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| | | published Friday, February 03, 2012 | 119 Views :: 0 Comments |
The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, in collaboration with our allies at the Ploughshares Fund, the Arms Control Association, and the Union of Concerned Scientists present two new fact sheets on nuclear weapons funding.
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| | | published Tuesday, January 31, 2012 | 97 Views :: 0 Comments |
Jan 31, 2012 By John Fleck Albuquerque Journal Staff Writer
It seems to have been sometime during 2007 that the wheels started coming off of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s proposed new plutonium lab.
National Nuclear Security Administration officials were publicly telling congressional auditors they thought the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement project was under control. They said the $800 million price was based on “reliable cost estimates,” and the project was not in danger of heading down the agency’s well-worn path of cost overruns and schedule delays.
Internally, though, there were signs of trouble. The lab’s draft safety plan for the project was “substandard,” NNSA said. By February 2008, the cost estimate had more than doubled to $2 billion, and has continued to climb.
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| | | published Monday, January 23, 2012 | 298 Views :: 0 Comments |
January 20, 2012
By Todd Jacobson From the Nuclear Weapons & Materials Monitor
With less than a month remaining before the Obama Administration’s Fiscal Year 2013 budget release, Los Alamos National Laboratory officials are bracing for what is expected to be a massive cut to its biggest project: the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility. The multi-billion-dollar project that will replace the lab’s aging Chemistry and Metallurgy Research facility has come under fire in recent months, both from Congress and from government watchdog groups like the Project on Government Oversight and the Los Alamos Study Group. Although lab and NNSA officials haven’t said anything publicly about the project, lab officials are privately expecting the worst when it comes to funding for the project, which is estimated to cost between $3.7 and $5.8 billion. “We’re not expecting funding for CMRR,” one official told NW&M Monitor. “Right now, we’re planning to go without.”
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| | | published Monday, January 23, 2012 | 199 Views :: 0 Comments |
The following infographic was developed by the Project on Government Oversight to illustrate how many nuclear weapons and plutonium pits (the nuclear core of atomic weapons) currently our government currently holds in reserve. With so many nuclear components sitting in storage - why do we need to invest billions in producing more?
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| | | published Monday, December 19, 2011 | 678 Views :: 0 Comments |
December 17, 2011
From the Associated Press
The compromise budget bill approved by the U.S. House on Friday slashes funding for and prohibits any site preparation work on a controversial new $6 billion nuclear facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The spending bill appropriates $200 million for the project this fiscal year, $100 million less than the administration had requested. It also notes that “no construction activities are funded for the project this year,” and calls for a new report on the country’s capability for manufacturing “pits,” or the cores that power nuclear weapons.
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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 | 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 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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