Hiring with LANL's "Demonic, Destructive, Suction Tube"

It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.¹

To appropriately staff the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) nuclear warhead “pit” production mission, an estimated 7,054 new hires are needed by 2024.² However, the Northern New Mexico workforce has become “very, very limited”, said LANL’s Deputy Director, Kelly Beierschmitt.³ Despite having hired 1,000 – 1,200 individuals for the last few years, many more are required to meet the statutory deadline of 30 pits per year by 2026.⁴ The LANL job website currently has 823 listings.⁵

To hire thousands of new workers, a “workforce pipeline” has been established by DOE/NNSA that has been deemed both “valuable” and “vital” by LANL Directors and staff.⁶ ,⁷ The function of this pipeline is to channel students into Lab funded programs that assist with the knowledge and skills necessary for eventual hire at LANL and other national laboratories.

The Lab annually employs “1880 students, from high school through post-doctorate” and an internal evaluation determined “50 percent of their workforce formerly worked as students or post-docs at LANL”. ⁸

The pipeline is structured to educate and recruit children and young adults of all ages in New Mexico. Programs include early childhood initiative home visits for infants, K-12 programs, high school internships, undergraduate and graduate internships and fellowships, postdoctoral positions, and instructor training programs.^9,10,11,12 The backbone of these programs is funding, which provides for LANL’s influence at all levels of New Mexico’s educational institutions. 

Within New Mexico
The LANL Foundation is a grant and donor funded organization that was established in 1997 serving “babies, students, and their families primarily in Northern New Mexico”.¹³ Most recently, LANL operator Triad National Security, LLC. provided a $599,600 grant to the foundation in 2019 to provide “scholarships for students pursuing two- and four-year degrees and trade and professional certifications”.¹⁴

Internship opportunities are provided by LANL for high school students¹⁵, as well as college undergraduate¹⁶ and graduate students. College partnerships with LANL throughout the state include the University of New Mexico, New Mexico State University, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, and Santa Fe Community College.^18,19

Summer programs are a vital part of these partnerships, and LANL reported 1,154 summer student interns worked virtually at the Lab in 2020.²⁰

Post- Doc positions include Postdoctoral Research Associates, Director’s Postdoctoral Fellows, and Distinguished Fellows.²¹ These positions are most likely to lead to employment with the Lab; 36% of all LANL employees in 2019 were former students or postdocs.²²

New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions (NMDWS) agreed in 2019 to provide funding to prepare and train students for high-demand jobs at LANL:
Funding from the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions (NMDWS) will help prepare the workforce of the future for well-paid careers at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the environmental remediation company Newport News Nuclear BWXT – Los Alamos (N3B). The funding will support new programs that train more than 50 area students for high-demand jobs as radiological control technicians (RCTs) and nuclear-trained operators.²³

Targeted Recruitment
Recruitment aimed toward women, racial minorities, and LGBTQ+ individuals is highlighted as part of the pipeline program.^24,25 However, many current and former employees have complained about the “toxic” work culture at LANL, highlighting the risks these vulnerable groups may encounter working at the Lab.

This lab is run by the good old boys. I’m in my mid 40’s and never worked for a company without a maternity policy. LANL just put one in place. Pretty much sums it up. The men are rude, condescending and sexist. Racism is rampant. Living in the community is like going back to 1960s. – Anonymous (May 2021)

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report in April 2021 on sexual harassment within the NNSA. The results found that LANL does not practice all the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) “Practices for Effective Training to Prevent and Respond to Sexual Harassment” and that “NNSA could improve prevention and response efforts”.²⁶

The GAO report highlights the negative effects of sexual harassment in a workplace environment:

Sexual harassment can produce harmful psychological, physical, occupational, and economic effects on harassed employees. It can also affect the environment in which they work and lead to decreased organizational performance and productivity and increased employee turnover. In national security settings, sexual harassment can undermine an organization’s core values, cohesion, and readiness, as well as public goodwill.

