Morale at Los Alamos National Laboratory Continues to Drop *Peace activists from around the nation will gather in Santa Fe, New Mexico to mark the 55th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the second week of August. Monday August 7th and Tuesday August 8th, there will be a conference in Santa Fe at Temple Beth Shalom, followed by a march to Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) on Wednesday, August 9th. The conference will include workshops and panel discussions by environmental activists on topics including uranium mining and milling, nuclear weapons production, militarization of space, the Cerro Grande fire, nuclear disarmament, nuclear waste and transportation, indigenous rights and environmental justice. Wednesday August 9th from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. there will be a non-violent civil action beginning with a rally at Ashley Pond in Los Alamos to bring greater pressure on the Department of Energy (DOE) to end the production of nuclear weapons. The march to LANL will begin at 2p.m. Come join your neighbors, bring your friends; enjoy the music and famous guest speakers. For more information contact Peace Action New Mexico at 505-989-4812. *The morale at LANL is "a serious issue," said U.S. weapons chief John Gordon. Gordon became the first head of the National Nuclear Security Administration on June 28th. Previously he worked at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory and at Sandia National Lab, both in Albuquerque. As a former Air Force general, he commanded a nuclear missile unit and served as associate director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). "He knows his business," said Sandia Lab president C. Paul Robinson at a recent news conference. Critics are not so sure. Gordon was quoted at that news conference saying that the United States is the only nuclear power without the capability to build plutonium cores for nuclear weapons. This is not accurate, as set forth in the publicly available Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement for the Continued Operation of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, published in January, 1999. In the summary section it explicitly states under Section 2.5.2 titled, "Enhancement of Plutonium Pit Manufacturing", that "The Expanded Operations Alternative reflects implementation of the pit (or core) production mission recently assigned to LANL by enhancing the existing capability to manufacture pits. The capacity that results from this enhancement would allow for up to 50 pits to be fabricated each year under single-shift operations (80 pits per year under multiple-shift operations)." In further support of the critics, the LANL statement goes on to say, that "Pit manufacturing activities at LANL are supported by several TA's (technical area's) at LANL." Since Rocky Flats was shut down in an FBI raid in the late 1980's, the pit production equipment was moved to LANL, where between 10 to 20 pits per year are presently being manufactured. Critics of the lab point out how statements made by DOE and LANL officials seem to not coincide with LANL's own Environmental Impact Statement reports. Critics also point out that it is no surprise citizens feel the lab and the DOE lack credibility, and perhaps this is also a small part of why morale continues to drop at the lab. The relationship between many LANL weapons scientists and the FBI became even more tense last week when, according to a labor organizer, a nuclear-weapons designer inside the top-security X Division made a mock Nazi salute to an FBI agent in one of LANL's hallways. The weaponeers in X Division design the plutonium-core first stage for about 80 percent of the nations nuclear weapons. * In response to the Santa Fe-based environmental organization, Forest Guardians who were threatening a lawsuit to stop the environmentally damaging 70-foot, $7 million dam, the Corps of Engineers now says the Pajarito Canyon Dam is not needed to protect White Rock, but to protect Technical Area 18, site of small reactors. Sam Hitt of Forest Guardians believes that the Department of Energy exaggerated the threat of flood danger to White Rock to go around an environmental review of the dam project saying, "It's a crazy, unneeded project that's causing tremendous environmental harm." |
