The Los Alamos National Laboratory signed a 10-year lease on an office building in downtown Santa Fe, N.M., about 35 miles southeast by road from the main laboratory campus.
As many as 75 people could occupy the office space, which includes the first-floor of the Dorothy McKibbin Conference Center. The leased space will support the lab’s Community Partnerships Office, plus communications and government affairs functions, according to a press release.
“[A]ctivities designed to reduce the impact from wildland fire had not been fully implemented at the Los Alamos National Laboratory,” the Department of Energy’s Inspector General wrote in a recently published audit report.
The report focuses on the lab’s response to the 2011 Las Conchas Fire, and the much more destructive 2000 Cerro Grande Fire — an event that stressed the lab’s emergency operations and communications capabilities like few things would, until the COVID-19 pandemic. The Inspector General’s report did not consider the most recent revisions to the lab’s wildfire and forest-management strategies, which were published in 2019.
Fred Mortensen, retired from Los Alamos, received another E.O. Lawrence award for his contributions to nuclear weapons research, the lab announced recently.
Mortensen “played an essential role in the design of three of the seven systems in the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile,” and his work on nuclear explosive tests laid the cornerstone for certifying the stockpile’s destructive capabilities over the last three decades without yield-producing detonations, Los Alamos said.
Charles Ball and Debbie Ball are heading back to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Medal for Exceptional Public Service, the lab said.
Each recently completed a stint in the Donald Trump administration’s Pentagon, where Charles Ball was deputy assistant secretary of defense for threat reduction and arms control and Debbie Ball was senior policy adviser for nuclear deterrence policy in the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced that it renewed a nuclear research grant to an 11-member University of California, Berkeley-led team.
The $25-million grant will go toward research in nuclear physics, science and engineering, radiation detection, nuclear material science, radiochemistry, and mass spectrometry, the NNSA said.
