The LANL Director mentioned Non-proliferation is a big part of their work. However, the Nuclear Nonproliferation program budget is a mere 6.5% of the total Lab budget (Nuclear Weapons is 84%, with a Billion dollar increase for FY26). https://nukewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/FY26-Lab-Table-spreadsheets-Chart-1.pdf Nuclear Nonproliferation is a valuable program that LANL does well, and its funding should not be cut to provide more money for nuclear weapons production (literally the opposite of nonproliferation). The Nuclear Nonproliferation budget should be increased, especially if the Lab director agrees on its importance. NukeWatch NM is entirely supportive of LANL’s Sealed Sources program, which serves as the nation’s lead for collecting potentially dangerous radioactive materials that are no longer needed, securing them, and ensuring they don’t fall into the wrong hands, protecting communities and enhancing security.
On the discussion of AI missions at the lab:
The lab is partnering with NVIDIA for their hardware and ChatGPT/Open AI for their models. “The goal is to harness the power of the next evolution of high performance computing and apply it to our national security science and technology. Big development on this front is the “genesis” mission…” and in an answer to a question, want to “use artificial intelligence to [for example] help us develop the molecules that could deliver a therapeutic isotope to a cancer cell with high specificity so that when that undergoes radioactive decay the decay products basically kill the cancer cell but no surrounding tissue”
Again, the lab’s nuclear weapons budget ate up almost all else this year – how does the lab propose to work on this kind of work when its’ science budget is less than 1%? How will this advancement of AI be applied to our national security science and technology in terms of nuclear weapons? NukeWatch has serious concerns and questions regarding the tangible risks associated with integrating commercial AI infrastructure to be with active national security and nuclear defense programs. Beyond this, a $1.25 billion advanced computing campus is planned in Michigan to support far-away Los Alamos Lab in high-performance computing and AI research.
From InsideClimateNews Oct. 8, 2025: “The University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Laboratory want to add a 300,000-square-foot taxpayer-subsidized data center with a 20-acre electric substation to the landscape.
The proposal has ignited a controversy. Township leadership has accused the university of being deceptive about its plans for the $1.25 billion data center, and wants U-M to instead build it in an industrial area.
Meanwhile, a group of about 300 residents called Stop The Data Center does not want a data center anywhere in Ypsilanti Township. They oppose it over potential increases in utility bills, local water pollution, regional air emissions and the center’s national security role. They labeled the township’s plan to relocate the center near a low-income area as “environmental racism,” and have protested at township meetings and board members’ homes.” https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08102025/los-alamos-university-of-michigan-national-security-data-center/
NukeWatch NM stands with the Ypsilanti Township in protesting this data center and holds the same concerns about environmental impact, water usage, and the data center’s and AI’s role in nuclear-related research.
The electric power capacity upgrade project (EPCU):
“This is actually a key component of enabling the high performance computing and artificial intelligence needs of the future. We were becoming limited by the amount of power that’s available at Los Alamos, that entails not just a new distribution line from Santa Fe up to Los Alamos (which was the subject of a of a lot of public discussion) but also the distribution system for that electricity around the lab which is aging and in need of replacement. That’s a really important development for our future commissions.”
Over 24,000 people provided public comments to the Department of Energy (DOE) and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in opposition to the proposed EPCU Project. Because of strong cultural and ancestral ties, the Pueblo of Tesuque has been and is very strong in its opposition. While DOE and NNSA state that they need more power for plutonium pit production, the annual electrical needs of LANL and Los Alamos County have remained steady at 90 megawatts for the past 25 years. https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2023-11/draft-ea-2199-epcu-project-2023-11_0.pdf, p. 13 of pdf.
NukeWatch seriously questions LANL’s unsupported statements that it could run out of energy. Further, even if more energy is needed for the lab’s expanded mission, the National Nuclear Security Administration did not provide complete information on viable alternatives in its EPCU Environmental Assessment. The draft LANL Site Wide Environmental Impact Statement clearly indicates that up to “159 megawatts of solar photovoltaic arrays across the site” could be installed as part of NNSA’s preferred Expanded Operations Alternative. That alone could eliminate the need for the EPCU.
Shipping of flanged tritium waste containers (FTWCS) –
“Was completed safely … all of them now [have] been shipped to their final disposal site and there was a miniscule release sort of radiation associated with that. In fact, in the time that you’ve spent listening to me since I started speaking you will have received more radiation from the air you breathe and the room you’re in than anyone in northern New Mexico would have received from that event in operation of the FTWCs.”
