As Los Alamos National Laboratory continues to transition from traditional scientific innovation to its identity as New Rocky Flats, New Mexicans have more than enough cause to be concerned.

LANL has never been a “good neighbor” to its host community and surrounding areas, and it never will be — outside of dispensing token cash awards and tiny contracts to mollify local yokels who might protest safety lapses or environmental insults.

A Los Alamos news outlet recently reported a LANL employee was stopped for speeding on their way to work. Local cops allegedly found the driver in possession of a stolen submachine gun and scorched pieces of tinfoil like you might find on someone who is abusing hard drugs or pharmaceuticals. Apparently, LANL’s zeal to meet its plutonium pit production goals is tainting its ability to meet safety and security requirements necessary to prevent the lab from becoming like the original Rocky Flats, which was shuttered by the feds after years of criminal environmental contamination and cover-ups.

Shortly after LANL’s first contract change, while trying to impress the federal government with its ability to get things done, lab managers found themselves dealing with a young woman who had taken a raft of classified documents to an off-site trailer turned methamphetamine lab. Not long afterward, LANL raced to meet a transuranic waste shipment milestone that would have netted big bonuses for its managers, and ended up blowing up a section of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant due a failure to proofread a revamped procedural document.

Under LANL’s current management, we continue to see report after report of serious safety lapses at the lab’s plutonium facility. A talented, young LANL worker joked to me recently that they were just one glove box fire away from becoming permanently unemployed, which is why they were seeking work outside New Mexico.

The larger question is why LANL’s internal mechanisms aren’t preventing all the accidents at its nuclear facilities or self-identifying the Scarfaces-in-training who have sought employment at New Mexico’s premier white-collar welfare institution? The answer can probably be found in the lab’s underlying culture of “Mission Above All” and contracts that pay managers huge cash rewards for prioritizing expediency over safety.

At a recent online town hall — viewed by a pitifully small 140 viewers — LANL Director Thom Mason didn’t directly address the traffic fatality that occurred during LANL’s rush hour a month ago. One can’t help but wonder whether this cavalier omission indicates the director is so far removed from the community and his workforce that he doesn’t see the depth of that tragedy or the tone that his silence about it sets for the region?

It also makes a person wonder how much more death and contamination will come creeping out from behind LANL’s tall fences and into the fabric of our communities before LANL creates its first 30 plutonium pits?

James Rickman is a native New Mexican who served on the Los Alamos County Council from 1997-2000 and worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory for 24 years.