Copyright © 2021 Albuquerque Journal
In February, Los Alamos National Laboratory proudly announced its return to Santa Fe, the town that once served as the gateway to the “Secret City” on the hill.
A 10-year lease at what was once known as the “Firestone” building and, most recently, headquarters of Descartes Lab in downtown Santa Fe will house 75 lab employees and marks LANL’s return to Santa Fe after a 58-year absence. The first floor of the 34,073-square-foot two-story building on the corner of West Alameda and Guadalupe Street would be christened the Dorothy McKibben Conference Center, named for the woman who served as the gatekeeper for a 1940s clandestine mission known then only as Project Y. It would come to be known as the Manhattan Project, a successful endeavor to develop the world’s first atomic weapon.
“This building will act as an additional entrance point for the Laboratory, just as Dorothy McKibben’s office at 109 East Palace in Santa Fe did decades ago,” LANL Director Thom Mason said in a news release.
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Earlier this month, Mason spoke more about LANL’s plans for Santa Fe, while providing a lab update during a webinar put on by the lab’s public affairs office.
“The lab actually, in some sense, began in Santa Fe,” he said. “At 109 East Palace, you can see a plaque on the building that served as the front door to the lab. People from around the country and, indeed, the world were told to take the train to Lamy and they would be met there. They didn’t know what they were going to, where they were going. Many didn’t even know what they were going to be doing. They would make their way to 109 East Palace and then be told their journey is not done. You need to go up the hill to Los Alamos.”
The lab’s entryway office was open from 1943 to 1963, when McKibben retired.
“And we haven’t had a Santa Fe presence since then, but that’s now changing,” Mason said.
A few weeks after declaring its return to Santa Fe, the lab announced it was signing leases at two other Santa Fe properties, totaling more than 79,000 square feet. Conveniently standing side-by-side on Pacheco Street near the intersection with St. Michael’s Drive, Ark Plaza and Pollon Plaza formerly housed state government offices. Leasing those two buildings will make room for another 500 lab employees in Santa Fe before the end of the year, according to the lab.
Mason said LANL is simply running out of room in Los Alamos and needs space to expand as its mission does the same. He said that federal officials had a strong interest in magnifying the regional impact of New Mexico’s national laboratories.
“I think our Santa Fe footprint will give us a great platform for doing that,” he said, adding that the lab plans to dig in its heels in the state’s capital city. “We’re viewing this as a permanent presence.”
Santa Fe values
City government officials have rolled out the welcome mat for LANL, noting the well-paying jobs it will bring, its potential economic impact and the scientific work performed at the lab that doesn’t have anything to do with nuclear weapons.
“We’ve seen how LANL is using the lab’s super-computer capabilities to provide important health policy support during COVID,” business-minded Mayor Alan Webber, who founded and got rich off the business trade magazine “Fast Company,” said in a statement to the Journal. “As we move out of COVID, having 500 new jobs in Santa Fe will add to our recovery. Importantly, we’ll also see more long-term entrepreneurial connections between LANL and the Santa Fe startup community.”
The city’s economic development director, Rich Brown, told the Santa Fe New Mexican that LANL will be a job creator, provide a boost to the entrepreneurial community and spur economic development in town. “This is a great benefit to our economic resiliency efforts,” he said.
Local chambers of commerce chimed in with support, their comments included in a LANL news release announcing the two leases on Pacheco Street.
“Having two major office buildings fully occupied promises to strengthen the Santa Fe economy and anchor the St. Michael’s commercial corridor,” Bridget Dixson, president and CEO of the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce, said. “The Chamber is pleased to welcome the Laboratory to the business community.”
“Two new offices in two different Santa Fe neighborhoods will diversify our city’s economy and is a natural fit,” added David Fresquez, president of the Santa Fe Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
But not everyone thinks LANL is a good fit for Santa Fe.
“The full name of the city is the (Royal) City of Holy Faith of St. Francis Assisi,” noted Ken Mayers, co-founder of the Santa Fe chapter of Veterans for Peace. “The Pope himself has said that the building of nuclear weapons is immoral, so we don’t want to associate that with the City of Holy Faith.”
Indeed, in 2019, while visiting Nagasaki, Japan – where the second of the bombs developed during the Manhattan Project was dropped in 1945, killing tens of thousands of people – Pope Francis called for global disarmament.
