 | |
Aerial view
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| Established | 1943 |
|---|---|
| Budget | $2.92 billion |
Field of research
| |
| Director | Thom Mason |
| Staff | 12,752 |
| Students | 1,613 |
| Location | Los Alamos, New Mexico, United States 35°52′32″N 106°19′27″WCoordinates: 35°52′32″N 106°19′27″W |
| Affiliations | |
Operating agency
| Triad National Security LLC |
| Website | lanl |
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory
| |
  | |
| Location | Central Ave., Los Alamos, New Mexico |
| Coordinates | 35°52′54″N 106°17′54″W |
| Area | 22,200 acres (9,000 ha) |
| Built | 1943 |
| NRHP reference No. | 66000893 |
| Significant dates | |
| Added to NRHP | October 15, 1966 |
| Designated NHLD | December 21, 1965 |
Los Alamos National Laboratory (Los Alamos or LANL for short) is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory initially organized during World War II for the design of nuclear weapons as part of the Manhattan Project. It is located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the southwestern United States.
Los Alamos was selected as the top secret location for bomb design in late 1942, and officially commissioned the next year, under the management of University of California. At the time it was known as Project Y and was the center for weapon design and overall coordination. Other labs, today known as Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Hanford Site, concentrated on the production of uranium and plutonium bomb fuels. Los Alamos was the heart of the project, collecting together some of the world's most famous scientists, among them numerous Nobel Prize winners. The site was known variously as Project Y, Los Alamos Laboratory, and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory through this period.
The lab's existence was announced to the world in the post-WWII era, when it became known universally as Los Alamos. In 1952, the Atomic Energy Commission formed a second design lab under the direction of the University of California, Berkeley, becoming the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Since that date the two labs have competed on a wide variety of bomb designs. With the ending of the Cold War, both labs turned their focus increasingly to civilian missions. Today, Los Alamos is one of the largest science and technology institutions in the world. It conducts multidisciplinary research in fields such as national security, space exploration, nuclear fusion, renewable energy, medicine, nanotechnology, and supercomputing. The town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, directly north of the lab, grew extensively through this period.
After several reorganizations, LANL is currently managed and operated by Triad National Security, LLC.
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. 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.
General Leslie Groves
wanted a central laboratory at an isolated location for safety, and to
keep the scientists away from the populace. It should be at least 200
miles from international boundaries and west of the Mississippi. Major
John Dudley suggested Oak City, Utah or Jemez Springs, New Mexico but both were rejected. Jemez Springs was only a short distance from the current site. Project Y director J. Robert Oppenheimer had spent much time in his youth in the New Mexico area, and suggested the Los Alamos Ranch School on the mesa.
Dudley had rejected the school as not meeting Groves’ criteria, but as
soon as Groves saw it he said in effect "This is the place". Oppenheimer became the laboratory's first director.
During the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos hosted thousands of employees, including many Nobel Prize-winning scientists. The location was a total secret. Its only mailing address was a post office box, number 1663, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Eventually two other post office boxes were used, 180 and 1539, also in Santa Fe. 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, Japan, University of California president Robert Sproul did not 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 first stages of the explosion of the Trinity nuclear test.
The work of the laboratory culminated in several atomic devices, one of which was used in the first nuclear test near Alamogordo, New Mexico, codenamed "Trinity", on July 16, 1945. The other two were weapons, "Little Boy" and "Fat Man", which were used in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Laboratory received the Army-Navy ‘E’ Award for Excellence in production on October 16, 1945.
Post-war
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.
The name officially changed to the Los Alamos Scientific
Laboratory on January 1, 1947. By this time, Argonne had already been
made the first National Laboratory the previous year. Los Alamos would
not become a National Laboratory in name until 1981.
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 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. During the late-1950s, a number of scientists including Dr. J. Robert "Bob" Beyster left Los Alamos to work for General Atomics (GA) in San Diego.
Three major nuclear-related accidents have occurred at LANL. Criticality accidents occurred in August 1945 and May 1946, and a third accident occurred during an annual physical inventory in December 1958.
Several buildings associated with the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos were declared a National Historic Landmark in 1965.
