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Bulletin 264: LANL expansion, new mailing list, staff position available, news and views you can use
- For news, analysis, and organizing opportunities, sign up to our “Friends” list!
- Nuclear weapons expansion targets Santa Fe – Whoa! If you are local, we need your help on December 9.
- Staff position available! Internships also, and volunteers are badly needed.
- News and views you can use
- Next time: The Pope’s statements in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; new developments in pit production, and last but far from least, our continuing, essential, fall fundraising campaign.
November 26, 2019
Action suggestions are in red.
Dear friends and colleagues –
1. For news, analysis, and organizing opportunities, sign up to our “Friends” list!
Our communication modes and web presence are evolving, in the direction of much greater richness and accessibility.
These bulletins will continue, as will press releases. If you received this Bulletin directly, you don’t have to do anything to continue getting these.
But our “Local letters with organizing notes,” which are actually of national and international interest as well as local, are now going to be much more frequent and available by subscription, not just by invitation. Along with these bulletins and other pertinent content, they will now be posted on our blog (“Remember your Humanity”), which is being totally reworked.
Most importantly, these letters and blog will include a very frequent digest of pertinent nuclear and climate insights and news. For some years we have been preparing this digest for a select, committed group only.
If you already receive our local letters (with “lasg_nm” in the subject line) and you want to keep doing so in their new, more-frequent format, no action is necessary. If however you do not get local letters and think you might be interested in more news, views, and organizing notes from us, please join our “Friends” listserve, by sending a blank email here. We will start very soon, over the Thanksgiving holidays.
With these changes and others (see next Bulletin, hopefully this weekend), we are aiming to make the Study Group’s work and community more accessible to you and any others to whom you forward this Bulletin.
As you will see, we approach nuclear weapons and related issues as holistically as we can, without partisan flavor and in the context of our spreading planetary, as well as national, crisis.
2. Nuclear expansion targets Santa Fe – Whoa! If you are local, we need your help on December 9.
This past Sunday’s Albuquerque Journal North carried an important article by reporter T.S. Last, (“A new urban center for Santa Fe?,” Nov. 24, 2019). If you live in New Mexico and care about Santa Fe or nuclear weapons, you should read this article carefully.
The article updates readers on proposals to the City of Santa Fe to redevelop the 64-acre former College of Santa Fe campus, founded and run for decades by the Christian Brothers, which later became the Santa Fe University of Art and Design (SFUAD) and is now vacant. Last’s article describes two of the competing developers’ plans, both of which involve what is in essence the expansion of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) into The City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis.
The Los Alamos Field Office of the National Nuclear Security Administration, part of the DOE, is interested in the site mainly for office space or for engineering, light manufacturing and research.
...
“Having a new campus – midway between New Mexico’s two national laboratories – to house professional staff, scientists and engineers in partnership with the City of Santa Fe would be very beneficial,” the [NNSA] statement said. “Given NNSA’s strong financial commitment to the State of New Mexico in the coming decade and the urgent need for additional mission space, the Midtown Campus is a logical choice to investigate.”
Toni Chiri, spokeswoman for the Los Alamos Field Office, issued an assurance that no radiological or high-hazard activities would be performed on the property. The field office is exploring using the space mostly for administrative office space or for engineering, light manufacturing, and research and development in collaboration with facilities across the country, she said.
“It would meet the growing need for office and development space, and would address the commute workers face in driving back and forth,” Chiri said.
The proposals echo the grandiose expansion plans of Triad, LLC, the contractor which operates LANL for NNSA, which feature Triad’s proposed “Innovation Triangle,” based on nuclear weapons production and design at LANL. (See for example this presentation by Triad on October 15 to the Los Alamos County Council, starting at 21:00 minutes.) The Journal article continues:
One of the other respondents for master developer – Santa Fe Innovation Village – is also part of the Central Park Santa Fe proposal.
