LOS ALAMOS, N.M.—Weekends bring a brief respite and slower pace to Los Alamos, New Mexico, the birthplace of the atomic bomb nearly 80 years ago.
Silent mountains thick with ponderosa pine surround the town where some of the nation’s best-kept military secrets reside.
The urban sidewalks are empty, except for the occasional tourist or dog walker, and many of the shops, restaurants, and office buildings are closed.
There’s no traffic on the road from Trinity Drive to Oppenheimer Drive.
But it’s just a matter of time before Los Alamos jumps back into action.
Every Monday, the town roars back to life as commuters arrive by the thousands. The population nearly doubles in this “census-designated place” of 13,460.
Cars line up at security checkpoints to enter the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the county’s biggest employer and the reason for the sudden increase in population.
Employees clear the first barriers, then move through more checkpoints to get to their jobs four days a week.
Many of them drive from residential areas across Los Alamos County (population 19,187), and some commute from as far away as Albuquerque, 96 miles south, or the state capital of Santa Fe, about 35 miles north.
There has always been a housing shortage in the county, local officials said, but the pressures are growing as LANL reaches peak employment at about 19,000 workers. The lab hopes to begin offering round-the-clock shifts in 2025.
According to the plan, in 2021, nearly 55 percent of the LANL workforce lived outside the county.
‘One-Horse Town’
“We’re a one-horse town. Everything the lab does affects everybody,” local realtor Chris Ortega, owner of Re/Max Los Alamos, told The Epoch Times.“The hiring has increased demand. There are fewer houses on the market than there were five or six years ago.
“People are coming and going all the time. Half of the lab lives here in Los Alamos. The other half lives off the hill somewhere—Santa Fe, Espanola, Albuquerque.”
In 2022, there were 8,149 households, 5,229 with families, in Los Alamos County. Most households were made up of two or three people and had an average income of $135,801.
“Based on employment rates and high wages, a family household making more than median income is likely to have a member of the family employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory,” the housing plan states.
A plurality of LANL employees agreed in a previous study that it would be beneficial to live in Los Alamos, provided that they could find suitable housing near the lab.
Housing is hard to find and has been for a long time. Now, it’s worse because of LANL’s latest hiring surge, which started in about 2022 with the government’s plan to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
“It’s difficult to find housing,” said Linda Matteson, assistant county manager for Los Alamos County. “We hear it anecdotally from people we’re hiring—people from the lab.”
Only 14 percent of the land around Los Alamos is county-owned or privately owned, she said. The U.S. Forest Service, Park Service, and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) own the rest.
“We’re very constrained,” Matteson told The Epoch Times. “Of that 14 percent, think about private houses, private land. Think of our geography with mesas and canyons. It’s limited. We, the county, own less than 10 parcels that we could develop. Some are open spaces that you wouldn’t want to develop.”
The plan found that because there isn’t enough housing, many people who do essential work in the community can’t live in the community.
According to the housing plan, rental costs have more than tripled. Real estate website Zillow lists 33 current rentals available. A three-bedroom, one-bathroom house is listed for about $3,000 per month.
The lab is planning to hire hundreds more workers this year and next before slowing down.
“This reflects the high percentage of commuters into the county, a limited supply of available housing, and the potential displacement of families with less financial resources by those with more,” the plan states.
Tax Revenue
The fiscal year 2022 budget for LANL included nearly $2 billion in salaries for employees and $155 million in tax revenues for the county.The lab was responsible for creating 24,169 jobs and contributing $3.12 billion to businesses in New Mexico.
Matteson said that LANL accounts for about 85 percent of Los Alamos County’s gross property tax revenues.
“People come here because of the quality of life and amenities and things like that,” she said. “The county feels it’s our job is to maintain those, increase where we can, and provide those services so people still want to live here.”
In September 2022, LANL announced its master development plan for the next 30 years.
