Officials will break ground on two large construction projects valued at $75 million this week at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in north Richland.

A new 73,000-square-foot Biological Sciences Facility and a 75,000-square-foot Computational Sciences Facility will be built as privately financed buildings to serve Department of Energy research on the PNNL campus.

Cowperwood Co., a real estate development company based in New York City, will own the buildings and lease them to Battelle Memorial Institute, which operates PNNL on contract for DOE.

CTL Capital of New York City is financing the project, while San Francisco-based KMD Architects is doing the design and D. E. Harvey Builders of Houston is handling construction.

The two buildings will be connected by a two-story transparent atrium that will allow for shared common space. The buildings will provide new research space to partially replace aging lab facilities in the 300 Area that must be vacated by 2011 to expedite environmental cleanup at Hanford.

Mike Kluse, lab director, said in a prepared statement that the new facilities are vital to research PNNL does in the fields of energy, environment and national security.

"They will allow us to expand our research programs (and) will make PNNL among the most modern in the national laboratory system," he said.

When completed in late 2009, the two facilities will house about 310 lab staff who work for the DOE's Office of Science, the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, National Institutes of Health, as well as other government and private organizations.

The construction project is the second to be awarded in connection with replacing 300 Area facilities and building a new PNNL campus in north Richland.

The first project was announced in April for a $106 million construction contract for a nearly 200,000-square-foot publicly funded Physical Sciences Facility. That building, which will house 450 employees, is being paid for by DOE's Office of Science, the National Nuclear Security Administration and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Lydig Construction Inc. of Spokane and George A. Grant Inc. of Richland are partners in that project.

PNNL spokesman Greg Koller said the Biological Sciences Facility is being designed to help staff develop better solutions for environmental restoration, as well as use powerful computer capabilities to understand how living organisms can solve problems in bioenergy, environmental cleanup and human health.

The Computer Sciences Facility will provide space for the following programs: information analytics, cybersecurity, computational biology research and high-performance computing. It also will contain electronic and instrumentation labs and 10,000 square feet of raised computer floor space to allow for the next generation of computing design.

PNNL has 4,200 employees and has been managed by Battelle for 43 years.