LANL Dir. Thom Mason denounces problems and declares the virtues of LANL during virtual Town Hall meeting
The following are published comments by Greg Mello in answer to the Santa Fe New Mexican article: LANL director expects massive hiring effort to plateau as nuclear pit production ramps up, SFNM, Apr 3, 2024
What LANL actually ends up doing, versus what it says it will do, are seldom the same. The purpose of this highly structured town hall was to pour oil on troubled waters while avoiding anything controversial to the maximum extent, while touting LANL’s supposed benefits to the region. There were plenty of misrepresentations and “strategic omissions,” but this article didn’t follow up on them much — things like the nuclear waste disposal site which LANL said it must create by 2027 to support pit production but disavowed last night. Is that a no-go story for this newspaper because of powerful real estate interests in Santa Fe? Overall, there was almost zero real transparency involved in this public relations effort. Let’s be clear: LANL creates weapons of mass destruction. It now seeks to build them as well as design them, in a crash program that is radically transforming the nature of LANL away from research and development to plutonium processing and manufacturing.
The estimated cost for this manufacturing mission has expanded manyfold over initial estimates, from a few hundred million in 1997 (for a much larger capacity than envisioned now) to $3 billion in 2017, and now to circa $22 billion just to start up. Costs will expand much further as time goes on. Mason said that LANL does not envision building new nuclear facilities for its pit mission but that is not exactly true, as LANL must replace the Sigma building, which will certainly cost more than a billion dollars, just to pick one project.
Pit production is many years late already and will continue to slip. I didn’t see that in this article. It has already failed four times at this mission — I didn’t see that in this article either — and if LANL were any kind of accountable business, it would have already failed again. Even more amazing is that the whole mission is temporary, in that it is housed in old buildings with very finite lives, NNSA says. (Nope, not in this article either.) Hoped-for production of new weapons is becoming LANL’s unique value to the national security establishment; “clean” R&D can be done in California.
The dirtiest mission in NNSA’s portfolio is being assigned to LANL because NNSA can get away with it here, where homes are just as close to LANL’s plutonium facility as they are in Livermore. That doesn’t matter because there is so little push-back here. This allows LANL to be an essential fulcrum of the new arms race, a fact to which Mason alluded in the vaguest sort of way. That, plus trying to prevent proliferation and trying to clean up its mess, now account for 97% of LANL’s budget, according to NNSA. Neither LANL nor the New Mexican tell us this. Naturally, nuclear weapons missions do not create economic or social development in the region, despite the federal government having spent about $145 billion at LANL to date. What has been created is inequality and “the aura of apartheid,” which play a major role in creating the terrible social problems of northern New Mexico. This newspaper does cover this transformation as time allows, but Mr. Wyland, as talented and hard-working as he definitely is, must run from pillar to post covering many complex subjects. Nonetheless I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t point out that this transformation of LANL is utterly unprecedented in LANL’s 80-year history, and the New Mexican has not yet addressed the full magnitude of the situation. We consistently hear from people in Santa Fe, even highly educated people who assiduously follow public affairs and read this newspaper carefully, that they have no idea about LANL’s new pit production mission, its scale, or its purpose. One thing this newspaper could do, without spending a dime, is to actually ask the so-called “watchdogs” if they support this new mission or not, and if so why. Many do. The result of this journalistic failure is the phenomenon of “fake resistance,” a subset of the fake politics haunting New Mexico overall.