For more on Los Alamos, see: https://www.utwatch.org/war/losalamos.html
What is Los Alamos?
Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) is one of the nation’s three nuclear weapons facilities. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were built at LANL during WWII. Located in northern New Mexico, LANL is the largest developer of WMD in the world. One of LANL’s main programs is the Stockpile Stewardship Program which provides for upgrades of every American nuclear weapon, as well as the research and development of new nuclear weapons such as the Robust Nuclear Earth Pentrator. LANL’s budget totals about $2 billion, 75% of which goes towards maintaining or expanding the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
LANL is a government-owned, contractor-operated (GOCO) facility. GOCO means that while the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration ultimately oversees LANL, the University of California System “manages” the Labs. This arrangement between LANL, the DOE, and the UC System has been in place since the LANL’s inception in 1943. Despite this official oversight, LANL effectively functions as an independent bureaucracy.
How is UT involved with Los Alamos?
At this time, UT doesn’t have much to do with Los Alamos, although professors and students already have the opportunity to collaborate with Los Alamos researchers on certain projects. However, the Department of Energy (DOE) has opened bidding to universities and private corporations to manage Los Alamos for the first time in 60 years. The University of California System has managed LANL since its inception in 1943, but security failures, systemic mismanagement, and mishandling of nuclear waste have sullied UC and forced DOE officials to look for another manager. UT believes it is well-positioned to take over management due to its stature as a public top-tier research institute and Texas connections to the Bush administration. The UT Board of Regents voted in February to spend up to $6 million on the bidding process. Hugh Gusterson, a visiting professor from the Georgia Institute of Technology who researches the political culture of nuclear weapons has called UT’s stab at Los Alamos “a vanity bid.”
Why would UT want to manage Los Alamos?
UT administrators and politicians such as Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson believe that LANL will bring “prestige” to UT as well as increased research opportunities for students and faculty. They also cite LANL’s importance to “national security.” “I think we can do an outstanding job, in collaboration with partners, in running a national lab that is very important to the security of this country,” Yudof said in the Daily Texan. It is difficult to discern if reasons of prestige and commitment to national security are the major factors driving folks at the top. The LANL bid has very little support among UT faculty, students, and alumni, leading one to believe that acquiring Los Alamos has more to do with politics than genuine concern for the UT System.
Will LANL bring prestige or research opportunities to UT?
Research: Longhorn students and faculty already have a number of collaborations with Los Alamos, as do many other universities around the country who are not the formal managers of LANL. UT would have no additional research opportunities as a result of managing Los Alamos. “I have interacted with people at Los Alamos on a variety of scientific topics,” Roger Bengston, a physics professor at UT said to the Daily Texan. “I cannot imagine that these interactions would be facilitated by UT holding the contract to manage Los Alamos.”
University of California students, although their school has managed LANL for 60 years, have not had an advantage in garnering LANL opportunities. As a federal institution, LANL is bound by law to weigh all prospective American researchers and students equally. Because lab facilities would remain in New Mexico, UT researchers would not enjoy any greater access to LANL than they already have.
Prestige: While there may be conflicting views on what prestige entails, the UC System has been held accountable for the many things that have gone wrong at LANL. For example, the Department of Energy has reprimanded UC for “for violations of nuclear safety rules and procedures involving the storage of nuclear waste materials” at Los Alamos. When a Tawianese LANL employee was accused of spying and stealing U.S. nuclear secrets for China and later hard drives with sensitive information went missing, UC came under criticism for ineptly handling security. Essentially, UC has functioned as a scapegoat. Although UC has little power to affect LANL management, which has been incapable of reforming itself, it is blamed for mistakes made on-site at Los Alamos. “I don’t see very many benefits that would arise,” said Peter Riley, a UT-Austin physics professor and associate dean for research and facilities. “I see a lot of difficulties, and the difficulties outweigh the benefits.”
DOE officials have come under immense pressure to do something, anything about Los Alamos. Their answer is to let someone else deal with the mess while ignoring the deep-rooted problems at LANL. “The University of California’s performance in managing security at our weapons laboratories is unacceptable and must be immediately addressed,” Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2000. One might add that a university has neither the ability nor the right to be a security force for a nuclear weapons facility. As recently as April 28th, 2004, CNN reported “Security upgrades ordered at nuclear weapons sites after the September 11 attacks may not be fully in place for five more years.” UT would do a no better job than UC of dealing with security risks. Instead of bringing prestige to UT, LANL would be a liability that could seriously tarnish the University’s image as a premier research institute.
How will students be affected by Los Alamos?
One of the big selling points of LANL is that it will afford students the opportunity to work on important scientific research. However, there is no evidence that undergraduate or graduate students will have a greater opportunity to work on important projects. Los Alamos needs scientists to work on huge classified research projects, but the “science” done at LANL is specious in many respects. For one thing, 75% of the funding goes to nuclear weapons research and development. Much of this work is classified, thereby imposing strict limits on publishing and limiting access to the “big picture” aspect of research projects.
