AA Learn more about in-home care options for your loved ones

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) — Los Alamos was the perfect spot for the U.S. government’s top-secret Manhattan Project.

Almost overnight, the ranching enclave on a remote plateau in northern New Mexico was transformed into a makeshift home for scientists, engineers and young soldiers racing to develop the world’s first atomic bomb. Dirt roads were hastily built and temporary housing came in the form of huts and tents as the outpost’s population ballooned.

The community is facing growing pains again, 80 years later, as Los Alamos National Laboratory takes part in the nation’s most ambitious nuclear weapons effort since World War II. The mission calls for modernizing the arsenal with droves of new workers producing plutonium cores — key components for nuclear weapons.

Some 3,300 workers have been hired in the last two years, with the workforce now topping more than 17,270. Close to half of them commute to work from elsewhere in northern New Mexico and from as far away as Albuquerque, helping to nearly double Los Alamos’ population during the work week.

RELATED COVERAGE

Inside the delicate art of maintaining America’s aging nuclear weapons

The U.S. will spend more than $750 billion over the next decade to overhaul nearly every part of its nuclear defenses and replace systems that in some cases are more than 50 years old.

While advancements in technology have changed the way work is done at Los Alamos, some things remain the same for this company town. The secrecy and unwavering sense of duty that were woven into the community’s fabric during the 1940s remain.

James Owen, the associate lab director for weapons engineering, has spent more than 25 years working in the nuclear weapons program.

“What we do is meaningful. This isn’t a job, it’s a vocation and there’s a sense of contribution that comes with that,” Owen said in an interview with The Associated Press following a rare tour of the facility where workers are preparing to piece together plutonium cores by hand. “The downside is we can’t tell people about all the cool things we do here.”

While the priority at Los Alamos is maintaining the nuclear stockpile, the lab also conducts a range of national security work and research in diverse fields of space exploration, supercomputing, renewable energy and efforts to limit global threats from disease and cyberattacks.

The welcome sign on the way into town reads: “Where discoveries are made.”

The headline grabber, though, is the production of plutonium cores.

Lab managers and employees defend the massive undertaking as necessary in the face of global political instability. With most people in Los Alamos connected to the lab, opposition is rare.

But watchdog groups and non-proliferation advocates question the need for new weapons and the growing price tag.

“For some time Los Alamosans have seemed numbed out, very involved in superficial activities but there is a very big hole in the middle where thoughtful discourse might live,” Greg Mello, director of the Los Alamos Study Group, a nonprofit that has been challenging the lab over safety, security and budget concerns, said in an email.

Town officials are grappling with the effects of expansion at the lab, much like the military generals who scrambled to erect the secret city on the hill in 1943.

The labor market is stressed, housing is in short supply and traffic is growing. There are few options for expansion in a town bordered by the national forest, a national park and Native American land, leaving county officials to reconsider zoning rules to allow developers to be more creative with infill projects.

Still, officials acknowledge it will take time for those changes to catch up with demand and for prices to normalize in what is already one of the most affluent counties in the U.S. With the lab being the largest employer, Los Alamos also boasts the highest per-capita levels of educational attainment with many residents holding master’s degrees and Ph.Ds.

Owen is originally from Peñasco, a Hispanic village in neighboring Taos County. His fascination with science was sparked by a high school field trip where he learned about explosions and implosions. It wasn’t long before he landed a summer job at the lab and went on to earn engineering degrees that helped him move up through the ranks.

Los Alamos taps into regional schools as a generational pipeline. Grandfathers work as machinists. Mothers solder key components. And daughters become experts at tracking radiation.

Alexandra Martinez, 40, grew up in nearby Chimayo and is the latest in her family to work at Los Alamos. She chuckles when asked if she was born into it.

“That’s what I wanted — the ability to do something great,” said Martinez, a radiation control technician who is stationed at PF-4, the highly classified complex that is being transformed into a more modern plutonium pit factory.

She must pass through fencing topped with concertina wire and checkpoints manned by armed guards. The layers of security are more sophisticated than those from the Manhattan Project era, when all incoming and outgoing mail was censored and telephone calls were monitored.

Los Alamos became an open city when the security gates came down in 1957. Still, many parts — including historic sites related to the Manhattan Project — remain off limits. Tourists have to settle for selfies near the town square with the bronze statue of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Across the street, rangers at the Manhattan Project National Historical Park visitor center answer questions about where scientists lived and where parties and town halls were held. A chalkboard hangs in the corner, covered in yellow sticky notes left by visitors. Some of the hand-written notes touch on the complicated legacy left by the creation of nuclear weapons.