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
that no longer required as much research towards developing new nuclear
weapons and has led the lab to increase research for "non-war" science
and technology. 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 contributed to the early development of the flow cytometry technology. In the 1950s, researcher Mack Fulwyler developed a technique for sorting erythrocytes that combined the Coulter Principle of Coulter counter
technologies, which measures the presence of cells and their size, with
ink jet technology, which produces a laminar flow of liquid that breaks
up into separate, fine drops. In 1969, Los Alamos reported the first
fluorescence detector apparatus, which accurately measured the number
and size of ovarian cells and blood cells.
As of 2017, other research performed at the lab included
developing cheaper, cleaner bio-fuels and advancing scientific
understanding around renewable energy.
Non-nuclear national security
and defense development is also a priority at the lab. This includes
preventing outbreaks of deadly diseases by improving detection tools and
the monitoring the effectiveness of the United States’ vaccine distribution infrastructure. Additional advancements include the ASPECT airplane that can detect bio threats from the sky.
Medical work
In 2008, development for a safer, more comfortable and accurate test for breast cancer
was ongoing by scientists Lianjie Huang and Kenneth M. Hanson and
collaborators. The new technique, called ultrasound-computed tomography
(ultrasound CT), uses sound waves to accurately detect small tumors that
traditional mammography cannot.
The lab has made intense efforts for humanitarian causes through its scientific research in medicine. In 2010, three vaccines for the Human Immunodeficiency Virus were being tested by lab scientist Bette Korber and her team. "These vaccines might finally deal a lethal blow to the AIDS virus", says Chang-Shung Tung, leader of the Lab's Theoretical Biology and Biophysics group.
Negative publicity
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 pleaded guilty to a single
count and the other 58 were dismissed with an apology from U.S. District
Judge James Parker for his incarceration. Lee had been suspected for having shared U.S. nuclear secrets with China, but investigators were never able to establish what Lee did with the downloaded data.
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. 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 two weeks. In 2003, the laboratory's director (John Browne) and deputy director resigned following accusations that they had improperly dismissed two whistleblowers who had alleged widespread theft at the lab.
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 August 2004 newsletter he wrote, "This willful flouting of
the rules must stop, and I don't care how many people I have to fire to
make it stop". Nanos is also quoted as saying, "If I have 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, but the two
surplus barcodes nevertheless appeared in inventory. Auditors
incorrectly concluded that two disks were missing. The report states,
"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.
Science mission
Los Alamos National Laboratory's mission is to solve national security challenges through scientific excellence.
The laboratory's strategic plan reflects U.S. priorities spanning
nuclear security, intelligence, defense, emergency response,
nonproliferation, counterterrorism, energy security, emerging threats,
and environmental management. This strategy is aligned with priorities
set by the Department of Energy (DOE), the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and national strategy guidance documents, such as the Nuclear Posture Review, the National Security Strategy, and the Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future
Los Alamos is the senior laboratory in the DOE system, and executes work in all areas of the DOE mission: national security, science, energy, and environmental management. The laboratory also performs work for the Department of Defense (DoD), Intelligence Community (IC), and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), among others.
The laboratory's multidisciplinary scientific capabilities and activities are organized into four Science Pillars:
- The Information, Science, and Technology Pillar leverages advances in theory, algorithms, and the exponential growth of high-performance computing to accelerate the integrative and predictive capability of the scientific method.
- The Materials for the Future Pillar seeks to optimize materials for national security applications by predicting and controlling their performance and functionality through discovery science and engineering.
- The Nuclear and Particle Futures Pillar applies science and technology to intransigent problems of system identification and characterization in areas of global security, nuclear defense, energy, and health.
- The Science of Signatures Pillar integrates nuclear experiments, theory, and simulation to understand and engineer complex nuclear phenomena.
Through partnerships across government agencies, laboratories,
universities, and industry, Los Alamos integrates science, technology,
research and development solutions to achieve the maximum impact on
strategic national security priorities. To further these collaborative
efforts, Los Alamos operates three main user facilities:
- The Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies: The Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies is a DOE/Office of Science National User Facility operated jointly by Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories with facilities at both Laboratories. CINT is dedicated to establishing the scientific principles that govern the design, performance, and integration of nanoscale materials into microscale and macroscale systems and devices.
- Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE): The Los Alamos Neutron Science Center is one of the world's most powerful linear accelerators. LANSCE provides the scientific community with intense sources of neutrons with the capability of performing experiments supporting civilian and national security research. This facility is sponsored by the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, Office of Science and Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology.
- The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL), Pulsed Field Facility: The Pulsed Field Facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, is one of three campuses of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL), the other two being at Florida State University, Tallahassee and the University of Florida. The Pulsed Field Facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory operates an international user program for research in high magnetic fields.
As of 2017, the Los Alamos National Laboratory is using data and algorithms to possibly protect public health by tracking the growth of infectious diseases. Digital epidemiologists at the lab's Information Systems and Modeling group are using clinical surveillance data, Google search queries, census data, Wikipedia, and even tweets
to create a system that could predict epidemics. The team is using data
from Brazil as its model; Brazil was notably threatened by the Zika virus as it prepared to host the Summer Olympics in 2016.
Laboratory management and operations
Around
LANL's 43-square-mile property are 2,000 dumpsites which have
permanently contaminated the environment. It also contributed to
thousands of dumpsites at 108 locations in 29 US states.
Contract changes
Continuing
efforts to make the laboratory more efficient 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 had
difficult relations many times since their first World War II contract,
this was the first time that the university 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 led 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 sixty
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
with effect October 1, 2007. 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 those UC
would have given them, LANS no longer guarantees full pensions to newly
hired LANL employees. It now provides basic 401(k) retirement saving options.
On June 8, 2018, the NNSA announced that Triad National Security, LLC, a joint venture between Battelle Memorial Institute,
the University of California, and Texas A&M University, would
assume operation and management of LANL beginning November 1, 2018.
Safety Management
In
August 2011, a near criticality incident happened with eight rods of
plutonium placed close to each other to take a photo. In the aftermath,
12 of 14 of the lab's safety staff left in anger about their advice
being dismissed by the management. Without safety management, the
Plutonium Facility PF-4 was shut down in 2013 and is still closed in
2017 because the lab fails to meet expectations. As a consequence, the U.S. Department of Energy, sought alternative suppliers the LANL's management contract.
The lab was penalized with a $57 million reduction in its 2014 budget over the February 14, 2014 accident at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant for which it was partly responsible.
In August 2017, the improper storage of plutonium metal could have triggered a criticality accident, and subsequently staff failed to declare the failure as required by procedure.
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. IBM Roadrunner, which was part of this network, was the first supercomputer to hit petaflop speeds.
Until 1999, The Los Alamos National Laboratory hosted the arXiv e-print archive. The arXiv is currently operated and funded by Cornell University.
The coreboot project was initially developed at LANL.
In the recent years, the Laboratory has developed a major research program in systems biology modeling, known at LANL under the name q-bio.
Several serials are published by LANL:
- National Security Science
- 1663
- Community Connections
- Actinide Research Quarterly
- @theBradbury
- Physical Sciences Vistas
LANL also published Los Alamos Science from 1980 to 2005, as well as the Nuclear Weapons Journal which was replaced by National Security Science after 2 issues in 2009.
Controversy and criticism
In
2005, Congress held new hearings on lingering security issues at Los
Alamos National Weapons Laboratory in New Mexico. But documented
problems continued to be ignored.
In November 2008 a drum containing nuclear waste was ruptured due to a 'deflagration' according to an inspector general
report of the Dept. of Energy, which due to lab mistakes, also occurred
in 2014 at the Carlsbad plant with significant disruptions and costs
across the industry.
In 2009, 69 computers which did not contain classified information were lost. 2009 also saw a scare in which 1 kg (2.2 lb) of missing plutonium prompted a Department of Energy
investigation into the laboratory. The investigation found that the
"missing plutonium" was a result of miscalculation by LANL's
statisticians and did not actually exist; but, the investigation did
lead to heavy criticism of the laboratory by the DOE for security flaws
and weaknesses that the DOE claimed to have found.
Institutional statistics
LANL
is northern New Mexico's largest institution and the largest employer
with approximately 8,762 direct employees, 277 guard force, 505
contractors, 1,613 students, 1,143 unionized craft workers, and 452
post-doctural researches.
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 quarter 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 US$2.2 billion.
