For immediate release November 23, 2022

Los Alamos lab "agenda:" novel nuclear weapons and new ways to use them, hypersonic nuclear weapons

New "low-level" nuclear waste disposal facilities to begin operation by April 2025, in support of plutonium warhead core ("pit") production

Production of "non-nuclear" warhead components sought

Biosecurity "leadership," including participation in "near-term decision making," sought

Local and state government "partners" are to be guided to help make investments to facilitate LANL expansion

"Proactive" counterintelligence needed to protect Los Alamos from "reputational risks"

Contact: Greg Mello, 505-265-1200 office, 505-577-8563 cell

Permalink * Prior press releases

Albuquerque, NM --

Background: One week before the 2021 inauguration of Joe Biden, six senior managers of Triad LLC, the corporation which manages the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), wrote an overall strategy ("agenda") for LANL, including 21 major strategic initiatives and dozens of specific programs to be launched or completed by 2026, and the management structure by which Triad hoped to achieve these goals.

This "Agenda" was never published outside LANL, NNSA, and the Department of Energy (DOE).

Triad updated this "Lab Agenda" in January of this year. Apart from a back page on LANL's web site not mentioned in menus or available from on-site searches, the new version was not published either.

We received both versions on Nov. 21 in response to our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request of Aug. 11, 2022.

The "Lab Agenda" -- the more detailed 2021 version and the condensed 2022 update -- are completely different from, and go far beyond, the Performance Evaluation and Measurement Plans Triad negotiates annually with NNSA.

Content and comments (the latter indented):

Study Group director Greg Mello: "It is rare for LANL documents in the public domain to present LANL's institutional agendas in terms both bold and relatively specific.

"This LANL agenda expresses a clear ambition to be a policy leader, not just a science and technology laboratory and weapons production agency. It is a political document, expressing the reality that LANL is a political player in nuclear policies. LANL seeks to help make national biosecurity and other technology policies as well.

"We want to get these documents into the public domain as quickly as possible. We will not be able to unpack and explain each and every initiative, as understanding many of them requires background in nuclear weapons science, technology, and policy. Others remain somewhat opaque. Still others only make sense when combined with information obtained from other sources. All we can do here is offer some highlights, omitting much that is of concern.

"For example, we know from conversations with administration officials that NNSA under Jill Hruby seeks to use its classified computing assets to identify potential genetic variants of diseases that could become biowarfare and bioterror agents. At least one congressional committee isn't sure that's a good idea. We think it's a terrible idea. We must leave this issue here, except to remark that LANL seeks to lease up to 100,000 sq. ft. of light laboratory space, apparently for use as a Biological Safety Level 2 laboratory.* The organisms which can be handled in a BSL2 facility, such as anthrax, are not all good neighbors.

(*No other Categorical Exclusion [CX] for off-site laboratory space, besides that for a BSL-2 laboratory, has been issued. We therefore link the above Request for Information [RFI] with the BSL-2 proposal. This connection needs to be verified. We know that negotiations for the use of one property in a residential area of Santa Fe broke down and LANL was forced to look elsewhere. We have heard nothing more about this leasing initiative.)

The 2022 Lab Agenda Update features 13 "critical outcomes" supported by 88 specific initiatives, some of which are mapped onto a timeline ("Roadmap"). Of the 13 critical outcomes, about half relate entirely or mostly to nuclear weapons, another five or so relate to wider military and defense topics (some also include nuclear weapons), three relate to institutional capacity, and one ("climate and clean energy") focuses on (mostly) non-military aspects. Obviously, there is overlap.

Mello: "LANL's limited work and expertise in this field, together with high LANL costs and overheads, plus LANL's own abysmal energy performance and LANL's continual misrepresentations of its own climate performance and even worse, the technologies it is promoting such as hydrogen made from natural gas, make LANL an extremely poor candidate for public investment in the energy and climate field. LANL's endorsement of hydrogen as a fuel, by itself, should give state and federal decisionmakers serious pause."

[Nota bene, which may be necessary to add in these times where opinions are thrown around with little basis in knowledge and formal academic reviews are often if not usually warped by funding and academic fashions, Mello has decades of amateur and professional background assessing energy technologies, at the Study Group and long before, underpinned by rigorous training and in the physical sciences, engineering, and mathematics. Mello: "Disagreement is fine, but show your work."]

1. Pit production (p. 7) Most of the 11 initiatives listed will be familiar to close students of the situation.

One is not. Initiative 8 is: "Place Low-level Waste [LLW] Disposal Facilities in service by the middle of FY 2025 [i.e. by April 2025]" (emphasis added). LANL has had multiple formal LLW, transuranic, and chemical disposal sites in the past. The largest and most recently used is Area G in Technical Area 54, which was also used to dispose of chemical wastes and prior to 1972, transuranic wastes. (Better references are available but these will do for now.)

A 2021 aerial photo of Area G in relation to recent housing development and the San Ildefonso Sacred Area is here (if that link does not work go here and scroll down.)

As best we can recall, no final remedy for Area G cleanup has been formally accepted by the State. DOE's cleanup proposals involve variations of capping.

