Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), a friend of the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories who has spent the last two decades on Capitol Hill, on Monday announced he will not run for re-election in 2020.
Rather than seeking a third term, Udall will leave the Senate in January 2021.
Since 2009, Udall has occupied the Senate seat once held by Pete Domenici: the Republican known by some of his nuclear constituents in New Mexico — whose interests in Washington he tended — as St. Pete.
After Udall leaves, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), already a regular partner when it comes to defending the state’s flagship DOE nuclear weapons facilities, will become New Mexico’s lead advocate in the upper chamber.
Before winning his Senate seat, Udall was the U.S. representative for New Mexico’s 3rd Disrict, which includes the Los Alamos National Laboratory, from 1999 to 2009.
In what will be his final Senate term, Udall pushed back against plans by DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) to move part of the agency’s capacity to produce fissile nuclear-weapon cores called plutonium pits away from Los Alamos.
“There is only one place in the U.S. with the technical know-how to do [pits], and that is Los Alamos National Laboratory,” Udall told Energy Secretary Rick Perry and NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty in a budget hearing last year.
Udall has also stuck up for the independent of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board: the federal health-and-safety watchdog for active and former DOE nuclear weapons sites. In a September letter co-signed by Heinrich, Udall asked the Energy Department to reconsider the 2019 rule that curtails some agency interactions with the defense board, and which the DNFSB feared could limit its access certain sites.
Udall has also carefully monitored plans for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, questioning the agency’s plans to greatly expand the deep-underground storage facility to provide a final resting place for 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium.
