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In 1985, US President Ronald Reagan and Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
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Fire in glovebox at LANL plutonium facility sparks safety discussion
“The Board is concerned that this significant level of access denial and limitation is occurring simultaneously with a considerable increase in production at defense nuclear facilities and regulatory change,” said the report.
Nuclear Newswire | July 30, 2026 ans.org
According to a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) report, a fire occurred in a glovebox in the plutonium facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory on June 15. A test involving nonnuclear material was underway in the furnace inside the glovebox at the time of the incident.
An explanation for the cause of the fire has yet to be released. The incident has incited discussions among laboratory personnel and management regarding fire safety practices at the facility, including concerns raised by resident inspectors that most gloveboxes in the facility lack automatic fire suppression and that multiple similar preventable incidents have occurred at the facility in the past few years.
What we know: The DNFSB report said that on June 15, personnel were conducting a thermal treatment test of an americium recovery resin. The resin, which contained no nuclear material, had been placed in a furnace inside a glovebox. Having received a permit to do so, they left the room unattended, and when they returned they “smelled an unexpected odor and then saw smoke and subsequently flames coming from the furnace.”
NM Environment Secretary James C. Kenney Takes Aim At Department Of Energy LANL Legacy Waste Cleanup Program During Trinity Commemoration Event In Santa Fe
‘This is not about feelings. When are we talking about feelings; this is about money. If you show me the numbers for legacy waste cleanup at Los Alamos moved to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. You show me numbers that you’re investing in New Mexico and I’ll show you some feelings, but until that time, you have the feelings that I have, which are that I’m really annoyed and I’m really bothered. I’m going to say to say it again. This isn’t about feelings – in some ways it is a lot about feelings in this room – but when it comes to legacy waste cleanup it’s not about feelings – it’s about moving the waste from Los Alamos and getting it into WIPP,” Kenney said.
New Mexico Environment Department Sec. James [Kenney] was the guest speaker at Sunday’s annual Trinity Test Commemoration at St. Michael’s High School in Santa Fe, and was expected to outline the department’s efforts to hold the federal government accountable for cleanup efforts and the protection of New Mexico’s water resources.
Other speakers were Dr. Michael Ketterer, Professor Emeritus at Northern Arizona University; Jay Coghlan, Executive Director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico; and Tina Cordova, Co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. The event is organized by the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, Back from the Brink New Mexico Hub, Interfaith Power and Light New Mexico, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Soka Gakkai International-USA, and the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium.
Later in the afternoon when it was Secretary Kenney’s turn to speak, he recognized that 81 years ago with the Trinity Test, New Mexico and the world changed in “a moment of non-consent, a moment that nobody knew was coming”. He said it changed the trajectory of communities like Los Alamos and all over the state of New Mexico, who are dealing with the fallout of what transpired.
While pointing NMED staff members in the audience who had chosen to attend the event, Kenney said he wanted to be really clear that the Environment Department staff fully recognizes that their past is their call to action. He called those employees the community’s last bastion to hold the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration accountable.
Expanded federal law says these states and parts of others were downwind, but many don’t know they could be compensated
Nuclear fallout gave her cancer. Now she’s a dogged voice for America’s downwinders
When she was 29, Mary Dickson got thyroid cancer and chalked it up to bad luck or bad genes.
Her life had been pretty idyllic, despite being raised against the frightening backdrop of the Cold War.
She spent hours of her childhood running around in the gullies by her home near the mouth of Parleys Canyon in Salt Lake City. The neighborhood was packed with kids who pretended those rising and falling hills were rollercoasters, racing up and down, laughing and screaming. With seven kids in her house, she always had playmates.
Dickson and her friends also pretended at school. Children were taught to huddle under their wooden desks and cover their heads with their hands, pretending Russians were dropping bombs. Each child brought a bleach bottle filled with water, name scrawled in indelible marker so they’d have something to drink should bombs actually fall. Sometimes, they cowered in a “fallout shelter” — a crawlspace under the grade school— waiting for an audible all-clear.