Four possible LLW areas were analyzed in the 1999 LANL Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS). Currently, LLW is shipped off the LANL site. In 2010, LANL planning documents showed an LLW disposal site in a different location, near the present Transuranic Waste Facility (TWF) in TA-63.

Mello: "If LANL proceeds with this proposal, in any form, whether at LANL or off-site, it must be thoroughly analyzed in the draft SWEIS now being written. It will be controversial.

"As convenient as it might seem to be, there are no good places to dispose of nuclear waste at LANL. There is too much precipitation; both the welded tuff and the underlying basalt are fractured; the topography is divided; and the cultural impacts for Native peoples are profound. To even contemplate such a course of action is an insult, and points to the profound lack of human values that pervades "The Lab Agenda" overall, as can be seen on other pages. There are approximately 2,000 archeological sites at LANL, some of which are actively-used shrines today. Proposing to open another nuclear waste disposal site at LANL, or in any of the surrounding lands and communities, is a scandal."

The Study Group has been working to close Area G for three decades; Mello's work to close Area G and begin the cleanup at LANL began in 1984 as lead hazardous waste inspector and analyst for hazardous waste and contaminated sites at LANL for the New Mexico Environment Department in 1984-5.

Initiative 9 addresses staffing for plutonium missions, which has been problematic. On Nov. 16, LANL Director Thom Mason said that while 2,077 staff members were hired by Triad in FY21 overall, 1,200 staff members quit that year, far more than was expected. (LANL's hiring problems will be the subject of another press release in the future.)

Initiative 11 seeks to deconflict Defense Program missions at LANL's main plutonium facility (PF-4) -- principally pit production and stockpile surveillance, primary design and certification, technology development, and plutonium sciences -- from the surplus plutonium mission in PF-4, mainly oxidation of metallic plutonium (e.g. pits) for future dilution and disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). Upon information and belief, this deconfliction has already occurred. Pit production has priority. (Call us for details.)

2. Non-nuclear production (p. 8)

This refers to production of warhead components not made of nuclear (fissile or fissionable) materials, in particular to pit components. The stewardship of low-level production for non-nuclear pit components was consolidated at LANL in the early 1990s. At present, some of these components are made at NNSA's Kansas City National Security Campus and, at least until recently if not still, by specialty subcontractors.

The scope of this initiative is not clear but it is potentially a fairly large effort. It is likely to involve beryllium, a highly-toxic material. At last ken, LANL made Be pit components at the Sigma Complex in TA-03. If the work weren't dangerous, why would LANL want to "[i]nform and obtain stakeholder support"?

3. Experimental Advances (p. 10)

While there is nothing very new here, the long-standing idea being to demonstrate certification of entirely new nuclear weapons from models and (very expensive) subcritical experiments without overt violations of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which the U.S. has not ratified in any case. The Bush Administration formally rejected application of the Vienna Convention on Treaties that would otherwise bind the U.S. to follow the Treaty prior to ratification.

Both radiography and "reactivity" are to be used, the latter likely referring to the use of neutron illumination, and subsequent fission, within imploding surrogate pits.

On a related topic, the 2021 Lab Agenda included an initiative to "Reinvigorate Laboratory thinking regarding maintaining a capability to return to underground nuclear testing if directed" (Responsibility: Bob Webster) (p. 8).

Mello: "The U.S. is not going to return to nuclear testing, ever. The nonproliferation and reputational cost would be far too great. This is a kind of "psyop" to influence decisionmakers, first and foremost those within DOE and LANL. We have more background on this agenda item than we can go into here."

"Obviously, the U.S. has largely vitiated the CTBT as far as it's own stockpile is concerned. The U.S. has no need to test. Far more data is gathered from present methods of testing."

4. Integrated deterrence, technology modernization, and threat response (pp. 11-13)

Taken together, these provide some of the headlines above. They are quite clear. Of particular note, the goal is not just technology development but also to "derive modernization requirements for the current stockpile and delivery systems and new employment concepts to address these [cross-domain] impacts and consider the implications to nuclear force policy." LANL will "[p]ropose options for alternative US weapons and delivery systems that address gaps."

Mello: "Under Triad, and under Jill Hruby's leadership at NNSA, the Federally-Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) model is being given greater weight not just at LANL but across the whole NNSA complex, than in the past. A recent NNSA report, "Evolving the Nuclear Security Enterprise," Sep 2022, outlines this way of thinking.

"The point is that under present NNSA management, the labs are being encouraged to help write national security policy, not just provide technical options. This also occurred in the evolution of the Trump Nuclear Posture Review, when laboratory directors literally had a seat at the Cabinet table to help write nuclear weapons policy, by virtue of their FFRDC status.

"The conflicts of interest could not be more striking. This LANL agenda aims to strengthen what most ordinary citizens would call corruption in the nuclear complex. More nuclear weapons mean more work, more political power, and more personal bonuses and career advancement, not just for the labs and their senior managers but all across the defense-industrial complex and of course in Congress too. The idea is not to be public servants, but for the public to be the servants."

We must leave the balance of this Agenda for another time. Please call if you have questions.

***ENDS***