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Albuquerque Journal via AP
The Los Alamos National Laboratory could become the home to a $6 billion research center.
SANTA FE, N.M. -- At Los Alamos National Laboratory, scientists and engineers refer to their planned new $6 billion nuclear lab by its clunky acronym, CMRR, short for Chemistry Metallurgy Research Replacement Facility. But as a work in progress for three decades and with hundreds of millions of dollars already spent, nomenclature is among the minor issues.
Questions continue to swirl about exactly what kind of nuclear and plutonium research will be done there, whether the lab is really necessary, and — perhaps most important — will it be safe, or could it become New Mexico's equivalent of Japan's Fukushima?
As federal officials prepare the final design plans for the controversial and very expensive lab, increased scrutiny is being placed on what in recent years has been discovered to be a greater potential for a major earthquake along the fault lines that have carved out the stunning gorges, canyons and valleys that surround the premier U.S. nuclear weapons facility in northern New Mexico.
Final preparations for the lab — whose high-end price tag estimate of $5.8 billion is almost $1 billion more than New Mexico's annual state budget and more than double the lab's annual budget — also comes as a cash-strapped Congress looks to trim defense spending and cut cleanup budgets at contaminated facilities like Los Alamos. It also comes as the inspector general recommends that the federal government consider consolidating its far-flung network of research labs.
Despite the uncertainty, the National Nuclear Safety Administration, an arm of the Department of Energy that oversees the nation's nuclear labs, is moving forward on final designs for the lab. Project director Herman Le-Doux says it has been redesigned with input from the nation's leading seismic experts, and the NNSA has "gone to great extremes" to ensure the planned building could withstand an earthquake of up to 7.3 magnitude.
Most seismic experts agree that would be a worst-case scenario for the area. But many people who live near the lab — and have seen it twice threatened by massive wildfires in 10 years — see no reason for taking the chance.
"The Department of Energy has learned nothing from the Fukushima disaster," said David McCoy, director of the environmental and nuclear watchdog group Citizens Action New Mexico, at a recent oversight hearing. That's become a common refrain since last year's earthquake and tsunami in Japan caused a meltdown at one of its nuclear plants. "The major lesson of Fukushima is ignored by NNSA: Don't build dangerous facilities in unsafe natural settings."
Lab officials say CMRR is needed to replace a 1940s era facility that is beyond renovation yet crucial to supporting its mission as the primary center for maintaining and developing the country's stockpile of nuclear weapons. While much of the work is classified, they insist the lab's mission is to do analytical work to support the nearby Plutonium Facility, or PF-4, which is the only building in the country equipped for making the pits that power nuclear weapons.
Watchdog groups, however, call it an effort by the DOE and NNSA to escalate the production of new nuclear weapons and turn what has largely been a research facility into a bomb factory.
And they are not giving up their efforts to halt the project. The Los Alamos Study Group, headed by Greg Mello, one of a number of area activists who have made a career out of monitoring LANL, has two lawsuits challenging the project and what he says is the federal government's refusal to look at alternatives despite the increased seismic threats uncovered in 2007 that have sent the price tag soaring.
Mello spends his days poring over every available public document on Los Alamos and the nation's nuclear program. And he makes frequent trips to Washington to lobby against funding for CMRR, which he says is an unnecessary attempt to "open the door for an overall expansion in intensity and scale" of the nation's nuclear weapons program.
At just about every public hearing related to the labs, Mello lines up with a regular group of aging hippies, retired scientists, former lab employees, residents of nearby pueblos as well as housewives and grandmothers from Santa Fe and other neighboring communities to oppose CMRR and anything and everything related to an expansion or continuation of the nuclear mission at Los Alamos.
While much of the public outcry over Los Alamos in recent years has focused on lagging cleanup efforts of radioactive waste and hazardous runoff into the canyons that drain into the Rio Grande, earthquake danger and the potential for catastrophic releases of radiation from existing facilities was front and center at a recent meeting in Santa Fe of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, appointed by Congress to oversee the nation's nuclear facilities.
