Los Alamos National Laboratory

Every time our (former) illustrious senator Pete Domenici is quoted in the newspaper or appears on TV I am reminded of his legacy: Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), where the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were developed and which today continues to poison our land, water, bodies and minds. Everyone knows this, including Domenici, but believes that our economy is so entrenched in LANL that any cutbacks or movement away from arms production would result in statewide economic collapse. (He finally decided not to run for re-election in 2008 because of a brain disease.)

What they fail to acknowledge, however, is that our economy is already collapsed for everyone except the few hundred LANL scientists who live on “the hill” and get paid big bucks to pollute our lives and endanger the world. The rest of New Mexico – particularly northern New Mexico – continues to garner all kinds of claim to fame: highest teen age pregnancy rates; highest per capita heroin overdoses; highest per capita alcohol related deaths; highest poverty rates; worst paid teachers; etc., etc. An announcement by the Lab, after it renewed its management contract with the University of California and Bechtel, is illustrative of the disparity it helps engender. Of the new 20 division managers named under a new administrator, not one has a Spanish surname. The Hispano people of northern New Mexico, who are the majority population, are LANL lackeys: they are the technicians, if they’re lucky, and the grunt workers, if they’re not. Two of my neighbors in the tiny village of El Valle get up every morning at five o’clock to drive the hour and a half to the lab where they are outside maintenance workers, freezing their butts off in the winter and sweating in the overgrown forests they thin all summer.

The rest of us live with the consequences. What those consequences are became abundantly clear during the Cerro Grande fire in 2000. What started as a forest fire in the neighboring Bandelier National Monument (actually a prescribed burn that got out of control), the fire ignited the tinder dry, overgrown ponderosa pine forests that surround the town of Los Alamos, home to the Lab. The Los Alamos site, formally Hispano land grant settlements and Native American hunting grounds on the Pajarito Plateau in the Jemez Mountains, was requisitioned by the federal government during World War II to develop the bomb in relative obscurity. During the cold war, the town of Los Alamos grew up to support the burgeoning bomb machine that ultimately became Los Alamos National Laboratory. Hastily constructed barracks provided instant housing for the scientists and their support crew (although most of the workers continue to live in the valleys surrounding the Lab in their traditional communities). Over the years, more suburban style housing became available, but was primarily frame and flimsy. When the Cerro Grande fire roared through town, it destroyed over 400 of these houses and apartments and then began burning lab facilities, storage pits, and contaminated canyons. Directly downwind, in El Valle and neighboring villages, the sky darkened and irradiated ash fell on our houses and fields. Those who could afford to leave fled: Mark took our son to Colorado to stay at my sister’s while I remained at home to take care of the animals, closing myself into the house as much as possible. Communities like Chimayo suffered under a constant cloud of smoke and many folks had to leave for weeks in order to breathe.

While the Cerro Grande fire brought the dangers of the lab literally into our homes and yards, we’ve all known for years that the Department of Energy has never enforced adequate protections. Radioactive waste has been dumped into canyons, contaminating groundwater and vegetation. Open incinerators have sent radioactivity into the air for us to breathe. For the past several years the Lab has been constantly in the news, as workers have been accused of security lapses, secret files have disappeared, funds have been misappropriated, worker morale has sunk to a new low, and the disparity of pay has been exposed. To address all these concerns, the Department of Energy renewed the lab’s management contract with the University of California, in partnership with the private weapons manufacturer Bechtel to make sure that these problems will continue to be swept under the carpet with corporate efficiency. Under this management, the Lab has been given the go ahead to start producing plutonium triggers (although it remains to be seen how many will be built) for nuclear bombs, work formerly done at Rocky Flats in Colorado, which was shut down and declared a Superfund site because of the contamination this work produced.

I often think that all of us who are activists involved in the many struggles we deal with in New Mexico—poverty, immigrant rights, resource protection, land grants, acequia advocacy—should probably all refocus our energies to shut-down the Lab. It is our most fundamental problem and the source of worldwide grief and suffering. It is an abomination.

Solution: Prohibit any weapons research and development and dedicate the Lab to environmental remediation and alternative energy development.