Divisions between classified and non-classified research jeopardize collaborative efforts between lab scientists and university faculty. A study conducted by a University of California Committee on Research Policy found that, “Even with the best of intentions to maintain an atmosphere of academic freedom in non-classified activities and programs, very few programs and facilities appear to be “outside the fence” (i.e. free of the logistical hurdles imposed by security). Thus, it is not surprising that relatively few campus-laboratory collaborations have taken root at either Los Alamos or Lawrence-Livermore.” (Source: http://bartok.ucsc.edu/peter/labs/DOE.html) This is a serious threat to academic freedom at a public university. In the 60-year history of LANL, there have of course been some beneficial scientific advancements produced. However, the fundamental research goals at LANL are not the pursuit of scientific discovery, but the tweaking and maintenance of the United State’s enormous atomic stockpile. Fundamentally, LANL is a bomb lab.
What’s in it for Los Alamos?
A combination of security scandals, mismanagement, and waste forced the Department of Energy (DOE) to consider solutions to Los Alamos’ seemingly intractable problems. But instead of implementing the internal reforms necessary to bring about change at Los Alamos and the DOE, the DOE chose to open the Labs to competitive bidding. So now either the DOE can maintain the status quo of UC managing LANL – the option the LANL interim director prefers – or pass management on to another university or private corporation. Either way LANL gets to keep its partnership basically the same and avoids reforming in any meaningful way.
In order to run, LANL needs scientists, researchers, and students. Universities provide cheap and eager bodies to keep LANL running smoothly. Additionally, the reputation of a university as committed to bettering society provides a cover for Los Alamos that it otherwise wouldn’t have, especially if managed by a for-profit defense company.
Won’t UT make money off the Los Alamos deal?
No. In fact it may actually cost us money. For starters, UT expects to spend up to $6 million on the bid alone. Should the outcome go the way of the Sandia deal (UT spent $852,000 and failed to acquire Sandia National Laboratories, another nuclear facility), then that money would be squandered outright. Should UT gain control of Los Alamos, then the University would be subject to the same financial arrangement as the UC System: the DOE pays the University of California about $16 million per year for management fees and operational costs. This amount is a reimbursement that UC System President Richard C. Atkinson claims doesn’t adequately compensate. As the Chronicle of Higher Education reported in November, 2003:
While the federal government pays the university up to $16-million annually in fees for running Los Alamos — along with Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, in Northern California — and reimburses it for operational costs, the university has long held that it does not make a dime on the government contract.
The nearly $1.5-million the university spends on tuition benefits for lab employees and their families, as well as the costs of its other efforts in the Los Alamos community, like offering college-preparation and education-planning classes to secondary-school students and their parents, comes out of the institution’s pocket and isn’t reimbursed by the Department of Energy, which oversees the facility. If any money is left over after paying the legal fees and other administrative costs that the federal government doesn’t cover, it is invested in research.
“I think we’ve carried a heavy burden in running these laboratories,” Mr. Atkinson told a House of Representatives’ subcommittee in May. “We’ve done it as a matter of national service.”
Furthermore, according to a April 26, 2003 memorandum (http://www.nnsa.doe.gov/docs/mcslarrow-brooks report to abraham.pdf) from DOE and National Nuclear Safety Administration officials, UC paid the the federal government $320,000 reimbursement for purchases LANL employees illegally charged to a laboratory-issued purchase card, other purchases where documentation was inadequate or missing, and for employee recognition awards that exceeded the allowed maximum. In a separate incident, UC paid the government $50,000 for an incident in which lab employees used doctored purchase orders to obtain personal items.
Why shouldn’t a University manage a nuclear facility? Isn’t a university better than a corporation?
A university has managed LANL since its inception in 1943, but it has never been a mitigating force in the lab’s decisions. Ultimately, the DOE has the final say in LANL matters. The day-to-day operations are controlled by LANL management with little input from UC officials or faculty. UT would be in the exact same position. According to Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group in an interview he gave to Issue magazine, “A university should be wary of managing Los Alamos because Los Alamos is basically unmanageable. Its location, its mission, and at this point its 60 years of tradition, make it really an incorrigible management problem. It’s a very difficult problem. I don’t think the University of Texas can manage Los Alamos; the University of California couldn’t.”
Additionally, the recurring security problems at Los Alamos – lost disks with classified information, emails containing sensitive data sent out of the lab, failure to pass Army-led mock terrorist drills – can be at least partially attributed to the lack of security culture at Los Alamos due to its pretensions to academia. According to the San Francisco Chronicle (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/07/21/MNGCC7Q7B61.DTL) :
“Several experts said one of the traditional strengths of the lab, its quasi-academic environment, may now be its greatest weakness. The lab boasted a relatively loose academic environment that helped foster a free exchange of ideas and inspired innovation, experts said.
Now there is a heightened concern about preventing information from circulating too widely, and it is questionable whether a university, as opposed to an industrial organization, can enforce such restrictions.”
If the UT System doesn’t do this won’t somebody else?
Unfortunately yes. We ask the University Texas Regents to make the decision not to participate in nuclear weapons development. When this goal is achieved we ask citizens of other states to pressure their academic institutions to take up where the UT system left off.