Luján seeks $6 billion for national laboratories in House bill

By Scott Wyland swyland@sfnewmexican.com
Jul 1, 2020 Updated Jul 2, 2020

National laboratories would receive $6 billion to modernize their infrastructure under an amendment U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Luján added to a spending bill the House approved Wednesday.

Some of the funding would likely to go toward upgrading lab facilities to boost the nation’s nuclear arsenal. That would include renovating Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium plant so it can annually produce 30 pits — the explosive centers of nuclear warheads — by 2026.

Luján, D-N.M., emphasized the funds would improve infrastructure to strengthen the Los Alamos lab’s scientific research, including efforts to battle the COVID-19 pandemic. The investment also would create good-paying jobs and give the economy a lift, he said.

“As America faces the greatest public health crisis in modern history, our national labs have lent their expertise and state-of-the-art facilities to combat COVID-19,” Luján said in a statement. “These scientists and researchers deserve our full support to tackle the ongoing pandemic as well as future scientific and technological challenges.”

After passing the House, $1.5 trillion public works package, a Democratic measure called the Moving Forward Act, goes to the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will decide whether to put it up for a vote.

The U.S. Department of Energy would receive the $6 billion for deferred maintenance, infrastructure needs and modernization of its 17 labs. The agency would decide how much money to add to the Los Alamos lab’s proposed $3.4 billion budget for the 2021 fiscal year.

Officials at the National Nuclear Security Administration, an Energy Department branch, said the money would help improve three nuclear weapons labs.

“More broadly, it supports the NNSA infrastructure modernization efforts that are already underway at Los Alamos and Sandia in New Mexico, as well as at Lawrence Livermore in California,” agency spokeswoman Ana Gamonal de Navarro said.

Not everyone applauded the effort to beef up the labs’ infrastructure funding.

“In New Mexico, nearly all the spending from this bill would support nuclear weapons,” said Greg Mello, executive director of the nonprofit Los Alamos Study Group. “This money will be spent to expand LANL in particular — to enable plutonium pit production — and possibly also to help fund new nuclear weapons facilities at Sandia [National Laboratory].”

Infrastructure projects at national labs are an inefficient way to create jobs, Mello said. His group’s analysis of Obama-era stimulus funds used to modernize labs showed it took 10 to 25 times more money to create one job at Los Alamos National Laboratory as it did tribal projects because construction costs and lab salaries are so much higher, he said.

The money would be better spent fostering renewable energy, improving transportation and creating low-cost or tuition-free vocational training for those fields, Mello said.

Still, the Los Alamos lab employs almost 13,000 people. Given the ripple effect, it creates a total of 24,000 jobs in New Mexico and injects about $3 billion into the state’s economy, according to a 2019 study by the University of New Mexico.

If Los Alamos’ pit production ramps up as planned, it will create about 1,200 jobs by 2026, lab officials say.