Everything about Los Alamos Laboratory totally explained
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) (previously known at various times as
Site Y,
Los Alamos Laboratory, and
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) is a
United States Department of Energy (DOE)
national laboratory, managed and operated by
Los Alamos National Security, LLC (LANS), located in
Los Alamos, New Mexico. The
laboratory is one of the largest multidisciplinary institutions in the world. It is the largest institution and the largest employer in northern
New Mexico with approximately 12,500 LANS employees plus approximately 3,300 contractor personnel. Additionally, there are roughly 120 DOE employees stationed at the laboratory to provide federal oversight of LANL's work and operations.
Approximately one-third of the laboratory's technical staff members are
physicists, one-fourth are
engineers, one-sixth are
chemists and
materials scientists, and the remainder work in
mathematics and
computational science,
biology,
geoscience, and other disciplines. Professional scientists and students also come to Los Alamos as visitors to participate in scientific projects. The staff collaborates with universities and industry in both basic and applied research to develop resources for the future. The annual budget is approximately
USD 2.2
billion.
Los Alamos is one of two laboratories in the United States where classified work towards the design of
nuclear weapons is undertaken. The other, since 1952, is
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
History
The Manhattan Project
The laboratory was founded during
World War II as a secret, centralized facility to coordinate the scientific research of the
Manhattan Project, the
Allied project to develop the first
nuclear weapons. The laboratory was officially known as
Site Y. In September 1942, the difficulties encountered in conducting preliminary studies on
nuclear weapons at universities scattered across the country indicated the need for a laboratory dedicated solely to that purpose. Manhattan Project scientific director
Robert Oppenheimer, who had spent much time in his youth in the New Mexico area, scouted the area along with General
Leslie Groves and physicist
Ernest O. Lawrence, and decided upon the
mesa which was once the
Los Alamos Ranch School. Oppenheimer became the laboratory's first director.
During the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos hosted thousands of employees in secret (its only mailing address was to a post office box, number 1663, in
Santa Fe, New Mexico), including many
Nobel Prize-winning scientists. Though its contract with the
University of California was initially intended to be temporary, the relationship was maintained long after the war. Until the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Robert Sproul, the president of the University of California, didn't know what the purpose of the laboratory was, and thought it might be producing a "
death ray". The only member of the UC administration who knew its true purpose—indeed, the only one who knew its exact physical location—was the Secretary-Treasurer
Robert Underhill, who was in charge of wartime contracts and liabilities.
The work of the laboratory culminated in the creation of three atomic devices, one of which was used in the first
nuclear test near
Alamogordo, New Mexico, code-named "
Trinity", on
July 16,
1945. The other two were weapons, "
Little Boy" and "
Fat Man", which were used in the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Japan.
After the war, Oppenheimer retired from the directorship, and it was taken over by
Norris Bradbury, whose initial mission was to make the previously hand-assembled atomic bombs "G.I. proof" so that they could be mass-produced and used without the assistance of highly trained scientists. Many of the original Los Alamos "luminaries" chose to leave the laboratory, and some even became outspoken opponents to the further development of nuclear weapons. During the late-1950s, a number of scientists including
Dr. J. Robert "Bob" Beyster left Los Alamos to work for
General Atomic (GA) in
San Diego.
In the years since the 1940s, Los Alamos was responsible for the development of the
hydrogen bomb, and many other variants of nuclear weapons. In 1952,
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was founded to act as Los Alamos' "competitor," with the hope that two laboratories for the design of nuclear weapons would spur innovation. Los Alamos and Livermore served as the primary classified laboratories in the U.S. national laboratory system, designing all of the country's nuclear arsenal. Additional work included basic scientific research,
particle accelerator development, health physics, and fusion power research as part of
Project Sherwood. Many nuclear tests were undertaken in the
Marshall Islands and at the
Nevada Test Site.
Post-Cold War
At the end of the
Cold War, both labs went through a process of intense scientific diversification in their research programs to adapt to the changing political conditions which no longer required as much research towards developing new nuclear weapons. Los Alamos' nuclear work is currently thought to relate primarily to computer simulations and
stockpile stewardship. The development of the
Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test Facility will allow complex simulations of nuclear tests to take place without full explosive yields.
The laboratory has attracted negative publicity from a number of events. In 1999, Los Alamos scientist
Wen Ho Lee was accused of 59 counts of mishandling classified information by downloading nuclear secrets—"weapons codes," used for computer simulations of nuclear weapons tests—to data tapes and removing them from the lab. After ten months in jail, Lee pled guilty to a single count and the other 58 were dismissed with an apology from U.S. District Judge James Parker for his incarceration.
(External Link
) Lee was suspected for a time of having shared U.S. nuclear secrets with
China, but investigations found this not to be true.