The plan includes an upgraded facility with 100 percent renewable energy from solar and wind power. The goal is to have zero carbon emissions by 2040.
Atomic Legacy
LANL has come a long way since the top-secret Manhattan Project at Los Alamos that made the first atomic bombs used at the end of World War II.On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped a uranium bomb called “Little Boy” on Hiroshima, Japan. About 140,000 people died in the explosion, which had the force of 15 kilotons of TNT.
On Aug. 9, 1945, the second, 21-kiloton atomic bomb, dubbed “Fat Man,” was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. It killed about 74,000 people.
LANL, built in 1943, played a leading role in the development and production of the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.
The $39 billion facility is located about 35 miles from Santa Fe. It covers nearly 40 square miles of DOE property, and encompasses nearly 900 buildings and 13 nuclear facilities.
From 1952 to 1989, plutonium for U.S. nuclear weapons was produced at the Rocky Flats plant near Denver.
When Rocky Flats closed, PF-4 at Los Alamos became the only plutonium facility in the country. The National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA) monitors and oversees LANL’s recycling of plutonium from old plutonium warhead cores, or “pits,” to make new pits.
“Today, the Laboratory is laying the groundwork for manufacturing new pits that are bound for a weapon already in the stockpile, the W87-1 nuclear warhead,” according to LANL.
“Los Alamos National Laboratory remains the only place in the country where pits can be made. This critical mission endures as the driving force for national security through deterrence.”
Building a Better Bomb
The 2022 Nuclear Posture Review of the U.S. Department of Defense identified improving the United States’ nuclear deterrent as a top priority in the face of emerging global threats and challenges.“That modernization effort, which is being carried out over the next two decades, includes initiatives to modernize all three legs of the nuclear triad,” according to a Defense Department statement.
The new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system, Sentinel, will replace the old Minuteman III, which entered service in 1970 and will continue to operate until the mid-2030s.
The Columbia class ICBM submarine will replace the Ohio class submarines, and the B-21 Raider will replace the B-2A Spirit bomber.
The program also calls for upgrading nuclear warheads at LANL, which the DOE controls. The research and production capabilities of the lab are central to that modernization effort.
A law passed in 2018 authorized the lab’s plutonium production facility to make 30 plutonium warhead cores each year until 2026. They will be used to replace existing cores in the aging nuclear stockpile.
The nuclear weapons to receive the plutonium pits made at LANL include the W87-1 warhead for the next-generation Sentinel ICBM; the submarine-fired W93 bomb; and the W76, W78, and W88 warheads.
As reported by the Federation of American Scientists, there are currently 12,121 known nuclear warheads in the world.
There are 5,580 in the Russian Federation, 5,044 in the United States, 500 in China, 290 in France, 225 in the UK, 172 in India, 170 in Pakistan, 90 in Israel, and 50 in North Korea.
The new START nuclear arms reduction treaty of 2010 between the United States and Russia will expire on Feb. 5, 2026.
Legacy Waste
Matteson said there are parcels of government-owned land around Los Alamos that still show levels of legacy contamination from early nuclear research and development.“There are lots of lands we would like to have developed that can’t be transferred to us because of the legacy waste cleanup,” Matteson said.
In 2017, N3B Los Alamos signed a $1.4 billion contract with the DOE’s Environmental Management Field Office to clean up legacy contamination from pre-1999 lab operations.
The company also ships hazardous waste to southern New Mexico for off-site disposal.
Matteson said the remaining contamination prevents the transfer of land for housing development to the county.
“It exacerbates the problem; we need land,” she said. “It can’t happen quickly enough for us.”
In July, a professor at Northern Arizona University took samples from nearby Acid Canyon and found significant levels of radioactive waste in an area without restrictions for the public.
Michael Ketterer, working in cooperation with Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said the plant, water, and soil samples revealed “alarmingly high” concentrations of legacy plutonium along the walking trail near Los Alamos.