“Convinced as I am that a world without nuclear weapons is possible and necessary, I ask political leaders not to forget that these weapons cannot protect us from current threats to national and international security,” Pope Francis said.
“In a world where millions of children and families live in inhumane conditions, the money that is squandered and the fortunes made through the manufacture, upgrading, maintenance and sale of ever-more-destructive weapons, are an affront crying out to heaven.”
Mayers, who retired from the Marine Corps Reserves at the rank of major, helped establish the Veterans for Peace chapter in 2002. Since then, the group and its allies have demonstrated for peace at the busy intersection of St. Francis Drive and Cerrillos Road from noon to 1 p.m. each Friday. Now, they’ve moved their weekly protest to the lab’s new downtown offices, across Alameda from the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and get about a dozen or more people to show up each week.
“It is absolutely insane that we are building more nuclear weapons, more dangerous nuclear weapons that are subject to accident,” Mayers said, adding that billions of dollars are spent on devices that potentially could lead to catastrophic consequences from which the world could not recover. “Superpowers are acting like 5-year-old kids playing with matches in a pool of gasoline.”
The lab has assured no weapons production will take place in Santa Fe.
It is, however, expanding its mission to ramp up production of nuclear bomb cores in Los Alamos. LANL and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina have been tasked by Congress to produce 80 plutonium pits – the triggering devices for nuclear warheads – per year by 2030.
Concerned citizens
Joni Arends heads Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety and is a regular at the Friday demonstrations. She founded the organization in 1988 in opposition to a proposed route that would have sent shipments of radioactive waste from LANL to the newly built Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad through the heart of Santa Fe, down St. Francis Drive. The group has also been critical of LANL’s safety record and the damage to the environment it has already caused.
Now, Arends’ group is concerned about LANL coming back to Santa Fe, apparently to stay, and what that footprint will look like.
In 2019, the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the nation’s national labs, was one of seven respondents to the city’s solicitation for master developers for the Midtown campus, 64 acres of city-owned property that became open to development when the Santa Fe University of Art and Design shut down. Anti-LANL activists staged a protest at City Hall in January 2020, urging city leaders to discard the NNSA’s proposal.
The task to oversee development of the property was awarded to another group that has since backed out, leaving the fate of the campus once again in limbo. The city could pick another master developer, try to develop the property itself, or sell it.
That’s enough to again raise concerns about just what LANL has in mind for Santa Fe, says Arends, who noted the two buildings on Pacheco are not far from Midtown. In fact, the buildings are also within the boundaries of the city’s Midtown LINC (Local Innovation Corridor) district, intended to encourage redevelopment on St. Michael’s Drive.
“There are rumors flying around that LANL wants all that space at Midtown, and that conflicts with the community,” Arends said, adding the property would be better utilized to address the city’s critical need for housing or as a mixed-use development, as planned.
“Having observed the laboratory and how they operate over three decades, it’s not a far stretch to understand the proximity to Midtown.”
Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety is part of a coalition of groups that last week threatened a lawsuit against the NNSA and the Department of Energy. The coalition is calling for federal agencies to conduct a comprehensive environmental review before ramping up the production of plutonium pits at LANL and the Savannah River Site.
The South Carolina Environmental Law Project, which represents the groups, sent a letter to officials at each agency saying that pit production at LANL “waves aside” environmental justice concerns and that going ahead with pit production flies in the face of an executive order signed by President Joe Biden that states federal agencies “shall make achieving environmental justice part of their missions.”
Nuclear Watch New Mexico and the Indigenous groups Tewa Women United and Honor Our Pueblo Existence are also represented by the law project, according to the letter.
Critics acknowledge LANL does some great work in the scientific field. Arends cited the COVID-19 modeling it has done during the pandemic, helping government and health care officials to better understand how the virus spreads, and where it is spreading, so they can make good decisions. She also mentioned LANL’s work with NASA, which has been in the news lately with the rover Perseverance sending back pictures from Mars using a camera developed at the lab.
“It would be wise for them to transition away from nuclear weapons to these others types of science,” she said.
Mayers of Veterans for Peace thinks so, too. And, while LANL asserts that no weapons work will take place in Santa Fe, that’s not good enough for him.
“They (LANL) like to point out the good things they are doing, like with COVID, but that’s a tiny bit of whitewashing,” he said, adding that 70% of LANL’s budget goes to nuclear weapons research and development.
“I’m sure people working in those buildings are very nice people, but the fact remains they are engaged in an evil enterprise.”