"The board believes that no safety issue problem in (the nation's nuclear complex) is more pressing than the plutonium facility's vulnerability to a large earthquake," the board's chairman, Peter Winokur said in reference to efforts to reinforce PF-4.
The board has worked closely with NNSA to ensure CMRR is designed to withstand a major quake, so Winokur said the board is not concerned about that project — "as long as they follow through."
It's that follow through that has watchdogs concerned.
"Los Alamos doesn't have that safety ethos needed for a facility that will store the bulk of the nation's stockpile of plutonium," Mello said
Winokur agreed that safety remains a concern at the lab.
Since the last contractor took over operations in 2006, he said, "It's fair to say they have improved safety at the sites." But he pointed to two recent memos about deficiencies in nuclear safety programs that he said underscore the fact "that the operations out there are very challenging and that there is plenty of room for improvement."
Asked if he thought it was wise to spend billions of dollars to keep the nation's nuclear weapons operations centered on an earthquake-prone mesa, Winokur said his mandate from Congress is to oversee safety, not second guess major policy decisions.
"I'll leave that to Congress and DOE about whether or not they want to build a facility of that nature in that region of the country where they do have a fairly large earthquake threat," Winokur said.
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AND JUST WHO'S DISTRECT IS THIS BOON DOGGEL IN ?????
Another money pit put atop a fault line . Next up will be coast over runs and so it goes. I thought we were getting out of the nuclear wepons game . Must have had a bad dream . Sorry bout that .
bob
Bob, can you not spell? "Boon Doggel" is BOONDOGGLE. "Distrect" is DISTRICT. "Wepons" is WEAPONS.
And how about "coast over runs"? At least they won't have to worry about tsunamis.
The Party of NO are sure to have a feildday with this one.
Why do we need 6 billion for nuclear facility? Haven't we been told the Taliban is making suitcase nuclear weapons in caves with no electricity?
why 6 billion is almost enough to fund out overseas adventures for 1/2 a week. We have priorities. We need marines in Australia, we need troops in Germany, and Greece, and Spain etc. Why would we want to divert money from the war machine, so we do not need the war machine?
Yeah Bob, it was a dream.
We're not out of the game. As a matter of fact, China is escalating the game.
Actually, making Nuclear Weapons and not using them is a lot cheaper than deploying troops. In that sense the cold war with Russia...which we are still playing cat and mouse with them...was the best of both worlds. China is next.
From your always watchful and helpful Departments of the Interior and Energy:
It is estimated that the plant is unsafe because there is an unlikely but real chance that an asteroid could come hurtling from space, crash into the plant, and cause a nuclear meltdown. Therefore, before we can build the plant we will need to place construction on indefinite hold to assess needed regulation in light of this new scenario.
Also, it has come to the government's attention that butterflies in the area will be forced to fly around the building under construction. This will cause what we have determined to be undue, unjust, and damaging stress to the local butterfly population. Therefore, we have determined that that construction should be suspended indefinitley until we can assess regulation to govern the impct on each species potentially threatened by this new construction.
***
Fourty Years Later
***
It has been determined that the plans for construction are now obsolete and incompatible with current regulations. Therefore we are suspending the construction of this building indefinitely until the contractors can draw up new plans for how the plant is to be constructed at which time construction will be suspended until we can assess needed regulation.
This lab is exactly what our defense budget should be going towards. We need to reign in our overseas empire of bases, end the foreign wars, and focus on military R&D here in the homeland.
Spades, were you talking about LANL or giving Harry Reid's description of Yucca Mountain. The gov wasted 30 years and a few billion on that one, and didn't even have a technical reason for cancelling that one (other than Harry Reid campaigning for Obama's election)
Building this 'research facility' will only cost each tax payer $43. Los Alamos is no longer a 'research facility' - it is a bomb factory, nothing more. I doubt there will be many private sector spin offs.
To give perspective - the USS Ronald Reagan cost $4.5 billion when it was christened in 2001. The USS George H. W. Bush cost $6.2 billion when it was christened in 2009. The United States operates 10 Nimitz class carriers with annual operating costs of $120 million, each - $1.2 billion for all. Of course that does not include operating personnel, aircraft costs, facility costs, or the cost of support vessels.