Santa Fe Innovation Village, LLC, was formed earlier this year, according to online records, and wants to make Santa Fe one of three proposed “villages” that would make up an envisaged “New Mexico Innovation Triangle” to include Los Alamos and Albuquerque.
“All three Innovation Villages will be integrated into the educational and economic development framework on the New Mexico Innovation Triangle and provide housing across a range of income levels, as well as a keen focus on sustainable development,” reads a section on Santa Fe Innovation Village included in the Central Park proposal.
“Over the past 18 months, the team has been developing a range of relationships across city and state government, gaining support for the necessary zoning, ordinances and other items to facilitate success on the Santa Fe Innovation Village at Central Park Santa Fe.”
Once a powerful antinuclear bastion, Santa Fe has been gradually falling under LANL’s spell for about two decades, but the City still remains a potent source of latent opposition to nuclear weapons and especially to NNSA’s and Triad’s plans to convert some of LANL’s old R&D facilities into a plutonium warhead core (“pit”) factory.
With this proposal and its token employment, NNSA hopes to coopt and suborn that potential opposition starting with the City’s political and business elites, while also setting up a recruitment center for its growing nuclear weapons work.
Mr. Affeldt, the developer who is the main source of the Journal article, will present his group’s plan at 11 a.m. on Sunday, December 8 at Collected Works Bookstore, 202 Galisteo Street (map) under the auspices of Journey Santa Fe.
If you live in the area, please come to this presentation if you can.We oppose these plans for a number of reasons with NNSA’s involvement near the top of the list, and think you should as well. You will hear more about this next week.
Without significant pushback and makeover from citizens, these well-greased nuclear weapons and capital investment wheels will keep turning, democratic voice will be lost, and what is solid and good in Santa Fe will continue to “melt into air” as Marx famously said, instead of being the foundation of the green, resilient, democratic communities and real social contract for which we all thirst.
3. Staff position available! Internships also! Volunteers needed!
Please see this web page, and pass the word. I would like to add one more word about volunteering. If only for the sake of our own children and grandchildren, we all need to maximize what we can accomplish. For the right persons, the Study Group offers that kind of opportunity. It takes a team.
4. News and views you can use
You may be interested in the following products from the Study Group, which have not yet been circulated to this list:
- GAO: Surplus Plutonium Disposition: Processing of surplus plutonium warhead cores ("pits") at Los Alamos is uncertain, may conflict with production of new pits, press note, Oct 28, 2019 (relatively technical). (Here was the New Mexican’s more popular version: Plan for plutonium disposal has holes, GAO finds, Santa Fe New Mexican, Oct 23, 2019).
- LANL's plans: transparency, environmental analysis needed, Oct 3, 2019
- LANL’s expansion plans lack coordination, transparency, sound engineering, and environmental analysis, Mello commentary, Los Alamos Reporter, Nov 8, 2019
- ‘Aura of apartheid’ at LANL offers false hope, Mello opinion editorial, Santa Fe New Mexican, Nov 30, 2019
- NM’s leading Dems want you to love plutonium, Mello opinion editorial, Albuquerque Journal, Dec 1, 2019
- Proposed expansion of LANL, Pacifica Affiliates Sprouts show, Greg Mello interviewed by Robin Collier, KCEI, Oct 3, 2019
The following news articles are pertinent to the expanded pit production being pursued by the Trump Administration at LANL and feature our work here, one way or another.
- LANL receives $5 billion to upgrade aging facilities, Santa Fe New Mexican, Oct 30, 2019
- LANL Deputy Director Of Operations Discusses Infrastructure Plans And Challenges At Council Work Session, Los Alamos Reporter, Oct 18, 2019
- NNSA approves new garage for lab, Los Alamos Monitor, Oct 9, 2019
- An evolving nuclear agenda spurs plutonium pit production at LANL, New Mexican Political Report, Oct 9, 2019
There is a great deal more to say that would be helpful – but not now.
Very best wishes and safe travels to all contemplating road trips this stormy holiday season,
Greg Mello
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