The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will name its under-construction Albuquerque headquarters building after the late John Gordon, the former agency administrator who died early this year.
Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, the current administrator of the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency, announced the decision Friday. The building’s official name will be the John A. Gordon Albuquerque Complex. Gordon, the long-retired first administrator, died of a stroke in April, following a long illness.
Albuquerque is the NNSA’s administrative headquarters in the west, giving management a foothold near its nuclear weapons labs in New Mexico and California, along with the Pantex Plant in Texas. The new complex, being built under contract to the Army Corps of Engineers, will be ready for occupation by some 1,200 NNSA staffers by “late 2021,” the agency stated in a press release.
The new three-story, 330,000-square-foot building on will replace about a dozen mostly classified buildings of mid-century vintage.
The Gordon Complex is being built on DOE-owned land on Eubank Boulevard in Albuquerque and will eventually be fenced within Kirtland Air Force Base. The effort will cost somewhere between $100 million and $250 million, the agency has estimated.