Heck, if each tax payer can spend $43 to build a floating target and another $8.50 a year to keep it on the target range - $43 for a bomb factory is a bargain.
Good lord. The idiots who failed 8th grade and can't even spell want the U.S. to give up on science. Wonderful!
Can someone throw a bucket of cold water on Bob and tell him that ignorance isn't a virtue?
OH MY GOD!!!! Stop all nuclear experimentation. There may be an earthquake! Oh the humanity!
Oh wait, the Fukushima damage had nothing to do with the earthquake , it was from the tsunami.
OH MY GOD!!!! Stop all nuclear experimentation. There may be a tsunami! Oh the humanity!
And look what we have here. Another moonbat who can't stand the thought of America having the capacity to defend itself. Let's talk about how entitlement spending is costing each American hundreds of dollars. People like you are a diease to this nation.
The only unsuspecting weapons to come out of this is a dirty bomb.
@Thel4ugh!ngm@n - I agree, the democrats will have a..um fielddayyyamadoo..um with this.
@KiloByte1339 -- Defending the country is one thing. Defending votes with pork is another. How many Mk48's can a Nimitz survive? How many Exocets does it take to overwhelm the defenses - and how much will those Exocets cost? How much does a Chinese diesel/electric cost? Asymmetric warfare becomes very expensive when major assets are expendable.
The money can be spent wisely or foolishly. Spending money on a 70 year old weapon technology seems foolish. Defense is sort of like education - just throwing money at it will not bring success ...
@drewbot7 -- Los Alamos is in New Mexico Congressional District 3 - Rep. Ben Luján [D-NM3]. The two New Mexico Senators are Sen. Jeff Bingaman [D-NM] and Sen. Tom Udall [D-NM].
Your beloved nuke factory is completely in the hands of Democrats ...
Some of the cost is necessary and some of it is waste. Its hard to show the need for this expense when there is so much poverty in the USA. When an American adults can't spell and are doomed to dead end jobs. Its all hard to justify this expenditure. When Americans are denied medical treatment because they dont have medical insurance, How can you justify this?
What and why? I hopefully believe that these facility was built to make things safer and better for the people who work in the military industrial complex. The building of a state of the art facility can lead to better research and lower costs. The key in the military is to be ahead of the enemies that lurk everywhere. Its the paranoia that lets this be built. The paranoia is well founded though illusionary.
The money spent here means money not spent on education or social security. Who here would give up there education or social security?
You just said Americans can't spell so what education would they be giving up? We are over educating our population with dead beat degrees. The college students i go to school with have degrees in political science or marine biology and you ask them what they want to do with that type of a degree guess what their answer is? ..."I don't know". Social security is a pyramid scheme it requires the next generation to pick up the bill and has no end, as long as the generation keeps growing it will be paid for ..but guess what? Thats stopped the scheme is over we lose. Its time to get rid of social security, get rid welfare and unemployment, we need to go back to food lines, make people go to the hundreds of charities that are available, if they want to retire they can save money, work hard.
France has a method of dealing with nuclear waste that refines it and fuses it into a glass cylinder. The US objects to this method because it is essentially irreversible. Any nuclear accident amounts to letting the genie out of the bottle - so using the above logic, we should not be doing it at all. Military and NASA space projects are one thing, generating power could be done other ways and does not justify the risk. Playing chicken with Mother Nature is just plain stupid. You know we will lose in the end. Politics and money are what drives these decisions to ignore the obvious.
Sadly we have no strong leadership on either side of the aisle in DC. We have all the resources and know how to be energy independemt which would defund our enemys around the world and create millions of jobs at home but we seem to be held hostage to enviromentalists idiots and greedy oil corps. We are so screwed.
France's method to deal with waste is the same as ours: They are digging a hole in a mountain to bury it as a write this.
France has a good program of standardization and fuel re-processing...but it still does not make money as good as it is and it still generates waste. Because the government runs the facilities they can actually shut down and turn off plants as needed on weekends or low demand, and keep other plants running over the weekends and not shut down by selling electricity to surrounding countries AT COST.
