Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) visited Los Alamos, but not at the Energy Department laboratory, on Thursday as part of his first U.S. Senate re-election campaign.
Heinrich, who is seeking a second term, appeared for a one-and-a-half hour meet and greet at a wine bar not 2 miles from the storied nuclear weapons lab.
Heinrich ran unopposed in his Democratic primary and is set to face Republican Mick Rich, a construction contractor based in Albuquerque, in the Nov. 6 general election.
To date, Heinrich has spent about 10 times more than Rich campaigning and has nearly 15 times more funding in his war chest, according to data from the Federal Election Commission compiled by the website Ballotpedia.
Heinrich has been a staunch advocate for manufacturing nuclear warhead cores known as plutonium pits solely at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Department of Energy (DOE) last year proposed moving the greater part of the mission to South Carolina from New Mexico. He has grilled nominees for key DOE nuclear posts about the plan as a member of the Armed Services Committee, and has distributed joint statements with fellow New Mexico lawmakers questioning the veracity of the agency’s split-state pit strategy.
Heinrich is also a dependable ally for the Sandia National Laboratories, which was part of his district when he was a member of the House of Representatives. Like the rest of the New Mexico congressional delegation, Heinrich is a defender of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant transuranic waste-disposal facility near Carlsbad, N.M. He opposes DOE’s effort to send diluted weapon-grade plutonium to the deep-underground salt mine: a component of the agency’s plan to move some pit production to New Mexico by repurposing a South Carolina facility designed to turn the plutonium into commercial reactor fuel.