While rhetorically and politically effective, this statement is not only also incredibly rude in downplaying the community’s concern over this venting, it is also somewhat misleading. It mixes external background radiation (which is low and continuous) with the potential for internal exposure to tritium – a key difference because tritium is most harmful if inhaled or ingested. LANL’s reported off-site dose for the FTWC operation is very small, but worst-case modeled scenarios and community concerns about monitoring, assumptions, and internal uptake remain important. The claim that “you get more from the air in this room” is misleading if it ignores inhalation/ingestion/internal dose. The lab needs to understand that transparency and independent data, as part of and along with basic respect shown to the community, are what will actually reassure the public. LANL’s original estimate of 100,000+ curies that could be released from this operation was more than enough cause for concern.
Gloveboxes:
The lab is “doing a lot of work in the Pajarito corridor, where our plutonium facility PF4 is located. Glove boxes are going in and out of PF4, there’s a larger investment in modernizing infrastructure in the Pajarito corridor to support that, with things like office buildings and parking spaces and the sort of blocking and tackling of infrastructure that you need to make sure that everything is operating smoothly in the PF4 facility.”
On October 11, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board sent DOE a letter titled Review of the Los Alamos Plutonium Facility Documented Safety Analysis, which reiterated the DNFSB’s concerns about safety at the Lab’s plutonium facility, PF-4. The Board has focused for decades on nuclear safety at PF-4. During that time, the Board has identified significant public health and safety issues with the facility, resulting in formal recommendations, correspondence, and public hearings.
LANL submitted a new draft nuclear safety analysis to DOE in April 2024. The Board determined that this safety analysis “depends on assumptions that cannot be technically verified and are sometimes non-conservative. The heavy reliance on computer models, rather than the set of engineered controls typically used to protect the public at DOE facilities (such as safety-class active confinement ventilation), also adds more uncertainty to the analysis…Unverified assumptions and worker actions which have not been documented as required safety controls may not protect public safety.” Many safety projects have been significantly delayed, including projects to address seismic vulnerabilities for fire suppression and glovebox systems.
The DNFSB and DOE have been arguing about active vs. passive confinement at PF-4 for decades. The DNFSB wants active confinement, which means that things such as doors would automatically close and fans would automatically turn off during an earthquake or fire. This would automatically confine the plutonium in the building. DOE prefers passive confinement, which basically requires the last person to leave PF-4 during a fire to close the door. DOE seemed to finally agree to go with active confinement.
But DOE has stated that the planned strategy at PF-4 would shift away from active confinement. The main problem is that an active confinement ventilation system would require substantial facility upgrades far in excess to those that are currently planned. Since 2022, DOE has fully embraced a passive confinement strategy for the Plutonium Facility.
“Predicting the amount of release under passive confinement conditions can be quite complex. Fire or explosions could add energy to the facility’s atmosphere and introduce a motive force that could carry hazardous materials through an exhaust path. In addition, quantifying the leakage area that exists in a facility, which is analogous to the periodic containment leak rate tests required at commercial nuclear reactors, although possible, is not easily and accurately accomplished at nuclear processing facilities. Therefore, determination of the amount of radioactive material that could escape the facility becomes very complex and uncertain.”
Another issue is glovebox upgrades. DOE is currently upgrading the pit production gloveboxes. While these gloveboxes mostly protect workers, some gloveboxes are expected to contain molten plutonium. These present a large enough risk in a post-seismic environment (i.e., the molten plutonium itself can serve as an ignition source) that they must be credited with a higher level of seismic resistance.
Apart from these pit production gloveboxes, there are hundreds of other gloveboxes in the Plutonium Facility, most of which are only credited to withstand certain lesser seismic events to protect workers. Until recently, many of the gloveboxes associated with this (much larger) subset were unanalyzed such that their expected post-seismic performance was unknown. Many of these deficient gloveboxes are associated with processing heat source plutonium Pu-238, a high-hazard material which accounts for much of the facility’s overall safety risk.