No matter how your crunch the numbers, you cannot run power plants this way without losing money. Power generation and fuel is economy of scale. Period. The fact that it is state run just allows the losses to be absorbed in the budget while at the same time looking good from the "revenue" money coming in from selling to surrounding countries at rock bottom price.
Don't get me wrong, they are as best an example that you will get to run such a program. The problem is..it still falls short and still generates waste...even more waste in the form of low level handling and processing waste, that they have to bury.
There is a reactor design that uses nuclear waste (or anything else radioactive) as fuel. It cannot suffer a meltdown, as the containment vessel can easily withstand the maximum temperature of the core.
If only the government had not suspended funding to complete the research to make this reactor a reality, our energy problems (as well as the nuclear waste problems) would be over.
Tomorrowsnews: France has had 57 nuclear accidents since 1988. France does derive 80% of their energy needs from Nuclear energy but has declared a moratorium on any new construction pending a national review of their nuclear energy policies and a review of nuclear safety programs currently in place. Seems France has about 30% of their nuclear plants that were similar in construction to the problem reactors in Japan. Perhaps you should do a little research before simply offering generalties?
sundiver: search "magnetohydrodynamics": 80% generative efficiency, compared to nuclear(50%) or coal/natural gas (40%) boilers. plasma produced creates little or no toxic waste, and the exhaust gas can also produce electricity like conventional boiler technology.
medic, also costly, difficult to control, complex...
great on paper. in the real world, not so much.
If you have a smoke detector or carbon monoxide detector in your home - you have a radioactive source in your home. You can verify that with a Geiger counter or a film strip. That is why those detectors are not recyclable and prohibited from trash. If you live in the middle of the US - you probably have radon in your basement and likely have radon in your drinking water. Radon is a natural decay product for uranium. You are constantly bombarded with cosmic radiation every second of every day.
We live in a radioactive universe. There is no place to hide from it ...
I think you gentlemen are referring to what is known as a "breeder" reaction. Essentially taking Uranium 238 adding neutrons and then letting it decay to plutonium. From what my physics professor told me that reaction makes it a lot easier to make nuclear weapons and we can send our nuclear waste to France to get it bred. Nuclear power is over 1000 times more efficient than coal. We can just send the nuclear waste to the sun E=MC squared MOFO's!
and
actually, the advanced breeder reactor can , with reprocessing, burn 98% of the material that we are trying to dispose of as "waste". and yes, you are correct in that it can't melt down, if it heats up, the geometry of the rods changes and slows down the reaction. it could go for centuries without a single pump running and never melt(pump failure caused by power loss is the thing that killed fukishima, and a vulnerability in nearly every reactor in the US today).
the final waste from an advanced breeder reactor is also much shorter lived, it will decay to natural background levels in 300 years instead of millions of years. we can design safe storage for 300 years, we can't design safe storage for millenia. (and sending it to the sun is a really bad idea, if the rocket fails, you have a real disaster)
The U.S. Army can't even account for $6 Billion in Afghanistan. $6 Billion of taxpayer dollars just disappeared in Afghanistan over the past 10 years.
6 billion; what happened to the trillions in bailout and stimulus in 3 freakin years?
Your clueless tomorrowsnews, the first part of the auto project was to start in Finland and Biden and ppl knew about it beforehand, then the second part of the project will commence in Delaware and that is where the money comes in. Read the whole story before making judgements
@lourdesmanos - John McCain and John Kerry plus two other senators found 12 billion missing from the department of education in a single year back in the late nineties. No one cared than, no one cares now.
wrong, they won't let new posters paste links
do you know what "top secret" means?
the technology export will end as congress does their best to strip all basic research and the far right does their best to strip all education out of the budget along with the ever-decreasing investment by American companies in basic research despite record cash hordes that they use to buy out any competition.
@tomorrowsnews
Too bad you didn't read the entire story.... You might have seen this...
Once again, the people on the right just don't get it.... btw, the program was passed and signed into law by Bush....
and you can post urls if you've been around newsvine long enough...
@tomorrowsnews -- Fisker has received $688 million from private funding along with the $529 million loan from DOE. If the government was stupid for making the loan - the private investors must be stupid-er. Maybe the production in Finland is being paid for with private money ...