It’s a conversation that was reignited with the release of Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.” The film put the spotlight on Los Alamos and its history, prompting more people to visit over the summer.

The attention also boosted an ongoing effort to expand the federal government’s radiation compensation program to cover people in several western states, including residents in southern New Mexico where the Trinity Test of the first atomic bomb was conducted in 1945.

Aside from pressing questions about the morality of nuclear weapons, watchdogs argue the federal government’s modernization effort already has outpaced spending predictions and is years behind schedule. Independent government analysts issued a report earlier this month that outlined the growing budget and schedule delays.

For lab managers, the task has not been easy. Modern health and safety requirements mean new constraints Manhattan Project bosses never had to contemplate. And yet, just like their predecessors, Owen said officials feel a sense of urgency amid intensifying global threats.

“What’s being asked is that we all need to do better in a faster amount of time,” he said.

New allegations from 2021 include contamination issues, flooding, improper staffing and dismissing hazardous waste protocols

As contractors at Los Alamos National Lab resolved allegations of mislabeling hazardous waste in 2020 after a New Mexico Environment Department inspection, federal overseers recently reported additional significant safety violations from 2021.

Triad National Security, LLC is a contractor that manages the national lab, including LANL’s plutonium weapons program. Triad is co-owned by the Battelle Memorial Institute, Texas A&M University System, and the University of California.

On May 31, Triad and New Mexico’s environment department agreed to a $20,000 settlement, after the agency alleged Triad violated state laws during a 2020 inspection.

Environment department inspectors said Triad failed to label containers of hazardous waste, universal waste batteries and free liquids. There was also a failure to provide secondary containers for free liquid hazardous waste. NMED issued a notice of violation nearly two years later in July 2022.

According to the settlement, Triad did not admit to any of the allegations, but paid the civil fine to “avoid further legal proceedings.”

Federal overseer flags 2021 safety violations

On May 25, the National Nuclear Security Administration issued a preliminary notice of violation after a series of events that occurred between February and July 2021 at LANL’s plutonium facility.

The NNSA, an arm of the U.S. Department of Energy, is responsible for the nation’s nuclear weapons. It oversees the national laboratories production, testing and development of the stockpile.

The NNSA labeled the five safety breaches against Triad and Los Alamos labs as “Severity Level II violations” with a high safety significance.

Level II violations “represent a significant lack of attention or carelessness towards responsibilities of (Department of Energy) contractors for the protection of public or worker safety,” according to a letter to Los Alamos labs director Thom Mason.

When asked how the public and workers can trust Triad in the wake of nuclear safety violations, a laboratory spokesman gave the following written statement.

“The Laboratory takes the incidents raised by the Department of Energy’s Office of Enterprise Assessments seriously and undertook corrective actions to address them when they occurred in 2021. We will continue to work closely with DOE EA as we prioritize the safety of our workers, the public, and the environment,” the written statement said.

Violations included an issue when fissionable materials were placed in a drop-box and violated “criticality” safety posting limits, which are to help prevent fission chain-reaction accidents.

A glovebox – which is supposed to allow people to handle dangerous materials – breached on March 3, 2021, allegedly contaminating three workers’ skin with radioactive material.

“Triad did not immediately recognize that a glove had breached and that a worker had contamination on their hands,” the federal violation notice said. “As a result, the worker spread contamination to surfaces, personal protective equipment, personal clothing and skin of some workers in the room.”

The NNSA cited staffing shortages, noting that one person was given four roles.

“With all these responsibilities and distractions, self-monitoring was not performed when the individual exited the glovebox,” the violation notice said. That allowed the contamination to spread to two other people before being detected.

On March 31, 2021 flooding occurred in a vault with fissionable materials.

NNSA said Triad failed to inform the lab’s operations center that the vault water bath required filling. During the process, Triad deviated from approved procedures by blocking open a spring-loaded valve, “bypassing its safety feature.”

“This ultimately caused water to overflow onto the vault floor because the worker was not present to close the valve,” the violation notice said.

A second flooding event on July 19, 2021 happened after work was inappropriately delegated to unqualified workers, the NNSA said. The workers did not manipulate the valves in the right sequence, and did not notify the LANL Operations Center property to respond to the alarms.

“These errors resulted in one of the valves being misaligned, allowing water to inadvertently enter the ventilation system,” the violation notice said.

