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Nuclear labs face workforce cutbacks within 10 years

By James W. Brosnan
Wednesday, December 19, 2007

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WASHINGTON — One in five nuclear weapons jobs at New Mexico's two national laboratories would be gone in a decade under a plan by the National Nuclear Security Administration to reduce the size and scope of the weapons complex for a post-Cold War world.

Most of the jobs would be lost through attrition or transfer to other priorities, such as nonproliferation or counterterrorism, NNSA Administrator Thomas D'Agostino said Tuesday.

None of the eight labs or plants in the nuclear complex would be eliminated, he said, but 600 buildings would be shuttered or torn down, the land area reduced by 30 percent, and the workforce of 27,000 cut by 20 to 30 percent.

The plan was announced as Congress prepared to send to President Bush a catchall spending bill that restored $418 million of the $600 million cut earlier by the House for nuclear weapons work.

But it also came as Bush announced that by year's end the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile would be one-quarter its size at the end of the Cold War. Although the exact number is classified, independent scientists estimate the stockpile is several thousand warheads more than the 1,700 to 2,200 operational warheads permitted under a treaty with Russia.

Sandia officials said they plan to reduce from 8,338 employees to 7,800 by 2011. Los Alamos currently has nearly 11,000 employees, including contractors and students, but has announced plans to eliminate up to 750 jobs through buyouts or layoffs.

But the plan also would guarantee a future for both Los Alamos and Sandia by eliminating redundancies at other locations.

For instance, Sandia will keep its Red Storm supercomputer but it will not get one to rival the super-fast Roadrunner at Los Alamos or the Blue Gene at Lawrence Livermore. Instead, Sandia will be expected to integrate its high-performance computing with other laboratories.

Sandia spokesman Michael Padilla said the NNSA plan is consistent with the labs' evolving national security mission.

Sen. Pete Domenici, an Albuquerque Republican, inserted a provision into the spending bill that requires the Department of Energy to create "centers of excellence" at Sandia and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to maintain U.S. leadership in high-performance computing.

D'Agostino said he had not examined the provision, but said it would not necessarily conflict with the NNSA plan to force the labs to work more closely together.

Under the NNSA plan, Los Alamos would remain the only production site for the plutonium pits that trigger nuclear warheads. Facilities would be upgraded to a capacity of 80 pits a year.

The draft plan effectively drives a stake through the Bush administration's earlier plan to build a center in Nevada or Texas to produce up to 125 pits a year.

"NNSA is finally acknowledging reality in the face of repeated defeats in Congress," said Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico.

But Coghlan also questioned whether NNSA needs to make 80 pits a year in the light of another administration defeat in Congress this week. Appropriators halted production funds for the next generation of nuclear weapons, dubbed the Reliable Replacement Warhead.

Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore would remain competitors in designing nuclear weapons under the NNSA plan, but Los Alamos would be the premier site for plutonium research.

Los Alamos Director Michael Anastasio said the selection "confirms that Los Alamos is first and foremost a science R & D (research and development) laboratory."

Much of the plan is driven by the need to reduce the cost of guarding the weapons laboratories and plants. According to NNSA officials, the cost has rocketed from about $200 million a year in 2001 to almost $700 million a year today.

At the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Y-12 plant where uranium bomb parts are manufactured, for example, the size of the plant's footprint would be reduced by almost 90 percent and the workforce cut by 30 percent.

Members of the New Mexico delegation reacted with cautious optimism to the NNSA plan.

Said Domenici, "Fundamentally, the plan is not radical, but an affirmation of the direction the labs have been moving in recent years."

He said Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore should "all have good futures" if Congress supports the transformation.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, a Silver City Democrat, said that with the reduction in the nuclear weapons stockpile, the cuts at the labs "should come as no surprise," but that the labs should pick up new work in energy and research.

"I will be working very hard with the entire delegation to identify and support new missions that will keep the scientists and engineers at our labs very busy for years to come," said Bingaman.

Rep. Heather Wilson, an Albuquerque Republican, said the NNSA plan lays the groundwork for modernizing the weapons complex, but she questioned the plan for supercomputers.

"While some elements of hardware might best be consolidated at our physics laboratories — Livermore and Los Alamos — I believe Sandia must also continue to strengthen its expertise in computing in order to accomplish its missions," she said.

Rep. Tom Udall, a Santa Fe Democrat, who was criticized for supporting the initial House budget for the weapons complex, said the NNSA plan underscores that Los Alamos "must adapt to a changing reality."

He said Los Alamos must expand its role in growth areas cited by D'Agostino — nonproliferation, nuclear incident response and forensic and intelligence analysis.

But for some, the NNSA plan does not go far enough.

"It's ludicrous," said Coghlan. "NNSA is proposing to consolidate eight weapons sites at eight weapons sites."

Stephen Young, senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said, "My guess is that the transformation is more than we need."

He said the Department of Energy seems determined to maintain the capacity to design new nuclear weapons and produce lots of plutonium pits.