On Pit Production:
“With regard to pit production we’ve been ramping up the operations in the facility. About a year ago we went from working 10 hours a day four days a week to 24 hours a day four days a week, 24/4 shift so doubling the number of productive hours available in the plant. and then in the spring we ramped up further to 24/7 operations at 7 seven days a week 24 hours a day. Not full-on operations all 24 hours we obviously do more during the day … but we need the extra time just because of the large volume of work we have upgrading the infrastructure and improving the facility to make sure it’s fit for purpose for the long haul. It’s sort of a midlife refit if you will.
… “We met all of our goals for pit production. We no longer talk about the exact number of pits that we make because we’re now making what are called war reserve pits, they meet all the requirements for the deterrent and since the number of weapons is classified we can no longer tell you how many pits we made. When we were doing the development work we were able to be pretty transparent and say this year we made 5 or 7 or whatever but I can say that we’re meeting our production goals.”
“LANL recently produced its first W871 plutonium pit what did you learn from that milestone and how does it shape the path to full production?” “has allowed us to shift our emphasis up. Until achieving that first production unit, our priority was achieving the first production unit. So what that meant was in the constrained space of the PF4 facility, which is very precious floor space and hotly contested between people who need to upgrade aging infrastructure or put in new glove boxes or manufacture pits up until the first production unit, when push came to shove priority went to production because we needed that validation. Now that we have it the priority has shifted to the infrastructure – we’ve got to finish the infrastructure work in order to be able to get to rate production. We are charged with making minimum of 30 pits per year and that’s going to require more copies of the same equipment that we use to make that first pit, but we need to have more of them in order to get that throughput.”
Is LANL saying they are on track to produce 30 pits per year? Or is the priority now to upgrade the infrastructure? It is not clear from these statements. What is clear is that we will no longer know how many pits the lab is producing or on track to produce, now that the first war reserve pit was completed and announced last year.
Warhead production:
“Completion of the last production unit of the B61-12 which was a life extension program. The B61-12 is the gravity bomb that actually is not just part of the US deterrent it’s part of the NATO deterrent so there’s sharing arrangements with other NATO allies that gives them confidence that what’s happening in the Ukraine won’t spread into the NATO countries. In addition to that last production we didn’t miss a beat in shifting gears to focus on the B61-13 and achieved the first production unit at Pantex about a year ahead of schedule. Oftentimes people will hear about challenges that we have and how hard it is to reconstitute production which was something that we got out of for a long time but sometimes forgotten in that is the fact that we are doing a lot of work to modernize our deterrent to make sure it’s fit for purpose and causing our adversaries to think hard before they undertake a venture that would threaten the US.”
The United States has always rejected minimal deterrence, which means having only the smallest possible nuclear arsenal needed to inflict an unacceptable retaliatory blow to deter a first strike from an adversary, acknowledging that more weapons offer little extra security beyond a certain point. The statement from the LANL director above implies that the U.S.’ $1.7 trillion nuclear weapons “modernization” program and expanded plutonium “pit” production is all for deterrence. But in fact, this is a build-up of nuclear warfighting capabilities, which we can see is leading to endless modifications and/or new designs, which the Pentagon calls “flexible capabilities” and “a wide range of employment options.” Nuclear war planning is why we have thousands of warheads instead of just a few 100 for “deterrence.”
What are the implications of this? Nuclear weapons forever:
- Rebuild of existing warheads with new military capabilities.
- New design nuclear weapons that can’t be tested or could prompt U.S. to resume testing.
- New nuclear weapons production facilities expected to be operational until ~2080.
- New heavy bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, new cruise missiles and new strategic submarines to deliver new warheads.
All exceed budgets at enormous expense.
So-called “deterrence,” constantly promoted as deterring threats, is itself the threat!
Environmental Impact:
“It’s sometimes almost a misconception that there’s some sort of tension between the national security needs of production and environmental stewardship or safety or security. The reality is without environmental stewardship safety and security, we don’t produce. If it’s not safe, if the environment is at risk, we are shut down. And that means we’re failing in our national security mission. So it’s not that we have to sacrifice one against the other, the environmental stewardship safety and security are what enables us to meet our national security mission because without that we are sitting on our hands reviewing our training procedures and not getting any of that national security work done. So it’s absolutely imperative that that’s front and center every day.”
This question deserved more airtime in answering than was given by the Director. While NukeWatch NM appreciates the Lab’s efforts to not put any more contamination into the ground, historically and presently the Lab has prioritized nuclear weapons programs over cleanup. Currently, LANL has plans to leave much legacy (pre-1999) wastes buried forever. See https://nukewatch.org/area-c/ for more information.