But as most children get to do, Dickson grew up. She went to college, launched a career in journalism, married. Then came the cancer, with its then-brutal treatment: removal of her thyroid and surrounding lymph nodes, followed by radioactive iodine-infused medicinal drinks that made her ovaries light up during monitoring. Hospital staff put a “Caution, radioactive material!” sign on her hospital room door. Even those delivering meals would reach in just far enough to put food on a nearby tray.
KEY POINTS:
- Mary Dickson got thyroid cancer at 29 and only years later discovered it was caused by radioactive fallout from U.S. nuclear weapons tests.
- The government acknowledges downwinders throughout Utah, Idaho and New Mexico, as well as parts of Arizona, Nevada and Missouri.
- But advocates for downwinders cite gaps — cancers and locations — and many people do not know they could be compensated.
Sample Comments for the Draft Plutonium Pit Production Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS)
Why should you comment? This process produces valuable information, increases government accountability and transparency, and creates a legal administrative record that has led to important litigation in the past. The Trump administration is severely limiting and removing key opportunities for public comment and objection. Significantly, there is no other legally required opportunity that enables the public to comment on the “modernization” program to keep nuclear weapons forever.
BACKGROUND: The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is aggressively expanding the production of plutonium pits, the radioactive cores or “triggers” of nuclear weapons. The Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico has been capable of producing plutonium pits since 1996, and until 2018 production was capped at no more than 20 pits per year. NNSA now plans to produce up to 205 pits every year for the new arms race, with at least 80 pits per year made at LANL and at least 125 per year at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina.
Grassroots activist organizations Nuclear Watch New Mexico of Santa Fe, NM; Savannah River Site Watch of Columbia, SC; the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition of coastal Georgia, and Tri-Valley CARES of Livermore, CA successfully sued the NNSA over its failure to complete a required nationwide “programmatic environmental impact statement” (PEIS) for its plan to massively expand plutonium pits production. A draft of this PEIS was released in April 2026, kicking off in-person hearings in Livermore, CA, Santa Fe, NM, Aiken, SC, Kansas City, MO, and Washington, DC, as well as a 90-day public comment period ending July 16, 2026. This provides a unique and critical opportunity for public scrutiny of and formal comment on the government’s plans to make new nuclear bombs for a new arms race!
Plaintiffs Demand Release of Critical Documents and Extension of Public Comment Period on Expanded Plutonium Bomb Core Production
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, July 6, 2026
Contact: Jay Coghlan, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, 505.989.7342, c. 505.470.3154 | Email
Scott Yundt, Tri-Valley CAREs, 925.443.7148 | Email
Georgetown, SC — Today the South Carolina Environmental Law Project (SCELP) notified the Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous nuclear weapons agency, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), that it must publicly release three critical documents. At issue is the fact that NNSA is withholding important information from American taxpayers during a public comment period for a Pit Production Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS).[1] The public comment period ends this July 16 (ironically the 81st anniversary of the Trinity Test of the first plutonium pit).
Plutonium “pits” are the radioactive fissile cores or “triggers” of nuclear weapons. None of NNSA’s future pit production is to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing nuclear weapons stockpile. Instead, it is all for new-design nuclear weapons that could prompt the U.S. to return to testing and accelerate the new arms race.
SCELP, representing the nonprofit organizations Savannah River Site Watch, Tri-Valley CAREs and Nuclear Watch New Mexico, sued NNSA to force it to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act. This resulted in a federal judge finding NNSA violated NEPA and the agency ultimately agreeing to complete a Pit Production PEIS. Now it appears that NNSA is cherry-picking information to support its aggressive agenda of expanded plutonium pit production and suppressing negative information that could work against it.
