Local colleges train students to work in a plutonium pit factory, but at what cost?

It carries a legacy of illness, death and environmental racism for countless others. History tells of a long practice of hiring local Hispano and Pueblo communities to staff some of the most dangerous positions.

History tells of a long practice of hiring local Hispano and Pueblo communities to staff some of the most dangerous positions, a practice that has its origins in the early years of the lab, as Myrriah Gómez describes in her 2022 book Nuclear Nuevo México.

• By Alicia Inez Guzmán Searchlight New Mexico, Jun 10, 2023  https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/local-colleges-train-students-to-work-in-a-plutonium-pit-factory-but-at-what-cost/article_068bd3b2-0589-11ee-b8ba-93e1230989e7.html

Every day, thousands of people from all parts of El Norte make the vertiginous drive up to Los Alamos National Laboratory. It’s a trek that generations of New Mexicans have been making, like worker ants to the queen, from the eastern edge of the great Tewa Basin to the craggy Pajarito Plateau. All in the pursuit of “good jobs.”

Some, inevitably, are bound for that most secretive and fortified place, Technical Area 55, the very heart of the weapons complex — home to PF-4, the lab’s plutonium handling facility, with its armed guards, concrete walls, steel doors and sporadic sirens. To enter “the plant,” as it’s known, is to get as close as possible to the existential nature of the nuclear age.

For 40 years, some 250 workers were tasked, mostly, with research and design. But a multibillion-dollar mission to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal has brought about “a paradigm shift,” in the words of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, a federal watchdog. Today, the plant is in the middle of a colossal expansion — growing from an aged building to what the safety board calls “a large-scale production facility for weapon components with the largest number of workers in its history.”

In short, the plant is slated to become a factory for making plutonium pits, the essential core of every nuclear warhead.

Four years ago, LANL began laying the groundwork for this expansion by searching out and shaping a highly trained labor pool of technicians to handle fissile materials, machine the parts for weapons, monitor radiation and remediate nuclear waste. The lab turned to the surrounding community tapping New Mexico’s small regional institutions — colleges that mostly serve minority and low-income students. The plan, as laid out in a senate subcommittee meeting, set forth a college-to-lab pipeline — a “workforce of the future.”

Taken altogether, Santa Fe Community College, Northern New Mexico College and the University of New Mexico’s Los Alamos campus have accepted millions of federal dollars for their role in preparing that workforce. They’ve graduated 74 people to date, many of whom will end up at TA-55.

As Kelly Trujillo, associate dean of SFCC’s School of Sciences, Health, Engineering and Math, put it, “A lot of these jobs are high-paying jobs and they allow [workers] to stay in their home, in the area that they love.”

The trade-offs, like so much involving LANL’s history in Northern New Mexico, are not without controversy. For many local families, the lab has been a gateway to the American dream. Its high wages have afforded generations of Norteños a chance at the good life — new houses, new cars, land ownership, higher education for their kids. To work there is to become part of the region’s upper crust.

It carries a legacy of illness, death and environmental racism for countless others. History tells of a long practice of hiring local Hispano and Pueblo communities to staff some of the most dangerous positions, a practice that has its origins in the early years of the lab, as Myrriah Gómez describes in her 2022 book Nuclear Nuevo México.

New Mexico’s academic institutions have for decades served as LANL’s willing partner, feeding students into the weapons complex with high school internships; undergraduate student programs; graduate and postdoc programs; and apprenticeships for craft trades and technicians. The lab heavily recruits at most local colleges, too.

Talavai Denipah-Cook can still remember LANL representatives plying her with promises of a high-paying job and good benefits at an American Indian Sciences and Engineering Society conference years ago. At the time, she was a student at a private high school in Española, and the future that they painted looked bright.

“I was like, ‘Wow, that sounds really intriguing.’ We don’t get that around here, especially as people of color,” said Denipah-Cook, now a program manager in the Environmental Health and Justice Program at Tewa Women United, an Indigenous nonprofit based in Española.

Then she remembered the words of her grandmother, a field nurse from Ohkay Owingeh, who once tended to Navajo Nation tribal members affected by uranium mining and saw the health impacts of radiation exposure firsthand.

