Our View
Second road to lab lined with concerns

The New Mexican - September 21, 2019

A new road connecting Los Alamos and Santa Fe would take Northern New Mexico in the wrong direction.

That’s true despite the possibility of some $5 billion in construction at Los Alamos National Laboratory over the next five years — increasing to more than $10 billion over the next decade — and an increase in lab hiring for its new mission of producing plutonium pits, which trigger nuclear warheads.

With 60 percent of lab workers living off the Hill, officials at the national lab want a more direct way for workers to drive to and from their jobs. At least 1,500 to 2,000 new positions are possible by the end of 2020. That’s on top of the current 12,752 workers, which means traffic only will grow more congested in the years ahead.

Unfortunately, a new road between Santa Fe and Los Alamos would encourage greater sprawl, increase pollution and cut through country that would be better left alone. Building the road also would require a new span over the Rio Grande, one likely higher than the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge. All of this, when the world is coming to understand that continued reliance on travel by motor vehicle needs to be restricted for the good of the planet.

Rather than encouraging increased car or truck travel, there needs to be an emphasis on buses, car pools and even staggered shifts so the bulk of workers aren’t arriving and leaving at the same time. That would reduce traffic congestion and, importantly, could reduce emissions from motor vehicle traffic.

More housing needs to be built in Los Alamos. Doing so would take cooperation among state, county and lab officials, but it seems possible to build more places to live right where people work so commuting is not the default option. This is a less expensive and more environmentally sustainable option. There’s a reason that when a second road is proposed — as has happened before — it is discarded after more discussion.

This shortcut to make the trip from Santa Fe to Pajarito Plateau, where the lab was built back in the 1940s, has been discussed as far back as a century ago and revisited at different times.

The push this time could be more forceful, given the expansion of the lab workforce and ongoing construction. Before the discussion moves on to a debate about a road, another conversation needs to take place, however. Northern New Mexico deserves answers about the rush to produce more plutonium pits in Los Alamos. We are one of two locations singled out by the federal government to produce the nuclear triggers. Los Alamos National Laboratory, as well as the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, have been charged with manufacturing some 80 pits a year by 2030, a move to modernize the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal.

The National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the weapons labs, said in June it will ask for a full-blown environmental impact statement concerning pit-making at Savannah River. However, Los Alamos — for now, anyway — will only receive a lesser environmental review.

It seems to us if the construction and pit-making plans are expansive enough to prompt lab officials to ask for a new road, the people of Northern New Mexico deserve a full-blown examination of what the expanded pit production means to the region. That would include airing concerns about past safety problems and environmental pollution at the lab.

From a national perspective, the rush to increase U.S. nuclear capabilities has been moving quickly. That means there has been little consideration about what updating the U.S. nuclear arsenal means — in terms of its effects on other countries and the escalation of the arms race. Then, there’s the continual drain of our country’s resources away from peaceful uses to weapons of war. All of that comes on top of legitimate concerns about LANL’s past safety violations and continuing efforts to clean up legacy pollution.

A second road is the least of our worries.