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/fisker-327739-company-solyndra.html
Fisker is planning to begin assembly of their Nina model in Delaware beginning in 2013.
yeah yeah, beck and rush have melted your brain. your paranoid ranting and screaming is every single bit as mindless as anything you accuse the "left" of with global warming.
not going to happen, LOL
DOE is one of the most CORRUPT and ineffective agencies of the Federal Government. The contracting officers sign truly sweet heart COST PLUS type agreements which should be illegal.
This is NOT specific but is indicative of the things that happen in cost plus agreements with DOE:
A contractor 'remodels' an area. Doing so, they place a door in the wrong location and paint the walls the wrong color. To "CORRECT" these errors, the contractor is paid for the original work, then is paid again for making the corrections including all expenses and overhead plus profit.
DOE should be eliminated and senior management fired. There are probably wonderful scientists working there, but it is a GROSSLY and borderline criminally managed organization.
Well, there you go - the DOE was the department that Rick Perry wanted to eliminate but couldn't remember - the infamouse "brain freeze".... So, you want to eliminate all nuclear weapons research as well as cleanup of legacy nuclear waste? Because that's what's in the DOE (should be really the Department Of Nuclear Weapons).. Hmmm - don't thing you're fellow Repugs will go along with that...
The nuclear facility is the last of the priorities for these guys, the main object is to give contracts to the corporations who are going to build the facility and make money. The rest is not their concern.
The US cannot be trusted with nukes. The only country to murder civilians with nukes is the US.
That was a different time. In WWII, carpet bombing cities was common place, and dropping some A-bombs on Japan was no different. Getting Japan to surrender by dropping two bombs saved the lives of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of Japanese civilians who would have been killed in a land invasion of Japan by allied forces. And that doesn't even take into account the number of casualties we would have suffered at the hands of the brave Japanese soldiers defending their homeland to the death.
I will say, however, that it is a little hypocritical that we (the U.S.) condemn Iran and North Korea for trying to produce nuclear weapons, while at the same time developing the next generation of nukes here at home.
And that is in dispute.
In his memoirs Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman's CoS, wrote:
Many other high ranking military and civilian officials of the time also spoke out against it either then, or somewhat after. It's almost a 50-50 thing.
Getting Japan to surrender and stop the war without dropping the bombs was a 50-50 thing.
Getting Japan to surrender and stop the war by dropping the bombs was a 100-0 thing.
Any way you look at it, they still dropped nukes on civilian targets. Furthermore, as a poster above noted, the Japanese were ready to surrender. They were just shopping for terms. Two nukes and a few hundred thousand civilian lives later -- ok, we're out, no terms necessary.
There were powerful forces, figuratively speaking, that really, really wanted to use these things. Possibly it was not merely to show the world (think USSR) that we had them, but that we were inconsiderate enough to actually use them.
One more comment -- the motivation for building these things was that the Germans were trying to build them too. When Germany surrendered earlier in 1945, that motivation should have disappeared. To our shame, it did not.
GLOCKHEAD Have you ever been to another country,The US is the best country in the world you live here defend it.......
The Japanese General Staff knew they were defeated, but they refused to surrender. They were ready to fight to the death. It was only after the A-bombs fell that the Emperor ordered them to surrender. To refuse an order from the Emperor was unthinkable.
There was a contingency plan to "carpet bomb" Japan with A-bombs if they didn't surrender and an invasion became necessary. US troops would move inland through the bombed areas to occupy the islands. Most generals had no idea what the radiation would do to their own men.
Where did you come up with this notion of carpet bombing Japan.
Please provide your sources.
The U.S. only had two nukes, Fat Man and Little Boy, that was it, and they took years to build at that time.
Mike0...I think carpet bomb was the wrong thing for him to say, but we did promise after dropping little boy:
"you can surrender now or we can destroy your cities one by one. ....."
And we would have done it, one bomb and one city at a time. The only thing they were worried about was after fat man we did not have enough material breeding fast enough for more than 2 or three more implosion devices
More to the point, they might have carpet (fire) bombed with non-nuclear ordinance. It was effective everywhere, but even more so in Japan where so many houses were wood and even paper.
