Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories—longtime secretive federal agencies working on classified weapons programs—are about to throw open their doors to the private sector.

Technologies developed at the labs to build and test warheads and nuclear weapons could be game-changers in clean energy, climate change, biotech and other sectors.

Locked away for five decades, the federal agencies are pursuing better ways of commercializing their technology with other-than-weapons applications. They are partnering with the private sector in new ways and pushing for an open campus on 50 acres to help the labs better collaborate with the best and brightest.

In addition, the two Livermore-based labs are working with the local business council, consulting with M.B.A. students and launching a formal “hub” program to partner with the transportation industry.

The shift could mean a transformation of the role the labs play in the Tri-Valley and the Bay Area economy, creating an economic engine with tech transfer capabilities that rival UCSF and UC Berkeley’s.

Livermore Lab’s new leadership

Livermore and Sandia—federal agencies under the U.S. Department of Energy and funded mostly through the National Nuclear Security Administration—are boosting tech transfer plans.

Erik Stenehjem and Roger Werne, director and deputy directory of the industrial partnerships office of Lawrence Livermore, are tasked with forging new partnerships that will help get its discoveries to market.

Stenehjem came to the lab when the University of California ceded management in October 2007 to Lawrence Livermore National Security, a partnership of the University of California, Bechtel Corp., Babcok & Wilcox, URS Corp. and Battelle.

The new management marked a paradigm shift for the labs, say community members and industry insiders. “(The labs) tended to be silos,” said Toby Brink, president of the Tri-Valley Business Council. “But now that the directives have changed and management has changed, I think there’s a whole new attitude toward working collaboratively, and the (open campus) park is just the next step in that evolution.”

Lawrence Livermore went through a process six months ago where it identified seven priorities for its research funding. Energy and climate change modeling are two of them. Reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil is viewed as a national security issue, so clean energy technologies that help America toward that goal support the labs’ missions, lab officials said.

For example, the recently opened National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore was built to test what happens inside a nuclear fusion reaction, but the same technology could also create nuclear fusion energy to meet massive energy demands.

“Energy is almost exclusively a product of the private sector. So in order for the labs to help solve the energy crisis, we must partner with the private sector,” Werne said.