“From 1943 to 1963, radioactive liquid wastes were disposed [of] by piping them over the canyon wall,” the nuclear watchdog group said in an Aug. 15 statement.
“Acid Canyon ultimately drains via the Los Alamos Canyon through San Ildefonso Pueblo lands to the Rio Grande. Earlier studies have identified lab plutonium as far as 17 miles south in Cochiti Lake.”
The Atomic Energy Commission said it “remediated” the nuclear waste material at Acid Canyon in 1966 and 1967 and completed additional cleanup in 1982.
The nuclear regulatory agency said the DOE certified that the site “conformed to applicable cleanup criteria in August 1984 and released the affected areas for unrestricted use.”
LANL Director Thom Mason criticized Ketterer’s findings, saying that Acid Canyon is now safe for outdoor activities.
“The articles relied heavily on the messaging by the activists without giving important facts. For example, the articles did not explain the science behind applicable environmental standards, the fact that the Department of Energy has consistently made the same data public, or why the canyon could both have legacy plutonium and be safe for recreation.”
Mason said that “extensive data collected there for decades” has consistently shown Acid Canyon to be a safe place to enjoy the outdoors.
“Unfortunately, what the media didn’t report was that the levels are below what the DOE and EPA say requires further cleanup,” he wrote. “The levels are well within the agencies’ defined safe exposure ranges at less than 0.1 millirem/year, which is many times lower than the DOE public dose limit of 100 millirem/year.
“I want to be clear that legacy waste cleanup and monitoring remains a major priority for the DOE and the Laboratory.”
Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, rejected Mason’s comments.
“Presumably, humans will not be drinking that water,” Coghlan told The Epoch Times. “The serious threat is in plant uptake and subsequent wildfires, which the Southwest is becoming more prone toward.
“There was a catastrophic wildfire in 2000 that burned within a few miles of Acid Canyon. It is a question of when, not if, Acid Canyon burns with subsequent aerosolized plutonium.”
Mason had also addressed the contamination risk from wildfires in his statement, citing two air monitoring samples by the Los Alamos Fire Department and Santa Fe National Forest during a September 2015 prescribed burn in Acid Canyon, in which the “results indicated there was no measurable difference between airborne radionuclide levels before, during, and after the controlled burn.”
Coghlan voiced concern that waste management and expanded plutonium pit production will yield 57,000 cubic meters of radioactive, transuranic wastes over 30 years. Whether there is enough space for storing these waste products remains undetermined, he said.
Growing Pains
On Sept. 24, NNSA Los Alamos Field Officer Manager Ted Wyka addressed the county council with a report on how LANL continues to grow and expand.Wyka said that the plan is to hire 1,400 more employees in 2025.
He said the lab is solving problems associated with its burgeoning employee workforce by offering remote work options and changing work schedules.
By 2027, LANL’s existing power lines will reach their capacity and electricity consumption will exceed supply. Installing an extra power line and internal power distribution system should alleviate the increasing demand, he said.
LANL is also looking for ways to reduce traffic congestion in Los Alamos, such as sharing cars, using public transportation, having more parking, and finding or creating shorter commutes.
Wyka said that aggressive driving continues to be a problem and has led to two fatalities so far this year, as well as backed-up roads.
“This is about safety culture,” Wyka said. “The nuclear business is all about safety culture. That mindset of how you operate and how you get your procedures.
“The fewer cars we have on the road, the fewer accidents that are likely to happen. But people do not want to give up their cars unless they have a system in place to get them to where they need to go.”
He said that LANL is also looking to move to a 24/7 shift schedule and adjust hours to reduce worker fatigue.
Ortega said the challenge for Los Alamos County is finding a balance between housing supply and demand.
There are only 34 active listings for all of Los Alamos and nearby White Rock, while demand countywide is through the proverbial roof.
Ortega said that as LANL goes, so goes the town of Los Alamos and the county.
“I can’t see it changing near term,” he said. “The demand will remain constant and the supply will remain constant.”