The three documents that SCELP is demanding are:
- A new plutonium pit life study by independent scientists known as the JASONs. NNSA claims that potential aging effects drive the need for the immediate production of new pits, thereby ruling out the alternative of reusing some 15,000 existing pits. In contrast, a 2006 JASON pit life study concluded that most pit types have reliable lives of more than 100 years and those that don’t have relatively easy fixes[2] (the average pit age is now ~43). We believe that NNSA has been withholding an unclassified summary of the new JASON pit life study since the end of 2025. NNSA has not released it despite requests by Members of Congress and public Freedom of Information Act requests.
- A Department of Energy “Special Study” on NNSA leadership and management of its troubled plutonium pit production program, scheduled for completion in December 2025.[3] That Study is expected to be critical of the new pit production plant at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina, which will be the most expensive building in US history ($30 billion-plus). DOE has not released this Special Study despite requests by Members of Congress and public Freedom of Information Act requests.
- A new “Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis” (PSHA) for the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) that is nearly a decade overdue.[4] A 2007 LANL seismic analysis prompted badly needed seismic upgrades to the Lab’s plutonium pit production facility. NNSA’s April 2026 draft Pit Production PEIS stated that the new PSHA would be completed in early 2026,[5] yet it is still not available for public comment.
Nuclear Weapons Issues & The Accelerating Arms Race: June 2026
Nuclear Weapons:
Budget: Record $1 trillion military budget. Now Trump wants a reconciliation bill that adds $350 billion. He also wants the “Save America” voter suppression Act attached to it which is bound to be ruled not proper by the Senate parliamentarian (reconciliation bills are supposed to deal only with the budget). This could lead to a crisis of some kind.
Favorable polling for Trump is going down with the war in Iran and economic impacts. Will voter suppression will be the only thing that keeps Republicans in control of Congress?
There is also talk of $80 billion supplemental appropriation for the war in Iran.
Defense Authorization Act:
- Passed by House, Senate is considering.
- Hard line House congressional Trumpers want the Save America Act attached to the DAA. That would kill its passage in the Senate and probably won’t happen.
- Proposed 180 pits per year by 2050.
- Numerically expands the US nuclear weapons stockpile to deal with the alleged China threat. This will probably result in MIRVing of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) and more warheads on already MIRVed sub-launched warheads.
- Proposes to more closely integrate US and Israeli military and guarantee $3 billion per year to Israeli military.
Overall trend very bad. Welcome to the new nuclear arms race.
Lawmakers aim to force University of Michigan to follow local zoning rules
The planned computer data center campus is a joint project between the University of Michigan and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory on the north side of Textile Road across from the Ford Rawsonville Plant in Ypsilanti Township.
ANN ARBOR, MI – Three Michigan lawmakers introduced legislation that would curb the University of Michigan’s authority to buy land and expand its footprint across the state.
State Reps. Jimmie Wilson Jr., D-Ypsilanti, Jason Morgan, D-Ann Arbor, and Morgan Foreman, D-Ann Arbor, drafted two bills to go in front of the Michigan Legislature.
The new legislation would require any property UM acquires after Jan. 1, 2027 to remain subject to local zoning rules.
Testing the waters: Feds stop paying to sample LANL runoff
Buckman Direct Diversion picks up the cost for testing the Rio Grande
The federal government has also deferred its remediation of a dump site called Material Disposal Area C, citing its proximity to “active facility operations.” The dump resides across the street from the plutonium handling facility, where work is taking place round the clock.
That facility — officially known as PF-4 — is the linchpin in the nation’s modernization of its nuclear arsenal, which is estimated to cost about $1.7 trillion over the next three decades, or about two Manhattan Projects per year. Los Alamos’ budget for 2026 is expected to be around $5.2 billion, much of it for weapons production. Its clean-up budget, meanwhile, is around $281 million.
“There’s no reason in hell we should’ve lost that $96,000,” said Anna Hansen, a former county commissioner and Buckman board chair. “It’s a drop in the bucket.”
With every spring snowmelt or heavy summer monsoon comes the chance that radioactive particles and toxic chemicals could run down the lobed canyons that are etched into the sides of the Pajarito Plateau and outside the boundaries of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Evidence of Cold War experiments have been detected at high levels in these stormwaters, including traces of high explosives, metals and other radioactive particles, which dispersed across multiple watersheds when scientists tested weapons components in the open air decades ago or were buried in unlined waste pits.
