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December 31, 2019 Permalink for this letter. Please forward! Other Letters
Dear New Mexico activist friends – There are only two days left before the January 2 workshop we are putting together in Santa Fe. Many factors are coming together to make this a very important gathering, so we hope you will come -- and do your best to recruit others to come as well. The simplest way to do that is to forward this email to anyone you think might be interested. This workshop and training will focus on the planned industrial plutonium expansion of LANL, and the possible opening of a satellite LANL site in Santa Fe. It will be held on Thursday evening, January 2, from 5-8 pm, at the First Christian Church (map) in Santa Fe. Soup and bread will be served. As we said last time, we in New Mexico have a uniquely powerful role to play in U.S. nuclear weapons policies. The flip side: because of their powerful separate sovereignty and political weight, our twin nuclear weapons laboratories play an outsize role in limiting political discourse and our political representation, no matter who is elected. They help hold New Mexico back in every way, keeping us anchored in a bizarre alternative universe where the Manhattan Project and the Cold War never ended, one where the military-industrial-intelligence complex enjoys unquestioned respect and obedience, to our ongoing cost. They help lead our political class into believing any number of self-serving fantasies about how our economy and environment can be "fixed" with technologies not yet invented (but just wait, we are working on it!) so nobody has to really and truly face and address the social, economic, and environmental realities around us. It is truly amazing how many people who -- as Thoreau remarked, do not believe in moonshine in other matters -- do not understand that Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is and always will be supported solely for the sake of developing and maintaining nuclear weapons -- not just mostly, but almost entirely. (Equally amazing is that otherwise intelligent people think Santa Fe should, or even could, become some -- any -- kind of "high-tech" or "innovation" mecca, an arty sort of "Silicon Santa Fe." The "rising tide" they hope for -- which won't happen -- will, they hope, magically "lift all boats" as the "impact" of those high wage jobs "trickles down." Obviously it won't. California, a highly "innovative" state, now has the highest poverty rate of any state, factoring in cost of living. Inequality matters, massively. And regardless of all that, LANL has nothing to do with "innovation." It is a highly-specialized, bloated, bureaucratic, secret bomb lab that is trying to become the nation's all-around plutonium processing and manufacturing center despite its impossible location, topography, geology, and other characteristics. Greedy -- yes. Inherently corrupt -- yes. Unmanageable -- yes. Safe -- never. Smart -- no.) In 2017, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), after consulting with a large number of experts current and retired, formally decided that LANL's main plutonium facility (PF-4) could never be an enduring plutonium warhead core ("pit") factory (pp. 47-48). You might want to read that again. If there was to be a factory at LANL, it would have to be built from scratch, at great cost (a "greenfield" option). So-called "modules" -- plutonium workshops built underground near PF-4 to get around safety regulations based on public exposure -- wouldn't work either, a plan which the Government Accountability Office (GAO) had already ripped. (At least two plutonium "modules" are still however required by law; seee-page 1058 and more recently here again.) What happened then? Senators Heinrich and Udall had a cow (or cows), and the entire New Mexico delegation got legislation passed that would, they hoped, shore up LANL's pit-making role. Fast-forward to this month, when Congress passed the requested funding for pit factories at LANL (smaller and quicker, with round-the-clock production required using 1,000 to 1,500 additional plutonium and waste-handling workers) and in South Carolina (larger and later). The next Bulletin will go into this in much more detail for a national and international audience, but the key takeaway right now is that these plans for LANL require dramatic changes and expansion, which will -- according to LANL -- encompass and affect the entire region as well as the communities of Los Alamos and White Rock. But what are these plans, exactly? The plans that will affect the entire region? They are entirely secret, and that is how they will remain until there is sufficient public outcry. Amazingly, as of mid-November 2019 there were no actual completed plans for pit production at LANL, according to a bevy of NNSA spokespersons, only "LANL proposals." Despite legal requirements otherwise, no firm plans were submitted to Congress (as we kept hearing all year), only a request for a blank check -- which a pusillanimous Congress provided. Why do NNSA have no final plans? At bottom, it is because NNSA's and LANL's evolving plans, such as they are, are full of contradictions, uncertainties, and technical and political embarrassments. What would be the environmental impacts of these plans? In detail, nobody knows. We could make a long list of what to expect, to be sure, and that is something that with your help we will produce. What alternatives are there for LANL? Same. We hope you will join us On January 2. We're going to have a great time. Together, we are quite powerful. Please come, and please tell your friends. Greg, for the Study Group |
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