Berkeley Lab’s Iconic Dome Gets a New Roof—a Cool One

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
July 12, 2011

Paris may have the Eiffel Tower and London has its Big Ben, but Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has the iconic domed roof of the Advanced Light Source. Now the ALS is getting a new roof—and not just any roof but a cool roof that will reflect sunlight back into the atmosphere, thus playing a small part in mitigating global warming.

The new roof meets the specifications set out by Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu in a memo last year directing all Department of Energy facilities to install cool roofs when constructing new roofs or replacing old ones at DOE facilities, whenever cost effective over the lifetime of the roof.

Workers will be spending the month of July scrambling up and down the dome, tethered to ropes for safety, pulling out shingles installed more than 20 years ago and putting down new ones. It will take more than five weeks to reroof the 20,000 square foot surface because no more than four workers are allowed on the dome at any one time due to safety requirements.

“This is a major project for the Lab,” said project manager Ian White. “We’re doing things that have never been done before.”

While the ALS is less than 20 years old, having been completed in 1993, the dome dates to 1940, when Lab founder and namesake Ernest Orlando Lawrence decided to build a 184-inch cyclotron, an advanced version of his first cyclotron, which later led to his receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939. The building to house the cyclotron was designed by distinguished architect Arthur Brown, whose works included San Francisco’s City Hall, Opera House, and Coit Tower.
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