Mark Anthony will move to New Mexico from Lund, Sweden, where he directed construction of a multibillion neutron source, to lead the new plutonium infrastructure directorate at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the lab said this week.
Anthony’s appointment, effective Nov. 1, follows a four-month search for someone to head the plutonium infrastructure directorate, which is nested within Los Alamos’s Weapons Program. That’s according to an announcement from the lab.
As head of the new directorate, Anthony will quarterback construction of the lab’s planned plutonium pit factory at the PF-4 Plutonium Facility and supporting infrastructure. The laboratory has been staffing up the pit directorate this summer after director Thomas Mason publicly announced its creation in April.
Anthony, who has a masters in engineering management from Drexel University and a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Penn State, was most recently project director for
European Spallation Source in Sweden, according to his LinkedIn profile. The facility, still under construction at deadline, will bombard heavy elements with high-energy protons to release neutrons for researchers to observe.
Prior to that, Anthony did stints with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy in Europe, and Exelon in the U.S.
Together, a planned pit facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. and the Los Alamos pit factory are expected to cast at least 80 fissile nuclear-weapon primary triggers by the early or mid 2030s. The Los Alamos plant will come online first and, the National Nuclear Security Administration has said, cast at least 30 pits annually by 2026.
Anthony will be at the top of a new directorate that includes a mixture of new and old Los Alamos hands. The lab announced five of the directorate’s key managers earlier this summer.
Carolyn Zerkle was to become senior director for project execution on Aug. 9. She has been at the lab for about 30 years and will have some oversight of the entire plutonium infrastructure portfolio.
Thomas Bratvold was scheduled to become senior director for the Los Alamos Plutonium Pit Production Project on Sept. 13. He would head of the project to expand PF-4 so that, by 2036, the facility has both the equipment and the staff necessary to cast 30 war-usable pits annually.
Paul Gretsky was to step in Aug. 23 as senior director for the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Facility Project, responsible for ensuring that new pits are made to design-agency specifications. The first batches of new pits were scheduled to go into W87-1 warheads intended for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missiles that will replace the Minuteman III fleet starting in 2030 or so. The first of the new missiles were to use W87-0 warheads, which will come from Minuteman missiles and won’t get new pits.
Brian McIlvaine was to become the directorate’s functional integration manager on Aug. 9. McIlvaine, only with the lab since, 2019 would essentially be the conduit through which personnel on the different plutonium infrastructure projects, and personnel in other lab directorates, keep in touch.
