For immediate release July 17, 2023

Los Alamos to metastasize as weapons mission outgrows site

Lab management to present before local government Tuesday 7/18/23, 6 pm MDT

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

Permalink * Prior press releases

Albuquerque -- Tomorrow evening at 6 pm MDT, Dr. Kelly Beierschmitt, Deputy Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Director for Operations, will present to the Los Alamos County Council at a public work session (complete agenda with handouts) on LANL "Growth and Mission Support."

The meeting will be webcast at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82683176848.

The most dramatic points in Beierschmitt's presentation are provided below. One press release cannot encompass all the questions this presentation raises.

First, LANL has been growing rapidly, from 14,054 total employees in 2022 (slide 2) to a claimed 17,244 total employees as of 7/18/2023 (slide 3), a net recruitment of 3,190 persons. [Note 1]. This addition alone is roughly 3/4 as much as the entire workforce of the Pantex nuclear weapons plant, where all U.S. nuclear weapons are assembled. These employment figures do not include students (1,812 at the peak of the summer season in 2022, slide 12) or subcontractors, such as the hundreds of construction workers on site daily. Nor do they include federal employees (about 95, p. 74), or the roughly 650 employees of N3B, the separate corporation that is the cleanup contractor at LANL.

LANL now anticipates hiring an additional net 2,000 or so staff (slide 9), which would bring the total LANL (i.e. Triad) employment, plus full-time N3B and federal staff, to nearly 20,000 persons, not including students or subcontractors. As recently as November 2022, LANL's planned staffing level was 18,000 persons (p. 8).

Meanwhile, LANL is "watching budget negotiations to get an idea of when [the larger] FY24 budget for LANL will be approved" by Congress, which will allow even greater "spending and hiring" (slide 8).

By way of comparison, at the height of the early Cold War in 1952 and with a large research and testing agenda, the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL) employed some 2,800 persons, plus maintenance and construction workers, which was itself a big increase from the 1,411 who worked at LASL in 1950 (Jon Hunner, Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community, p. 161).

For plutonium warhead core ("pit") production alone, LANL estimated it would need an estimated 4,105 full-time equivalent staff (FTEs) to reliably produce 30 pits per year (“NNSA Pit Production at LANL, Report to Congress, May 2020, p. 5). Whether this many trained people will be (and remain) available for pit production at LANL is still an open question. As NNSA’s Cost Estimating and Program Evaluation (CEPE) group noted in its less-than-glowing review of NNSA’s LANL plan: “…there are significant risks in staffing” – as well as in “program management, production activities, supporting infrastructure, waste management, and other program requirements” (p. iii).

In its 2022 Transportation Plan, LANL assumed that in 2028, 12,600 LANL staff would be working onsite, 3,600 would be telecommuting, and 1,800 would be working in off-site locations (p. 8). Parking is limited, especially in the Pajarito Corridor where pit production facilities are primarily located and in Technical Area (TA-) 3, the lab's main technical area.

"[N]ew parking additions should be located east of the Rio Grande. A major behavioral change for LANL employees is necessary, and positive commute opportunities are key to recruiting and retention efforts. This is particularly important with limited housing options close to LANL..LANL may have to move beyond incentives and messaging toward assigned/restricted parking and enforcement to achieve the sea change in worker travel and parking behaviors necessary to attain program objectives." (p. 10)

Beierschmitt provides a map of existing and proposed Park n' Ride parking lots (slide 7). This is busing on a large scale. LANL aims to purchase 83 intercity buses this fiscal year alone, of which 34 are to be New Flyer hydrogen-powered buses (p. 24). The required hydrogen infrastructure does not exist and may never exist. Seventy-eight smaller buses and vans are also on the shopping list for FY23. (See also Bulletin 296, "The troubled logistics of LANL pit production: how will LANL staff and contractors get to work?".)

With a proposed additional 2,000 employees over November's assumptions for whom working space must be provided as well as transportation options, and housing, Beierschmidt's presentation goes further and proposes breaking off additional portions of LANL itself (slide 5), given the poor access and space limitations of the LANL site itself as well as the housing and transportation limitations of Los Alamos County. Possible "capabilities" for off-site LANL locations are said to include:

1. Low hazard, light laboratory space
2. R&D offices
3. Business and support services offices
4. Classified office activities [and]
5. Warehousing

Item 3. already exists. Items 1 and 5 have been announced previously. Of note, under item 1, a landowner described to us early-stage negotiations for a biological laboratory (biological safety level 2) in Santa Fe, which collapsed. Items 2 and 4 appear newly-revealed in this presentation. Most [Note 2] "hazardous and specialized operations" would remain at the original LANL site.

The budget figures in Dr. Beierschmitt's presentation (slides 3, 8) understate. The current "$4.4" billion omits so-called "Strategic Partnership Programs" (SPPs), which are funded outside the Department of Energy (DOE) budget, typically from DoD and intelligence agencies. LANL's web site shows $340 million in SPPs for FY22. With the addition of SPPs -- the exact amount is unknown to us -- LANL's FY23 budget will be in the vicinity of $4.8 billion. For FY24, DOE requested $4.92 billion for LANL, which will likely be the minimum it receives, not counting SPPs. LANL's budget will certainly exceed $5 billion in FY24 and will likely be in the range of $5.3 billion.

For those who want to dig deeper, closely related to the corporate ambitions in tomorrow's presentation are the "LANL Agenda" reports ("Los Alamos lab "agenda:" novel nuclear weapons and new ways to use them, hypersonic nuclear weapons, new nuclear waste disposal facility, additional production missions, biosecurity "leadership," "proactive" counterintelligence, Nov 23, 2022) as well as the still-largely-secret "Campus Master Plan" (available in fragments; see left column here).

Study Group director Greg Mello:

"The public and news media need to ask many questions about these new developments, which have the potential to significantly change the character of northern New Mexico. Contrary to LANL, these proposed changes would not be for the better. You can ask some of these questions tomorrow.

"If you can go in person to this working session, it is an opportunity.

"Could the inappropriateness of the LANL site for all this growth be any more clear than LANL itself makes them, in this new presentation? Geographically, LANL is -- apart from Livermore -- the worst possible place in NNSA's nuclear weapons complex for a plutonium pit factory. Yet NNSA persists in trying. We do not believe NNSA will succeed, for many reasons.

"LANL is basically a cancer on northern New Mexico. It contributes nothing but some raw cash looted from taxpayers and borrowed from the rising generation, which creates inequity, instead of social and economic development. That is because LANL makes no useful goods and provides no useful services. It produces very little useful knowledge. It is an economic black hole, in other words -- a place, as Herman Agoyo put it, "with no public memory." A place without a story. The stories LANL does provide are just propaganda of the worst kind. Ultimately they are stories about death-oriented solutions to national problems, which is LANL's big stock-in-trade. Such stories only harm us.

"We find it peculiar that so many who profess to want disarmament, including some in New Mexico, are quick to say that a pit factory at LANL would be the lesser evil. We disagree entirely.

Notes:

1. The 14,054 is is likely the average employment over fiscal year (FY) 2022. By November 9, 2022 LANL had nearly 15,000 employees. See LANL Transportation Plan FY23, LA-UR-22-31888, p. 5. LANL's employment figures are not always consistent.
2. See BSL 2 organisms. Related, NNSA seeks to use the powerful classified computing network available at its laboratories to anticipate genomic variations that might be used as biological warfare and terrorism agents (by adversaries of course), according to a conversation last year with executive branch officials (and a reporting requirement in a recent authorization or appropriations bill for NNSA). This large topic is beyond the scope of this press release.

***ENDS***