- LANL leases second office complex in Santa Fe as nuclear weapons growth pushes admin staff off “The Hill”
- 2,000 more staff needed for “24/7” plutonium “pit” production mission for only 20 pits/year
Today Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has announced that it has signed a 10-year lease for two adjacent office properties totaling 77,856 square feet, at the corner of Pacheco Street and St. Michael’s Drive in Santa Fe — enough space, LANL says, for 500 employees in “human resources, procurement, finance, and information technology.”
Previously, on February 10, LANL announced a 10-year lease on a 28,000-square-foot building in downtown Santa Fe to house up to 75 workers, provide space for meetings and events, and serve as a teleworking hub..
LANL and its parent federal agency the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) sought leased space to house LANL’s expanding staff for much of last year.
NNSA has approved leasing of up to 180,000 sq. ft. of real estate for these purposes, a figure LANL has also mentioned in public meetings as needed immediately. It is possible that more leases will be announced.
LANL’s “Fiscal Year 2021 Site Sustainability Plan,” released Feb. 23, noted that off-site work, specifically teleworking, was “the approach going forward” to handle the increased staff necessary to accommodate plutonium warhead core (“pit”) production (“LANL releases 2021 “Site Sustainability Plan” for “rapidly changing and growing mission”, Feb 24, 2021). From p. 48 in the document:
Although COVID-19 safety measures forced LANL staff to telework, management has emphasized the importance of teleworking to support the plutonium pit mission. To achieve the mission’s targets, LANL management is planning to increase the LANL workforce. LANL does not have sufficient space to bring on all these new hires, nor have federal funds been earmarked for enough new facilities. The telework strategy thus appears the approach going forward. Shifting a significant number of staff to work off-site will open up office space. In FY 2020, LANL conducted a telework pilot project with 1,336 staff to gage telework feasibility. For FY 2021, telework will be utilized in a combined strategy to reduce COVID-19 spread at LANL and to increase the workforce.
NNSA anticipates (pp. 12, 15) that about 2,000 additional staff will be necessary to accommodate the round-the-clock plutonium “pit” operations necessary for even a low production level of 20 pits per year (ppy). LANL is currently hiring more than 1,000 new workers each year, or roughly 500 net new hires.
LANL warhead activities spending increased by 49% in this fiscal year over the previous year’s level, to $2.91 billion (B), about three-fourths of the lab’s budget. If supporting functions are included the nuclear weapons portion of LANL’s work increases to more than 80% of the total (Presentation to the NM Radioactive & Hazardous Materials Committee, Sep 9, 2020, slide 6). LANL’s construction plans to support these new missions comprise the largest project in the history of New Mexico (slide 21), rivaling the cost of all three New Mexico interstate highways put together.
Los Alamos Study Group director Greg Mello said, “These leases are the first time since World War II that Santa Fe was home to a large prime contractor for nuclear weapons. I think we can expect one or more additional leases in Santa Fe, Rio Arriba, or Sandoval counties, unless the Biden Administration wises up. This is a Trump program, designed to deliver plutonium pits on an emergency, “surge” basis.
“The lab now expends 10 times as much per year, in constant dollars, as it did in 1955 during the height of thermonuclear bomb development and has twice the total employment. LANL has become morbidly obese, more so than any other nuclear weapons site in the world. The powerful leverage of the nuclear labs over the institutions of constitutional government has been too strong for its own good, and for the good of the Los Alamos community.
“New Mexican politicians, now colonial subjects at heart in this our failing state, are eating it up.
“More than three-fourths of LANL’s work is nuclear weapons. Other than nuclear weapons, LANL has no real raison d’etre; everything else done there could and should be done better, cheaper, and with greater objectivity and benefit elsewhere.
“In dollar terms, LANL’s pit program dwarfs every prior construction project in New Mexico, costing $1.1 billion this year alone. By 2030 the new mission will have cost $14 billion, with no end in sight for the cost, pollution, risk and damage to Northern New Mexico’s identity and reputation.
“The crazy thing is that because the LANL facilities are so inadequate, old, unsafe, and the LANL site itself so poorly situated — as indicated by these leases — trying to make pits at LANL is a losing game. A single adequate building could do the job — and NNSA has such a building in South Carolina, unfinished but built to fantastic safety standards, in a huge, stable, flat industrial site.
“The greed of the New Mexico congressional delegation, one of whom became our Governor, has been the biggest factor in generating what is by now a public-policy fiasco that Biden will sooner or later have to face.
“To wring pits out of LANL’s small, substandard buildings, LANL expects to have more people working on pit production than the Rocky Flats Plant did for most of its ill-fated life. That’s what’s primarily driving these leases, as LANL documents show.
“Pit requirements are a teetering jenga tower of one needless program stacked on another. The U.S. does not need land-based intercontinental missiles, let alone new ones. New warheads aren’t needed either, even with new missiles. Existing ones have all the needed safety features. They are well-tested and well-understood (unlike new ones), are very accurate, and have youthful pits. But there aren’t enough of them if the new missiles are to be provided with multiple warheads per missile. So why do that? Take away any of these requirements and this tower of nuclear Babel falls.
“As one Trump official put it, it’s all a very expensive way to give Livermore lab a new warhead to design and Los Alamos lab an emergency pit mission. Pits aren’t needed until the late 2030s, and frankly if they are “needed” then, the U.S. will have already sealed its fate, from climate collapse.