(External Link) In 2000, two computer hard drives containing classified data were announced to have gone missing from a secure area within the laboratory, but were later found behind a photocopier; in 2003, the laboratory's director
John Browne, and deputy director, resigned following accusations that they'd improperly dismissed two
whistleblowers who had alleged widespread theft at the lab. The year 2000 brought additional hardship for the laboratory in the form of the
Cerro Grande Fire, a severe
forest fire that destroyed several buildings (and employees' homes) and forced the laboratory to close for several days.
In July 2004, an inventory of classified weapons data revealed that four
hard disk drives were missing; two of the drives were subsequently found to have been improperly moved to a different building, but another two remained unaccounted for. In response, director
Peter Nanos shut down large parts of the laboratory and publicly rebuked scientists working there for a lax attitude to security procedures. In the laboratory's newsletter for August he wrote: "This willful flouting of the rules must stop, and I don't care how many people I've to fire to make it stop"; Nanos is also quoted as saying "If I've to restart the laboratory with 10 people, I will". However, a report released in January 2005 found that the drives were in fact an artifact of an inconsistent inventory system (the report concludes that 12 barcodes were issued to a group of disk drives that needed only 10; the two surplus barcodes nevertheless appeared on a master list). Thus, auditors wrongly concluded that two disks were missing. The report states that "The allegedly missing disks never existed and no compromise of classified material has occurred". This incident is widely reported as contributing to continuing distrust of management at the lab. In May 2005, Nanos stepped down as director.
Contract changes
Political dissatisfaction with UC management of the laboratory led the Department of Energy to open its contract with the University of California to bids from other vendors in 2003. Though the university and the laboratory have had difficult relations many times since their first World War II contract, this was the first time that the university has ever had to compete for management of the laboratory. The University of California decided to create a private company with the
Bechtel Corporation,
Washington Group International, and the
BWX Technologies to bid on the contract to operate the laboratory. The UC/Bechtel lead corporation -
Los Alamos National Security, LLC (LANS) - was pitted against a team formed by the
University of Texas System partnered with
Lockheed-Martin. In December 2005, the Department of Energy announced that LANS had won the next seven-year contract to manage and operate the laboratory.
On
June 1,
2006, the
University of California ended its 60 years of direct involvement in operating Los Alamos National Laboratory, and management control of the laboratory was taken over by
Los Alamos National Security, LLC. Approximately 95% of the former 10,000 plus UC employees at LANL were rehired by LANS to continue working at LANL. Other than UC appointing three members to the eleven member board of directors that oversees LANS, UC now has virtually no responsibility or direct involvement in LANL. UC policies and regulations that apply to UC campuses and its two national laboratories in California (
Lawrence Berkeley and
Lawrence Livermore) no longer apply to LANL, and the LANL Director no longer reports to the UC Regents or UC Office of the President. Also, LANL employees were removed from the UC's
403(b) retirement savings and defined benefits
pension program and placed in a LANS run program. While the LANS retirement program provides rehired UC employees with pensions similar to what UC would have given them, LANS no longer guarantees full pensions to newly hired LANL employees, instead it only provides them with basic
401(k) retirement saving options.
Much concern has been voiced on LANL
blogs and elsewhere about the new contractor's effectiveness in correcting the perceived problems in safety, security and financial management that were cited as the reasons for bidding the contract. Concern has also been voiced about Bechtel's lack of transparency (as a private corporation) and increasing control of national nuclear facilities.
Award of the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory contract to LLNS LLC was announced to take effect October 1, 2007, rounding out Bechtel's control of the bulk of the US nuclear weapons facilities including LANL (design),
LLNL (design),
Savannah River Site(nuclear materials),
Hanford Site (nuclear materials),
Pantex Plant (assembly/disassembly), and
Y-12 National Security Complex (nuclear materials).
Extended operations
With support of the
National Science Foundation, LANL operates one of the three
National High Magnetic Field Laboratories in conjunction with and located at two other sites
Florida State University in
Tallahassee,
Florida and
University of Florida in
Gainesville, Florida.
Los Alamos National Laboratory is a partner in the
Joint Genome Institute (JGI) located in
Walnut Creek, California. JGI was founded in 1997 to unite the expertise and resources in
genome mapping,
DNA sequencing, technology development, and
information sciences pioneered at the three
genome centers at University of California's
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL),
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and LANL.
The
Integrated Computing Network (ICN) is a multi-security level network at the LANL integrating large host supercomputers, a file server, a batch server, a printer and graphics output server and numerous other general purpose and specialized systems.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory also used to host the
arXiv e-print archive.
Directors
Further Information
Get more info on 'Los Alamos Laboratory'.
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