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| | | published Friday, December 09, 2011 | 532 Views :: 0 Comments |
Representative Edward J. Markey U.S. House of Representatives Washington, DC 20515 December 8, 2011 Dear Rep. Markey, On behalf of our 47 organizations and the members that we represent, we would like to express our gratitude to you for your principled call for reducing the amount of money that our country spends on nuclear weapons and related programs. In the letter that you signed on October 11 to the Supercommittee members about this issue, you expressed a view that—based on moral, security and fiscal grounds—our country can no longer justify current levels of spending on nuclear weapons programs. We endorse that position.
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| | | published Monday, December 05, 2011 | 754 Views :: 0 Comments |
Dec. 2, 2011
By William Hartung
From the Huffington Post
Your government is slated to spend hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade to purchase, maintain and operate our massive nuclear arsenal. The costs include everything from new nuclear bombers, submarines and bomb factories to the huge but unknown costs of deploying and maintaining thousands of nuclear weapons.
It's an outrage that we are spending this kind of money on these outmoded and unnecessary systems at a time when deficit reduction is the order of the day. It is equally outrageous that our government will not tell us exactly how much we're spending on them -- and may not even be keeping track.
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| | | published Friday, November 18, 2011 | 816 Views :: 0 Comments |
Nov 18, 2011
By John Fleck
From the Albuquerque Journal
Members of a federal safety panel meeting in Santa Fe on Thursday expressed impatience with federal efforts to reduce nuclear safety risks at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
“We’re a little frustrated,” said Peter Winokur, chairman of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
Winokur’s comments came during a public hearing at the convention center probing nuclear safety at the lab’s current facilities, emergency preparedness and plans for new buildings at the nuclear weapons design and manufacturing center.
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| | | published Thursday, November 17, 2011 | 599 Views :: 0 Comments |
Nov 17, 2011
By John FleckFrom the Albuquerque Journal
Seismic upgrades to the building at Los Alamos National Laboratory used for plutonium manufacturing could cost $150 million to $300 million and take until 2020 to complete.
The spending and timeline was included in a September report from the lab’s federal managers to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, which will gather today in Santa Fe for a lengthy hearing on safety at the nuclear weapons lab.
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| | | published Thursday, November 17, 2011 | 641 Views :: 0 Comments |
Nov 17, 2011From the Albuquerque Journal
Facing intense budget pressure, the U.S. Department of Energy should consider the equivalent of the military’s base closure process for its sprawling research lab complex, an internal agency review has recommended.
Two of those labs are in New Mexico, where the Department’s nuclear weapons program is a major employer.
The Department of Energy spends more money in New Mexico than any other state – $4.1 billion in 2010, the most recent year for which numbers are available. That money supports some 20,000 workers at Los Alamos and Sandia labs, where U.S. nuclear weapons are designed, manufactured and maintained.
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| | | published Wednesday, November 16, 2011 | 724 Views :: 0 Comments |
The following article discusses the MOX plutonium fuel program, which ANA opposes. Touching on several of the problems with the program, the Reporter quotes two ANA members, Tom Clements and Jay Coghlan.
Nov. 16, 2011
By Wren Abbott
From the Santa Fe Reporter
Los Alamos National Laboratory is doubling down on a project that helps create a controversial, highly reactive new fuel used in nuclear power plants. Beginning next year, LANL will create twice as much plutonium oxide, an essential component of mixed oxide, or MOX, fuel, which combines uranium and plutonium.
MOX fuel is believed to have amplified the effects of the recent nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan.
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| | | published Monday, November 14, 2011 | 1109 Views :: 2 Comments |
November 14, 2011 Contact: Rachel M. MacNair, Ph.D., Petition Coordinator (816)753-2057 or Ann Suellentrop(913)271-7925 Having once again collected in the range of 5,000 signatures from Kansas City Missouri residents, this time on two separate initiative petitions, KC Peace Planters turn in both sets of petitions to the City Clerk at 10 am on Monday, November 14, 2011.
Below is a short summary of each initiative, and below that is the precise legal language. We listened carefully to objections raised by councilmembers in our previous effort, and we believe these are strengthened and will more clearly stand up in litigation if necessary.
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| | | published Sunday, November 13, 2011 | 650 Views :: 0 Comments |
Nov 13, 2011From the Albuquerque Journal
LOS ALAMOS – From the fourth floor of the newest building on Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium row, geophysicist Terry Wallace can see the Pajarito Fault three miles away.
The fault’s forested stair step, created in a series of earthquakes over the past million years, defines the base of the mountains rising to the west. It has also come to play a defining role in discussions of the major buildings along Pajarito Road, home to the lab’s main nuclear facilities. To the north, the lab’s Plutonium Facility is in the midst of a major retrofit because of concerns about earthquake safety. The work will not be done until 2020.
Up the road, lab officials are struggling to move out as quickly as they can from the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Building, an old nuclear lab not designed to modern earthquake standards. Below Wallace’s vantage point is the site of what lab officials hope will become, in the next decade, a major new plutonium lab.
Questions about earthquake safety surround all of the projects.
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| | | published Thursday, November 03, 2011 | 929 Views :: 0 Comments |
ANA thanks the Santa Fe Reporter for their excellent feature article on toxic waste coming from Los Alamos National Laboratory. The following article quotes several ANA members and asks "Why are we expanding weapons production and cutting corners on environmental protection?"
Nov. 2, 2011
By Wren Abbott
From the Santa Fe Reporter  In the summer of 2010, an excavator lifted a 1940s-era radiation protection suit from a pit in Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Technical Area 21. With it came two pickup trucks of the same vintage—one of which may have been involved in the famous Trinity nuclear test near White Sands—and a 30-foot-tall chemical mixing tank.
The successful excavation of Material Disposal Area B, the lab’s oldest waste site, disproved a commonly held belief: that comprehensive cleanup of radioactive waste at the lab was cost-prohibitive, if not impossible. The project cleared a 200,000 square foot area and removed 750,000 cubic feet of toxic waste that had lain dormant since World War II. It cost $110 million—a modest sum for a facility with an approximately $2 billion budget.
Unfortunately, Area B is one of 24 waste sites at LANL, which in 1944 started burying everything from uranium chips to contaminated dump trucks in unlined pits. More than half of the lab’s estimated 17 million cubic feet of remaining waste lies in Area G—the only disposal site where LANL continues to dump, and one it seeks to expand. Though Area G’s fate has been bandied about for decades, it has now reached a critical turning point.
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| | | published Friday, October 14, 2011 | 875 Views :: 0 Comments |
October 12, 2011
By Los Alamos Monitor Staff
A Record of Decision has been issued for the Chemistry Metallurgy Research Replacement (CMRR) facility Wednesday afternoon by the National Nuclear Security Administration.
The new facility will consist of two buildings which will be linked by tunnels.
Sources close to the situation have indicated the decision has been made to move ahead with the project that promises to be an economic shot in the arm for the Los Alamos area at least during the construction phase of the multi-billion dollar project.
The NNSA is remaining mum on the decision, according to spokesperson Toni Chiri, who said a press release will be issued Thursday morning with details of the ROD.
“We will be spending tonight making Congressional notification,” she said.
Controversy has swirled around the project since planning for a replacement began in 1999 for the aging 550,000 square foot CMR building that was originally completed in 1952.
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