“She used to tell me, ‘Don’t ever, ever work at Los Alamos National Labs.’”

‘The snake road’

For nearly eight decades, LANL’s repeated attempts to expand have run up against the plateau’s geography. During the Manhattan Project, the site proved problematic in terms of housing, transportation and access along the road that old-timers called el camino de la culebra — the snake road. In more recent years, the lab’s footprint has stretched to encompass a nearly 40-square-mile campus that abuts Bandelier National Monument, U.S. Forest Service lands, the cities of Los Alamos and White Rock, and San Ildefonso Pueblo.

One of its smallest areas, TA-55, sits at the north-central edge of campus. Within is “the plant” — a 233,000-square-foot building that ranks, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, as the only “fully operational, full capability plutonium facility in the nation.”

This is where plutonium and other irradiated materials are conveyed by a trolley system from a vault to rooms lined with gloveboxes, sealed and oxygen-free. Workers, their hands protected by bulky gloves, weigh and handle plutonium in all its forms — molten, metal and powder. They disassemble and inspect existing weapons from the stockpile; forge parts for nuclear batteries that help power spacecrafts; and perfect the dimensions of plutonium “hemishells” on hand-built machines. According to a retired machinist, each pit has to be so precisely crafted that the difference between it and others can vary no more than the width of a strand of hair.

A mass of certifications and protocols are required for every task; there is little margin for error. Should radiation escape its enclosure, a radiation control technician stands by with a Geiger counter to detect it and stop work immediately.

Plant employees earn an extra $20,000 of environmental pay — in order “to attract people, quite frankly, to work in our more challenging facilities,” said Stephen Schreiber, who works in weapons production as the technical director of the lab’s office of Science, Technology and Engineering.

When Joaquin Gallegos, the former chair of NNMC’s Biology, Chemistry and Environmental Sciences Department, recruited high school students to join the college pipeline, he cited the competitive salaries and drew upon his own family history: the aunts and uncles who worked at LANL while continuing to tend multigenerational land.

The lab “subsidized” their lifestyle and made it possible not to “sell out,” Gallegos said. “People who have 10 or 15 acres of agricultural land, that’s not enough to support a family. But if you work at the labs, you could still maintain that culture. You could still raise animals and maintain that as part of your family.”

Pendulum swings for pits

It’s been almost 75 years since LANL last produced plutonium pits at an industrial scale. In 1996, the lab was sanctioned to produce up to 20 plutonium war reserve pits a year for the W88 warhead. It produced 30 pits in a five-year period, until 2012 when all major plutonium operations were suspended, after four pieces of weapons-grade plutonium were placed side by side for a photo op — a positioning that could have caused a runaway neutron chain reaction and a flash of potentially fatal radiation.

“The lab has never had to be accountable for their promises,” said Greg Mello, of the Los Alamos Study Group, an influential anti-nuclear nonprofit based in Albuquerque. “Could they be a factory? Could they produce pits reliably? No. Not at all.”

LANL, regardless, was tapped as one of two sites — the other being South Carolina’s Savannah River plutonium processing facility — to produce no fewer than 80 pits annually by 2030, according to the Fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. The law authorized LANL to produce 30 pits per year by 2026.

What’s being proposed is so huge it has no precedent, said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, an anti-nuclear advocacy organization in Santa Fe.

“Here we have this arrogant agency that thinks it can just impose expanded bomb production on New Mexico,” said Coghlan, referring to the National Nuclear Security Administration, the lead agency for pit production. “They do not have credible cost estimates and they do not have a credible plan for production. But yet they expect New Mexicans to bear the consequences.”

The costs, according to the Los Alamos Study Group, will come to some $46 billion by 2036 — the earliest the NNSA says it can hit 80 pits per year at the two sites. It’s roughly the same amount of money it would take to rebuild every single failing bridge in America.

The NNSA estimates the lab will need 4,100 full-time employees, including scientists and engineers, security guards, maintenance, craft workers, and “hard-to-fill positions,” as LANL has dubbed the pipeline jobs.

It is the most costly program in the agency’s history. It is also destined, Coghlan and others say, to collapse under its own weight. Both Los Alamos and Savannah River are, according to federal documents, billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.

