Did a little google, kind of surprised.

"

The Argonne National Laboratory Named Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

Argonne offers these special postdoctoral fellowships to be awarded internationally on an annual basis to outstanding doctoral scientists and engineers who are at early points in promising careers. The fellowships are named after scientific and technical luminaries who have been associated with the laboratory, its predecessors and the University of Chicago since the 1940s, including:

• George W. Beadle, biologist
• Arthur Holly Compton, high energy particle physicist
• Ugo Fano, atomic physicist
• Nicholas Metropolis, computational physicist
• Willard Frank Libby, nuclear chemist
• Glenn Seaborg, chemist
• Harold Urey, nuclear chemist
• Eugene Wigner, theoretical physicist
• Walter H. Zinn, nuclear reactor physicist

Fellowship recipients will be assigned according to his or her scientific or technical discipline. These fellowships complement the existing Enrico Fermi and Maria Goeppert Meyer fellowships at Argonne.

2006 Argonne Named Fellowships

Candidates for the Argonne National Laboratory Named Fellowships must display superb ability in scientific or engineering research and must show definite promise of becoming outstanding leaders in the research they pursue.

Fellowships are awarded for a two-year term, with a possible renewal for a third year. The 2006 Fellowship carries a stipend of $71,000 per annum with an additional allocation of up to $20,000 per year for research support and travel. The Fellows, who will be competitively selected by a special fellowship committee, are given the freedom of associating with Argonne scientists in a research area of common interest. "

If this is what you aim for, that is super. Even higher than a fresh Ph.D senior scientist in a mid size company.

I was surprised because I happened to hear from a Chinese couple working there as postdocs, the salary is around 50K per year. Maybe it is not this special fellowship.

If the stipend is this high, you could imagine the competition is very intense.