial shipping ended in 1979, and the one lock below Augusta has been deactivated.

Yucca Mountain is a mountain in Nevada, near its border with California, approximately 100 miles (160 km) northwest of Las Vegas. Located in the Great Basin, Yucca Mountain is east of Amargosa Desert, south of the Nevada Test and Training Range and in the Nevada Test Site. It was the site for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository before that plan was scrapped in 2010.

The formation that makes up Yucca Mountain was created by several large eruptions from a caldera volcano and is composed of alternating layers of ignimbrite (welded tuff), non-welded tuff, and semi-welded tuff. The volcanic units have been tilted along fault lines, thus forming the current ridge line called Yucca Mountain. In addition to these faults, Yucca Mountain is criss-crossed by fractures, many of which formed when the volcanic units cooled.

A series of large explosive volcanic eruptions occurred to the north of Yucca Mountain millions of years ago, producing dense clouds of volcanic ash and rock fragments which melted or compressed together to create layers of rock called tuff, forming the mountains and hills of the region. The volcanic eruptions that produced Yucca Mountain ended about 12 million years ago. This explosive volcanism produced almost all (more than 99 percent) of the volcanic material in the Yucca Mountain region.

William Henry "Bill" Gates III (born October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington) is an American business magnate, computer programmer and philanthropist. Gates is the former chief executive officer (CEO) and current chairman of Microsoft, the world’s largest personal-computer software company he co-founded with Paul Allen. He is consistently ranked among the world's wealthiest people and was the wealthiest overall from 1995 to 2009, excluding 2008, when he was ranked third; in 2011 he was the wealthiest American and the second wealthiest person. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and remains the largest individual shareholder, with 6.4 percent of the common stock. He has also authored or co-authored several books.

Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Gates has been criticized for his business tactics, which have been considered anti-competitive, an opinion which has in some cases been upheld by the courts. In the later stages of his career, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.