The Lab has also failed to make a “significant improvement in ethnic diversity” in the postdoc population from 2014 – 2019, resulting in recent targeting of racial minorities among student populations.²⁷

The employee-described “toxic culture” within LANL appears in the pipeline program through staff education of student recruitment methods. A predatory approach was portrayed as a joke in a LANL presentation to staff describing how and where to recruit students to the pipeline program (Fig. 2).²⁸

Beyond New Mexico
An “Institutional Consortia” has been established with several Universities across the U.S. Southwest, and a few other locations including Alaska and Massachusetts.²⁹ This includes partnerships with New Mexico Consortium, a non-profit corporation formed by three research universities in New Mexico, Regional Academic Collaborations (ReACt), University of California campuses, and others (Fig. 3).  

Housing and Commuting:
Will the excitement of working at LANL fizzle out as those in the pipeline realize they must be scattered throughout the region to areas like Santa Fe, which had 23% of employees – roughly 3,000 people – working in the county in 2020?³⁰ This is mainly due to the housing crisis in Los Alamos County and the limited road network for travelling to and from LANL. The Lab has stated that 60-80% of newly hired employees will need to commute from outside the county. ^31,32,33

Telecommuting pilots have been tested and will be utilized where LANL sees “value to the government”. ³⁴ Many workers will not have a choice, meaning they won’t actually be working “at” LANL. This could be a shocking disappointment to many newcomers.³⁵

What About Safety?
Will the pipeline lead students to a safe work environment? In 2019, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) reviewed the Nuclear Facilities Safety Program at LANL. It found that “significant work remains to enable the organizations within LANL that develop and implement criticality safety requirements to achieve compliance with applicable industry standards and perform their important safety function” and identified five safety items:

1. Lack of concrete milestones in corrective action initiatives
2. Inadequate staffing in the nuclear criticality safety division
3. Inadequate plan-of-the-day documentation
4. Instances of poor operational quality
5. Repetitive corrective actions

In Feb. 2022, Triad management increased plutonium facility operations at LANL to “24 hours a day, seven days a week”, and they expect “night shift activity to ramp-up in tempo and complexity”.³⁶ The Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) performed an “Independent Assessment of the Plutonium Strategy of the NNSA” in 2019 and determined that attempting to increase production at PF-4 by operating second shift and installing additional equipment is “very high risk”. ³⁷

Equipment at LANL does not currently meet safety standards. For example, in a weekly report from February 18, 2022, the DNFSB identified more than 50 gloveboxes that are deficient and ‘there are currently no funded plans associated with upgrading or replacing HS-Pu gloveboxes”.³⁸

Safety accidents are currently an issue for employees at LANL. Workers have been contaminated through breaches in plutonium gloveboxes as recent as Jan. 2022, and another 15 workers experienced a similar incident in 2020.³⁹

Do Students and Local Communities Have Informed Consent?

Students recruited to LANL are motivated by educational and financial incentives. While STEM education is vital for economic advancement of New Mexican communities, the outcome of this education must be considered. Are STEM education opportunities utilized for research, construction and implementation of systems that will sustain and nourish New Mexican communities?

Who is benefiting from LANL-funded programs?

The students?
New Mexican communities?
The environment?
LANL and other National Laboratories?
The federal and state governments?

Alternative, financially comparable options for students in New Mexico do not exist now. However, community conversations are a vital pathway to informed consent and establishment of reasonable employment alternatives.

Employment opportunities which benefit communities are most beneficial in response to supply shortages, resource limitations, climate change, and complex social issues. Endless growth is not an option on a planet with finite resources. Skilled workers are needed to support our communities now.

Are students provided with the resiliency, the knowledge, and the skills necessary to address the most daunting problems our species has ever faced: environmental and societal collapse?
How can student access to informed consent be ensured along the workforce pipeline fueling the country’s nuclear obsession?

“A young scientist working on a nuclear waste disposal project … ‘There are days I walk into that gate and say, ‘I’ve just got to get out of this place or I’m gonna go nuts.’ The problem can be summed up in one word – ambience. It’s just crazy to go to work in a place with barbed wire, guards, electrified fences, machine-gun nests. I find it really oppressive. And the physical plant reinforces it completely. It’s grim. There’s not a blade of grass, not a living cell, anywhere in the place. … I think there’s also a psychological ambience. Although I don’t confront weapons stuff on a day-to-day basis, every so often a forklift will go by with a missile or something on it and you’ll go, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing here?’”⁴⁰
- Debra Rosenthal, “At the Heart of the Bomb”