LANL Proposes Satellite “Campus” in Santa Fe as Part of Expanded Production of Plutonium Nuclear Weapons Triggers

Santa Fe, NM – Today, the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper reported:

“Santa Fe city leaders asked for developers’ ideas on what to do with the city-owned midtown campus…The National Nuclear Security Administration [NNSA], which administers the Los Alamos National Laboratory management and operating contract, submitted a master developer proposal to build an open-campus environment with administrative offices, sustainable green spaces, engineering space, light manufacturing, training facilities and research and development…

[A NNSA spokesperson said] “LANL is undergoing unprecedented growth and expects to hire more than 1,000 new personnel annually for the next several years. Having a new campus — midway between New Mexico’s two national laboratories [LANL and Sandia]— to house professional staff, scientists, and engineers in partnership with the city of Santa Fe — would be very beneficial.” ”

LANL’s growing jobs are primarily for expanded production of plutonium pits (the radioactive triggers of nuclear weapons) which helps to fuel the new global arms race. Over the last decade the Santa Fe City Council has passed three different resolutions against expanded plutonium pit production. Seventy percent (and growing) of LANL’s ~$2.6 billion annual budget is for core nuclear weapons research and production programs, while the remainder directly or indirectly supports those programs. In contrast, LANL’s renewable energy budget is .007% of its nuclear weapons budget and the Lab has zero dedicated funding to fight climate change. Moreover, LANL claims that its cleanup is more than half complete, intentionally omitting that it plans to leave ~150,000 cubic meters of toxic and radioactive wastes permanently buried uphill from the Rio Grande and above our common groundwater aquifer.

Just this last Sunday Pope Francis called for the abolition of nuclear weapons while in Japan paying homage to the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Those atomic bombs were designed and produced at the Los Alamos Lab.

The City of Santa Fe’s official name is the “La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís” (“The Royal Town of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi”), in honor of the beloved saint who preached peace and environmental protection and from whom the present Pope draws his name. It would be supremely ironic if the City of Santa Fe hosted a satellite campus for a massive institution that spends 2 billion dollars (and counting) every year on nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, commented, “Mayor Webber and the Santa Fe City Council surely know that the institutionalized presence of a nuclear weapons production laboratory in our city would generate a tremendous amount of controversy, a controversy they could well do without. The leaders of the City of Santa Fe should nix LANL’s proposal for a satellite campus in our town as a nonstarter and an affront to St. Francis de Assisi, the saint of peace.”

Foreign-Born Researchers

http://dailycallernewsfoundation.org/2019/11/19/foreign-born-researchers-at-us-agencies-were-secretly-working-for-china-and-recruiting-others-senate-report-finds/

Foreign-Born Researchers At US Agencies Were Secretly Working For China And Recruiting Others, Senate Report Finds
Department of Energy

At the Department of Energy, which the FBI said is the most frequent target for penetration and which works on nuclear weapons, multiple researchers joined TTP.

While one was working at a National Lab, he allegedly brought over dozens of other Chinese nationals, at least four of whom were TTP members. He “attempted to initiate official sharing agreements between the laboratory and a Chinese organization,” the report stated.

Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence had trouble investigating because of the “language barrier” and “insular nature” of the group of Chinese nationals working on six sensitive projects paid for by the U.S. government.

More than 35,000 foreigners, including 10,000 Chinese, are conducting research at the National Labs, the investigation found.

LANL Advancing Gender Equality

Los Alamos National Laboratory Commits To Advancing Gender Equality In Nuclear Policy

https://www.ladailypost.com/content/los-alamos-national-laboratory-commits-advancing-gender-equality-nuclear-policy

Los Alamos Lab Flying LGBTQ Flag For First Time

Los Alamos Lab Flying LGBTQ Flag For First Time

By Rebecca Moss | rmoss@sfnewmexican.com Jun 11, 2019 Updated Jun 12, 2019

At 19, Samuel Buelow felt he had to leave Los Alamos to be himself.

He had grown up as a girl in the insular, scientific community that felt deeply conservative in the late 1990s and early 2000s. After moving to Pittsburgh for college, Buelow came out as a transgender, gay man.

“It was definitely something, at the time, I felt I couldn’t have done living here full time,” Buelow said of Los Alamos. “There was very little awareness of these issues in general. And when there was, it was surrounded by some pretty intense homophobia and transphobia.”

That was then.

This … is a town sporting different colors.

On Monday, a rainbow flag was raised for the first time in front of the Otowi Building on the Los Alamos National Laboratory campus, flapping alongside the U.S. and New Mexico banners. Lab officials said it will fly for the remainder of the week.

It was another sign of change at the lab, which in previous years has undertaken different pride representations, including decorating the windows of a prominent building with rainbow-colored Post-it Notes in 2017.