Daniel Ellsberg vs. “Ordinary Insanity”
A new documentary issues an urgent warning about our dangerous nuclear delusions.
Norman Solomon| June 9, 2026 thenation.com
A few days before Thanksgiving in 2021, Daniel Ellsberg looked directly into a camera lens and talked about nuclear preparations for annihilating almost everyone on Earth. “That is insane,” he said. “And you have to call it a kind of ordinary insanity, because it’s so widely shared.”
The new film An Ordinary Insanity condenses Ellsberg’s essential message into a half hour. It follows the acclaimed 2009 documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Judith Ehrlich—who codirected that Oscar-nominated movie and is the director of An Ordinary Insanity—says that “as his understanding of nuclear war evolved, Dan confronted it for us and dug deep into its roots.”
When Ellsberg gave the 7,000 pages of the top-secret Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, he was risking the rest of his life in prison for exposing the official deceptions behind the Vietnam War. That brave act, causing him to be vilified and beloved, began his five decades of tireless antiwar efforts. Through it all, his main preoccupation continued to be reducing the risk of nuclear war.
Early in his professional life, Ellsberg had become a “national security” insider, with expertise in the command and control of nuclear weapons along with strategic planning. Access to official calculations made him aware of scenarios for initiating Armageddon. Some classified plans for starting a nuclear war, with a first strike on the Soviet Union and China, were beyond shocking.
“The Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated in 1961 that the effects of our carrying out those plans, the annual operational plan for which the weapons existed and were on alert, they estimated it would kill 600 million people. A hundred Holocausts,” Ellsberg says in An Ordinary Insanity. “When I saw that estimate in the White House, I thought that was the most evil planning that had ever existed in the history of humanity.”
As scientific research advanced and climate modeling discovered nuclear winter, estimates like 600 million became outdated.
Plutonium Pit Production Draft PEIS Congressional Briefing: Choices Before Congress on Plutonium Pit Production for New Nuclear Warheads
New Nuclear Media: Art, Films, Books & More
Time Zero: 05: The Lab (Part 01)
https://964f6bfd-c857-4667-8d59-615efbd0d7c4.libsyn.com/05-the-lab-part-01
“When the Manhattan Project arrived on the Pajarito Plateau in northern New Mexico, the land was not uninhabited. To establish the highly secretive Site Y, the United States military forcibly removed generations of Nuevomexicano ranchers and blocked regional Indigenous groups from accessing sacred sites. Almost immediately, the lab began detonating massive amounts of explosives, scarring the landscape. Military personnel regularly dumped nuclear waste into local canyon systems that ultimately flowed into the Rio Grande. When World War II came to a close, though, the lab did not.
More than eight decades later, an apocalyptic weapons factory—Los Alamos National Laboratory—still looms over the Pueblos and villages north of Santa Fe. Ninety miles south, Sandia National Laboratory and Kirtland Air Force Base store thousands of nuclear warheads beneath the city of Albuquerque. Both laboratories are expanding in scope and scale.
TELEVISION EVENT Trailer
Television Event is a documentary that follows the dramatic (and sometimes humorous) making and impact of the film The Day After. The 1983 film played a pivotal role in shifting public consciousness around nuclear weapons and, ultimately, President Reagan’s policies. It’s a reminder on the power of art and storytelling to create meaningful change.
The documentary was also reviewed in The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/movies/the-day-after-documentary-television-event.html
More:
In 2023 a book was publishedd about the making of “The Day After”, read the review in Arms Control Today: https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2024-03/book-reviews/apocalypse-television-how-day-after-helped-end-cold-war
As well as: “‘The Day After’: The Arms Control Association’s Forgotten Role.” <https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2019-03/features/day-after-arms-control-associations-forgotten-role> It is a reminder that a few people can, with some luck and good timing, put big things into motion.