The flooding included glovebox ventilations systems and a glovebox containing fissionable material. Triad issued a memo two years before cautioning that misaligned valves could flood the ventilation systems, NNSA noted in the letter.

NNSA said both flooding incidents shared a problem of insufficient staff to complete facility rounds.

The violations totaled more than half a million dollars, $571,187 to be exact. However, NNSA withheld $1.4 million from the Triad contract “in part for deficiencies related to the events,” the agency said it would not seek further civil penalty for the violations.

Triad is required to submit a written reply, which can contest the violations.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX

NEW MEXICO (KRQE) – Nearly 20 years after a large chromium plume contamination was identified near Los Alamos National Laboratory, state and federal officials are still trying to figure out the best way to clean it up. Disagreement over rising levels of chromium has led to the cleanup effort being halted.

“The plume that we currently know is about a mile and a half long and about half a mile wide,” explained Resource Protection Division of the New Mexico Environment Department Director Rick Shean, “It was discovered in 2005. However, at this point, the full nature and extent hasn’t been fully determined.”

In 2016, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) was given a consent order to clean up the chromium plume. The nearly 160,000 pounds of chromium comes from a non-nuclear power plant at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The plant flushed contaminated water into Sandia Canyon between 1956 and 1972. The DOE reported the chromium has seeped into the ground above the aquifer.

The DOE has a plan to clean it up: “It installed five extraction wells, one treatment system, and five wells to reinject the treated water back into the aquifer,” said DOE Los Alamos Field Office Manager Michael Mikolanis. This operation to clean up the chromium began in 2018.

In that time, the DOE said the plume moved back 500 feet on the southern edge, and they’ve managed to extract 700 pounds of chromium from the ground; a drop in the bucket compared to the 160,000 pounds leaked, but progress, officials said.

However, late last year the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) told the DOE to stop injecting the clean water back into the ground by April 1, 2023.

“We started seeing rising contaminants in one of the wells, one of the lower screens of the wells,” Shean said. The NMED is worried they were injecting clean water back into the plume, mixing it contaminated water. “This will cause problems in the future when you’re trying to design a full cleanup plan and full cleanup system in order to address all of the contamination,” Shean explained.

The NMED wants the DOE to put the clean water someplace else, but the DOE argued that will get rid of a ‘hydraulic barrier’ they’ve created as they’ve been re-injecting the clean water to keep the plume from spreading into surrounding communities. Mikolanis said, in the three months since they stopped their cleanup efforts, they’ve seen chromium levels rise again.

“Effectively, in the three and a half years we operated the well, we reduced chromium concentration by 170 parts per billion. In the last three months, the chromium in this extraction well has increased 80 parts per billion. That’s nearly half of the gains we’ve made in the past three years, and at this rate and at this trending, we will have erased completely the three and half years’ worth of work sometime in October,” Mikolanis said.

Right now, the DOE and the NMED are at an impasse of what to do. The NMED said extraction activities can continue, but the DOE stated they can’t unless they are also injecting the water somewhere else, and don’t want to do that at the risk of contaminating water elsewhere.

The interim legislative committee—the Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee—is encouraging both parties in the form of a letter to use a third party to resolve their technical issues and find a solution to finally clean up the plume.

Right now, this plume is not affecting the Espanola Aquifer Basin. An NMED spokesperson sent News 13 the following statement:

The hexavalent chromium plume is in the regional aquifer under the Pajarito Plateau, beneath Los Alamos National Laboratory and near the boundary with the Pueblo de San Ildefonso. The water source for Los Alamos County comes from groundwater pumped by twelve wells, which all draw on the regional aquifer beneath the Pajarito Plateau.

Although hexavalent chromium contamination is found in one part of the aquifer, the Los Alamos County supply wells are regularly sampled to ensure that contamination has not migrated to the drinking water supply. Additionally, NMED monitors a nearby groundwater monitoring well, R-35, that is located closer to the contamination plume and will detect increases in chromium concentration before reaching the nearest Los Alamos County supply well, PM-3. Chromium concentrations in the groundwater monitoring well R-35 have not increased and do not indicate there is contamination of the Los Alamos County drinking water supply.

Los Alamos County utilizes a wellhead protection program to treat the water with a disinfectant and routinely monitors the drinking water quality. The Los Alamos County Department of Public Utilities produces and distributes drinking water to more than 25,000 users in the Los Alamos townsite, White Rock, Bandelier National Monument and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

SANTA FE, N.M. — The U.S. Forest Service’s own prescribed burn started a sprawling 2022 wildfire that nearly reached Los Alamos, New Mexico, the agency acknowledged Monday in a report published after a lengthy investigation.