In fact, MORE were killed by the fire bombing of Tokoyo than the A-bomb.
and telling them that we had 20 more ready to go when we wouldn't have another ready for six months.
also true
no, we didn't have enough material for even one more device
The genie is out of the bottle. The USA can never leave the nuclear weapons game. Why?
Its the only game. Its cheaper then conventional war.
Danwill...
We had enough for 2 more.
We had the two piece (test) core that irradiated Harry Daghlian (Demon Core) and enough in the production breeder for another.
The Demon core was later detonated in 1946 during Crossroads if I am not mistaken.
ok glen, I had heard otherwise
:)
Glen -- interesting. Do you have a source for further reading?
Bringing me waay back when I read for days about this....
You can look up the Demon Core on line and start reading from there, looking at the dates and such. If they would have used this one and as a result set aside testing I am sure came up for debate.
Also read up on the history of the Hanford Washington site which was the first breeder for the project and when and how it produced material and its early history
I knew part of the story of the demon core (2nd incident), I didn't know about the first.
I just thought it wasn't ready until after WWII ended.
The most amazing part about this is the fact that these guys actually handled this stuff...in the open in a workshop, playing around with sheet metal, plywood, and reflective materials like tungsten carbide cutting steel and aluminum...and screwdrivers!
All this "hands on" made made version of a barely primordial element that has not been around on earth alongside any lifeforms for billions of years in any detectible amounts...and the two do not go together...for good reason.
And on a large scale they later contaminated vast amounts of material and resources in the wholesale handling, separation and "manufacture" of it.
hey, the "final" cleanup of Hanford is only going to run to about $100 billion or so...
but the simple truth is that nobody really knew that long-term radiation exposure was really a problem, they figured that if you didn't die of acute exposure, you would recover just fine.
Yes...I guess you are correct since it was not until the 1950's that Watson and Crick mapped DNA and later years that we could actually detect accummed mutations in it. Many research people died working with xray and other radiation sources, my cousin being one of them..all through the 40's she was a pioneer on electron and xray microscopes (acquired German technology after the War) She was dead within a decade and a half.
Los Alamos is the bedrock of the nuclear age, it resides at the pinnacle of nuclear research and presides over the entire history of the American nuclear technology and staff. It must be maintained if we are to maintain our defenses and technology. The envir. communists that have taken over much of the movement just want to debunk and neuter our capabilities, and 3 generations of NMexicans have benefited by the lab, the universities there are stronger because of it, and the people have had a much higher standard of eduction and living due to it. AND ther has never been a major incident, and the lab is NOT a nuclear reactor! you all are comparing oranges to fish. Yes DOE sucks, but so does the DOJ and The EPA and every other agency under Obama. It is the leadership STUPID.
It is the leadership. Frightening enough now with Dems- terrifying with GOP sociopaths.
Edwardo, in a nice testimony to your patriotism then, why don't you move to Northern New Mexico? I bet your wife and kids (if you have any) would bless your heart for it.
Cutting science research...we're already falling behind the other high GDP/wealthy nations and offer few jobs for scientists outside of becoming a teacher (professor at a university).
End the failing and illegal wars, and there's $1 trillion that was going to be wasted on Lockheed, Halliburton, Raytheon, millions of gallons of fuel, etc.
That is the problem. Everytime we spend money on the weapons for the military, it means less money and opportunity cost for other things.
Is that the truth? Maybe the trillions spent on the wars could of been spent here in the USA and now there would be a cure for cancer?
Maybe, We won't know if we keep having endless wars.
The DOE is developing a method to render ATOMIC bombs useless. Enough said
We need butter not guns.. give these eggheads a hoe..
Now there's an intelligent response...NOT!
The United States would never spend billions of dollars that could not benefit their military dominance. The Shuttle program produced unmanned Space Shuttles controlled by the military. It can show up anywhere once up and take out satellites before any country had a chance to take it down. They probably want to produce a high intensity air to ground laser system powered by a space based nuclear power source.