Money, waste and risk

More than $20 billion is slated for paying personnel and underwriting the construction in and around TA-55, including parking structures, office buildings, facilities to process transuranic liquid waste, and demolishing and decontaminating hundreds of old gloveboxes and installing hundreds of new ones. Construction is taking place at night, while staff work toward meeting LANL’s new quota by day.

Safety and controlling risk are paramount, said Schreiber, the LANL technical director. “We really do instill that in our workers.” But observers at the Union of Concerned Scientists say the pace doesn’t bode well.

“When you have new employees who are not very experienced in a new facility running new procedures in a high-risk environment — trying to do it fast, trying to meet a quota — that’s a recipe for something bad to happen,” said Dylan Spaulding, a senior scientist in the nonprofit’s global security program.

New Mexico’s all-Democratic congressional delegation, whatever the controversies, supports the project wholeheartedly. It was Heinrich and South Carolina’s Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham who rallied behind pit production in their states — ushering it into law in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. Then-Congressman Ben Ray Luján helped shepherd money to the pipeline programs.

Radiation 101

Last spring, assistant professor Scott Braley taught two back-to-back introductory courses to 13 future radiation control technicians at NNMC. His lectures covered a host of topics: the history of “industrial-scale” radiation accidents worldwide, algebraic formulas to determine the correlation between individual cancer and workplace exposure, and maximum permissible doses for future workers like themselves. The rates are higher than for the general public, Braley explained, because, for one, radiation workers “have accepted a higher risk.”

Once they get their associate degree, NNMC graduates proceed to the second part of their training, in a Los Alamos classroom. There, they learn how to don and doff personal protective gear — a suit not unlike the one that recent NNMC graduate Karen Padilla said she once used to keep bees. Padilla, 42, participated in simulations of scenarios that she and others might one day face, learning the proper ways to detect radiation around trash and 55-gallon barrels of waste, for instance.

“Long-term, I don’t have really any fears about this because I feel like my instructors are doing a good job of helping me understand how to protect myself” and others, said Padilla. “I think ultimately that’s my job as a [radiation control technician], to protect people who are working, to make sure they’re not getting into something that could be harmful.”

Much of the college programs center around minimizing risk. And yet they present an ethical dilemma, said Eileen O’Shaughnessy, co-founder of Demand Nuclear Abolition.

“What does it mean to assume that exposure is acceptable at all? Because the thing about radiation is it’s cumulative and any amount is unsafe.”

Generations of Northern New Mexicans have faced the same time-worn question: Are the good jobs worth the trade-offs?

“You realize, yes, they are paying you well, but you’re being put in situations that you have no idea about,” said the retired machinist, with over two decades of experience working at the lab, much of it at the plant. He asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “It’s the mentality at the lab,” he said. “They don’t really think that people that are techs are even really worth much.”

A powerful neighbor

Dueling perspectives reveal the chasms around the lab and, in particular, what some consider the Manhattan Project’s original sin: Its use of eminent domain to force Indigenous and Hispano people off their farms and sacred lands on the Pajarito Plateau. Its arrival, oral histories hold, spelled the end of land-based living.

“When did we stop farming to sustain ourselves?” Kayleigh Warren recalled asking a relative from Santa Clara Pueblo. The answer: “When the labs came in.”

Now an environmental health and justice program coordinator at Tewa Women United, Warren has borne witness to the region’s change in values. The lab has so deeply carved itself into Northern New Mexico’s psyche that imagining another future and means of survival has come to seem impossible.

As the single largest employer in northern New Mexico, LANL’s horizon of influence is vast. And with billions more dollars flooding in, its sway in almost every sphere seems only to grow.

Despite the lab’s omnipresence, economic gains have been relatively limited. While Los Alamos County has one of the highest median household incomes in the nation, the surrounding communities — including Española — are among the poorest in the state.

“LANL has been a bad neighbor,” Warren said. “If the economic benefits are so good for them to continue their work and expand, you would think the communities around here would be doing better. But we’re not.”

July 7, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | - plutonium, health, indigenous issues, USA | 1 Comment