CJ Bacino, the laboratory’s diversity officer, said a Los Alamos lab LGBTQ staff and allies group called Prism brought forward the idea of raising the flag this year to help mark Pride Week in Los Alamos County.

https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/los-alamos-lab-flying-lgbtq-flag-for-first-time/article_737d847e-8645-5455-8d96-15bcec7f3764.html

Bechtel refuses bilateral agreement with DOE

Bechtel refuses bilateral agreement with DOE contracting officials to incorporate Congressionally approved enhanced whistleblower protections citing they "could potentially create additional costs"

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/11/f68/DOE-OIG-20-04.pdf

Detailed LA Times on testing legacy issues in the Marshall Islands

Detailed Los Angeles Times story on testing legacy issues in the Marshall Islands, it includes interviews with staff from DOE and LLNL.

"Five thousand miles west of Los Angeles and 500 miles north of the equator, on a far-flung spit of white coral sand in the central Pacific, a massive, aging and weathered concrete dome bobs up and down with the tide.

Here in the Marshall Islands, Runit Dome holds more than 3.1 million cubic feet — or 35 Olympic-sized swimming pools — of U.S.-produced radioactive soil and debris, including lethal amounts of plutonium. Nowhere else has the United States saddled another country with so much of its nuclear waste, a product of its Cold War atomic testing program.

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 nuclear bombs on, in and above the Marshall Islands — vaporizing whole islands, carving craters into its shallow lagoons and exiling hundreds of people from their homes.

U.S. authorities later cleaned up contaminated soil on Enewetak Atoll, where the United States not only detonated the bulk of its weapons tests but, as The Times has learned, also conducted a dozen biological weapons tests and dumped 130 tons of soil from an irradiated Nevada testing site. It then deposited the atoll’s most lethal debris and soil into the dome.

Now the concrete coffin, which locals call “the Tomb,” is at risk of collapsing from rising seas and other effects of climate change. Tides are creeping up its sides, advancing higher every year as distant glaciers melt and ocean waters rise.

Officials in the Marshall Islands have lobbied the U.S. government for help, but American officials have declined, saying the dome is on Marshallese land and therefore the responsibility of the Marshallese government...

Over the last 15 months, a reporting team from the Los Angeles Times and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism made five trips to the Marshall Islands, where they documented extensive coral bleaching, fish kills and algae blooms — as well as major disease outbreaks, including the nation’s largest recorded epidemic of dengue fever. They interviewed folk singers who lost their voices to thyroid cancers and spent time in Arkansas, Washington and Oregon, where tens of thousands of Marshallese have migrated to escape poverty and an uncertain future.

Marshallese leaders acknowledge that America doesn’t bear full responsibility for their nation’s distress. But they say the United States has failed to take ownership of the environmental catastrophe it left behind, and they claim U.S. authorities have repeatedly deceived them about the magnitude and extent of that devastation."

https://www.latimes.com/projects/marshall-islands-nuclear-testing-sea-level-rise/#nt=liA4promoSmall-1col-7030col1-mainnt=liG0promoMedium-7030col1-main

Guard Accused Colleagues of Sexual Assault Fired

"A Nuclear Site Guard Accused Colleagues of Sexual Assault. Then She Was Fired"

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/us/politics/department-of-energy-sexual-assault.html

Settled sexual assault claims

Former Nevada Site Security Officer Settles Sexual Assault Claims Against Contractor"

https://www.exchangemonitor.com/former-nevada-site-security-officer-settling-sexual-assault-claims-centerra/?printmode=1

No-rehire list?

Anybody in HR....uhhhh....Strategic Human Resources Management (man we're pretentious) ever here about a "no rehire" list?

Who will replace Younger at SNL?

Steve Younger announced his retirement as Director of SNL months ago 

https://www.bizjournals.com/albuquerque/news/2019/08/27/sandia-labs-director-stephen-younger-to-retire.html

 Who will replace him? Will Honeywell promote from within as they did for their second Deputy Director? Will LLNL lose another weapons manager? Will an ex-LANS person show up again or someone recycled from NNSA? Maybe another Navy Admiral? Does it really matter?

Recruiting and Outreach at the Nation’s Largest American Indian College and Career Fair

LLNS Engineering Superintendent Randy Pico attends 2019 "National American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) Conference" Great for STEM and all under represented minorities!

https://www.energy.gov/lm/articles/recruiting-and-outreach-nation-s-largest-american-indian-college-and-career-fair

LANL receives $5 billion

LANL receives $5 billion to upgrade aging facilities

https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/lanl-receives-billion-to-upgrade-aging-facilities/article_417d159e-90b3-5e6f-85cf-696573310df3.html