Well, you can bet the cost and quality of healthcare in the USA is not going to benefit from any research being done in that hawk-war-mongering enteprise.
Fearmongering article. The media loves conflating atomic power with nuclear weapons and combining three different subjects into one - keeping the public well uninformed. Disinformed populace makes for bad voting decisions. "Let's see, we have to write about a nuclear research lab on a desert mesa in the Southern Rockies, so let's mention a powerplant on a Japanese coastline. They both have the word 'nuclear' in them and we don't have the time or inclination to research or understand the actual issues and besides, it's not our job". Because, clearly, selling ads trumps insight, fact, and clarity.
Jackson, what are you smoking? You wrote, "...a nuclear research lab on a desert mesa in the Southern Rockies.." Have you ever looked at a map of the United States? Do you possess any statistical data as to how many people's life would be directly or indirectly jeopardized by a nuclear accident if something went wrong in Los Alamos? Or, do you believe that a few hundred thousands of American lives are nothing in comparison to producing some nuclear weaponry?
The plant is necessary for our friends from outer space to refuel their spacecrafts! Duhhh!!!
It's rather obvious that this planned lab is an environmental disaster waiting to happen. Better planning and understanding should have killed the project before it left the drawing boards. Now the truth is finally coming out that is sole purpose is a bomb factory. And even more interesting is that it is severely over budget. Strike one . . . strike two . . . strike three----you're out!
No way should a bankrupt country waste money on such a wasteful venture. If they want to build it, they should go pass the hat around the billionaires who aren't paying any tax to see how patriotic they are.
Right on. And let them build the same lab in their own backyard, Ricksta.
Why New Mexico.....another cesspool?
Pinky, Pinky, Pinky, are you able to reason at all?
Los Alamos has been in NM since the 1940s.
Why do you think NM is a cesspool? Have you ever been there? It's a beautiful state.
New Mexico
Cleaner than Old Mexico
In a payback to Jim Wright they killed the accelerator in Texas after tons of money were already spent and construction progress was well underway. So what gives now? It was boosting the local economy of Waxahacie, Texas like nothing seen before, then there were the piles of concrete castings for the tube just sitting there by the highway. Funny how all this works. It was politics back then, it is probably politics now. Just a different state with different political pockets open.
alsophia: Politics didn't kill the supercollider program, fire ants did! Those pesky critters developed a taste for the insulation found on practically all of the electrical wiring used at the site.
Pretty sure that Los Alamos is not where we should be looking to cut corners.
If those guys say they need a better facility, then it's probably a good idea to give it to them.
TJP
Many of "those guys" (I am assuming you are referring to scientists working at Los Alamos) are not happy about making their lab into a bomb factory, either. Facilities like this, if we absolutely insist on building them, should be built someplace else, not where human life can be endangered. Real estate in Santa Fe is currently among the most expensive ones in the South West. What do you think will happen if masses of people figure out they have built their million dollars worth of homes in a potential graveyard that could be nuked for the coming 100 years and beyond? The area also happens to be covered in pristine woods, flora and fauna. Don't we have enough uninhabited deserts to build such dangerous facilities?
Oh quit bitching! --- Alien technology is costly to reproduce
Carbon junkies!
Bring it to Nebaska.
As a reporter who worked for the pathetic local rag in Los Alamos, I can tell you there is no more a dysfunctional place in the United States. The arrogance of DOE, NNSA (new name, same a-holes) knows no bounds. Greg Mello and his allies are right. These people are a danger to themselves and others.
Greg Mello is more than just a watchdog and a great guy he was one of my math teachers in high school. A round of applause for a man who champions for safety and sanity in a corporate military industrial complex... LANL!
Good Grief! NIMBY yuppiesall over again. Soon they will be BANANAS...Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anytthing. More than any thing else, THIS is why the world is the way it is: comfort loving self-indulgent 0-2 children safety freak EXPLITIVE DELEATED stupid citizens. Atomic weapons have saved a billion lives at least so far...at least that many would have doed had we continued to have the customary war every 7 years and the even more customary, for the last 500 years, World War every generation. BUILD THE DARN THING.