On Friday, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm will travel to New Mexico to tour Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to meet with the lab’s workers, the agency wrote in a press release.
While at Los Alamos, Granholm will meet Field Office Manager Ted Wyka, LANL Director Thom Mason, and NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby to tour the lab and receive updates on its critical national security facilities, DOE said. The tour was to begin Friday morning.
The White House has put forth a request to the U.S. House of Representatives to provide an additional $68 million from the Federal Salaries and Expenses account within the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
A little more than $66 million would go to “Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, within the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. This funding would be used to prepare for and respond to potential nuclear and radiological incidents in Ukraine, provide equipment and sensors to augment Ukrainian capabilities, assist Ukrainian partners with security of nuclear and radiological materials, and prevent illicit smuggling of nuclear, radiological, and dual-use materials,” the Aug. 10 letter says.
Just under $2 million in funding lines would go to participating in “forward-deployed interagency crisis management teams and provide subject matter experts on nuclear and radiological risk reduction measures. There are several new personnel requirements that are inherently governmental in function and cannot be contracted out. These are not enduring positions and are specifically tied to advisory support during the crisis and in early rebuild phase.”
During a July 30 experiment, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility delivered 2.04 megajoules (MJ) of energy to a target, resulting in 3.88 MJ of fusion energy output – the highest yield ever produced at NIF.
Since demonstrating fusion ignition for the first time at in December 2022, the lab has “continued to perform experiments to study this exciting new scientific regime,” a LLNL spokesperson tells the Exchange Monitor. “As is our standard practice, we plan on reporting these results at upcoming scientific conferences and in peer-reviewed publications.”
The lab refused to characterize the experiment, though NIF is almost exclusively used to test components of nuclear weapons. Amongst other things, the December ignition was designed to show how materials would react to an adversary nuclear weapon.
The Y-12 National Security Complex and the Pantex Plant, which are managed and operated by Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS), along with the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Production Office, were honored with all four of the annual NNSA security awards in 2023.
The following personnel and team were recognized:
- Major Courtney Coker, CNS (Y-12) Safeguards and Security – NNSA Security Manager of the Year.
- Y-12 Perimeter Intrusion Detection System (PIDS) Team – NNSA Security Team of the Year.
- Timothy Alvarado, NPO (Pantex) – NNSA Bradley A. Peterson Federal Security Professional of the Year.
- Steven Zuniga, CNS (Pantex) – NNSA Bradley A. Peterson Contractor Security Professional of the Year.
Sandia National Laboratories donated thousands of computers to schools in New Mexico through its annual K-12 Computer Donation Program, local outlet KQRE News reports.
Five Albuquerque Public Schools and five Silver City schools received desktops, laptops, iPads printers, monitors and keyboards from the lab. Each year, Sandia upgrades aging technology and then donates the retired computers to schools. The computers are wiped and the hard drives are removed to ensure no sensitive information is released. Schools then are able to refurbish the equipment at a very low cost.
In total, Sandia donated 1,802 computers, 472 laptops, 100 iPads, 56 monitors, 23 printers, 127 keyboards and 127 mice, according to the report. Since the program began in 2012, Sandia has donated nearly 22,000 computers with a total value of more than $26 million to New Mexico classrooms.