The Cerro Pelado fire burned in dry, windy conditions across more than 60 square miles and crept within a few miles of the city of Los Alamos and its companion U.S. national security lab. As the fire approached, schools closed and evacuation bags were packed before the flames tapered off.

Investigators traced the wildfire to a burn of piles of forest debris commissioned by the Forest Service. The burn became a holdover fire, smoldering undetected under wet snow, with no signs of smoke or heat for months, said Southwestern Regional Forester Michiko Martin.

The revelation prompted immediate rebukes against the Forest Service by New Mexico political leaders, including Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. She said she was “outraged over the U.S. Forest Service’s negligence that caused this destruction.” Episodes of extremely hot and dry weather in recent years have triggered concerns about prescribed burns as techniques for clearing forest debris, concerns that Grisham echoed.

The federal government already has acknowledged that it started the largest wildfire in state history that charred more than 530 square miles of the Rocky Mountain foothills east of Santa Fe, New Mexico, destroying homes and livelihoods.

The Forest Service last spring halted all prescribed burn operations for 90 days while it conducted a review of procedures and policies. By the end of the moratorium, managers learned that they can’t rely on past success, and must continuously learn and adapt to changing conditions, Forest Service Chief Randy Moore recently told New Mexico lawmakers.

Advertisement

Firefighters now monitor pile burns using handheld thermal devices and drones that can detect heat, Martin said Monday.

Examples of prescribed burns that escaped control include the 2000 Cerro Grande Fire that swept through residential areas of Los Alamos and across 12 square miles of the laboratory — more than one-quarter of the campus. The fire destroying more than 230 homes and 45 structures at the lab. In 2011, a larger and faster-moving fire burned fringes of the lab.

In the spring of 2022, wildfires were propelled by ferocious winds across Arizona and New Mexico, combined with extreme drought and warm temperatures, casting a pall of smoke across the region.

U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich urged the Forest Service to be more nimble in its investigations and decisions.

“The warming climate is making our forests more vulnerable to catastrophic wildfires. That’s a reality that our Forest Service can and must urgently respond to when deciding when and how to do prescribed burns,” he said in a statement. “We cannot catch up to this reality if it takes nearly a year to even make the findings on the Cerro Pelado Fire public.”

Los Alamos National Laboratory has designated the entire month of April for its 80th birthday bash. The public is invited to take part in the celebration by attending a talk by historian Madeline Whitacre from the Lab’s National Security Research Center, where she’ll discuss the facts, photos and stories from the Lab’s origins, on April 17, 5:30 – 7 p.m. at ProjectY in Los Alamos. See more information here.

Additionally, you can see rare footage of the Laboratory’s history in this video, where Senior Historian Alan Carr narrates the story of the Lab from temporary military outpost during World War II to the multidisciplinary institution it is today — all in about six minutes.

NSRC historians admit there are many ways to think about the Lab’s creation — known as Project Y during the Manhattan Project — and its birthdate. “The Lab doesn’t have a truly official birthday, at least in my opinion,” Carr said.

In 1942, Gen. Leslie Groves appointed physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to lead the wartime laboratory. What happened that solidified its existence?

“Perhaps conception was in the fall of 1942,” said Carr, “when creating a weapons lab was approved by the Manhattan Project. Up until then, the Chicago Met Lab [the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago] essentially served that purpose. It’s my understanding not all wanted a second design lab, but that Oppenheimer pushed for it and Gen. Groves liked Oppenheimer. We have some interesting planning documents from the fall of 1942: then, the physicists only thought it would take 130 people (total!) to get the work at Los Alamos done!

“That aside, I’ve always considered April 1943 to be the Lab’s intellectual and administrative ‘birthday.’ I think that’s how my predecessors have generally interpreted the history as well. Yes, construction started before then. Yes, there were meetings before then. Yes, there was technical work before then.

“But an important series of introductory scientific lectures was held during the first two weeks of April: the lectures by Robert Serber were summarized in a report, ‘The Los Alamos Primer,’ which became the Lab’s first report: LA-1. And on April 20, the University of California signed the contract to operate the Laboratory (retroactive to the first of the year).

“That’s why I like April: you have two major, unnebulous official things that happened that month,” Carr said.

LA-UR-23-23689