It's not that they aren't pretty...

President Obama’s 2011 budget eliminates funding for manned lunar expeditions and rolls back tax breaks for fossil-fuel companies and families bringing in more than $250,000 a year—all of which lends credence to what he told the New York Times this morning:

“We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences, as if waste doesn’t matter, as if the hard-earned tax money of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money.”

Defense, Medicaid/Medicare, Social Security and education are held harmless from such belt-tightening, though, and the US nuclear weapons program stands out among those agencies slated to get increases—here, to the tune of $5 billion more over the next five years. Los Alamos National Laboratory alone gets a 21.6 percent (from $1.8 to $2.2 billion) budget increase for 2011.

Read about what this means for New Mexico after the jump. Continue reading »

Updated at 5:05pm Tuesday; correction 9:16am Wednesday.

The details change, but the story never does.

The latest Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) brouhaha unfolded yesterday, when the New Mexico Environment Department slammed the lab with a hefty $960,000 penalty for failing to properly monitor radioactive pollutants in nearby watersheds. This time, it’s particularly scary: the groundwater in question provides drinking water for Los Alamos County, White Rock and the lab itself—“and it may well be the same aquifer that’s connected to the Buckman well field,” the environment department’s hazardous waste bureau chief, James Bearzi, says. Without proper monitoring, Bearzi worries the lab’s cleanup of Material Disposal Area G, its only active (and unlined!) waste disposal site, due to be finished by 2015, may do little to deal with the radioactive contaminants leaching into New Mexico’s precious water resources.

LANL, of course, sees things differently. “We respectfully believe we were compliant,” Environment Programs Spokesperson Fred deSousa tells SFReeper. “The problem,” deSousa says, “is [that] we thought there was an agreement.” Continue reading »

Corporate greed, or top-secret-special meritocracy? Nuclear Watch of New Mexico has uncovered a somewhat astounding little figure: Michael Anastasio, the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), earns $800,348 a year—almost twice as much as US President Barack Obama (who makes $400,000, with a $50K cushion for “expenses”). The proof is here, on one of the federal government’s “transparency pages” aimed at helping hungry reporters track down how stimulus money (of which LANL has received over $200 million in government contracts) is spent.

At $800,000, Anastasio is no Lloyd Blankfein (CEO of Goldman Sachs; $42.9 million last year), no Rex Tillerson (Exxon Mobil; $32 million)—but his salary is nothing to be sniffed at, either. Los Alamos gets its money straight from the US Department of Energy, whose budgets are funded by…well, you and me (provided we pay our taxes).

In a press release today, Nuclear Watch pointed out other problems: that LANL’s business–national security–doesn’t exactly stimulate New Mexico’s economy. Case in point (from the Nuclear Watch release):

According to Census Bureau data, in 2007 Los Alamos County had the 4th highest median household income ($101,098), while New Mexico was the 45th state in median household income ($41,509) with the 3rd highest poverty rate. Politicians and the Department of Energy constantly remind New Mexicans that the nuclear weapons industry is vital to the state’s economy. Despite that, historically New Mexico has slipped to 47th in per capita income in 2007 from 37th in 1959. In contrast, Bechtel has experienced record setting revenues for each of the last six years ($31.4 billion in 2008).

Another fun news tidbit surfaced today: Apparently, the federal government’s claims of “jobs saved” by federal stimulus money is a tiny bit fudged. It even starts to sound like the government is inflating its numbers until a Health and Human Services Department staffer fires back at the Associated Press with this gem:

“If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job,” HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said.

Right, so…then you have two jobs, at least for government accounting purposes?

I digress. The point is, if the government’s claiming more jobs than actually exist, one might wonder whether certain government contractors are doing the same.

Postscript: Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch informs me that Tom Hunter, the director of Sandia Lab, makes an even prettier penny: $1.7 million.

Yesterday, at a meeting of the Santa Fe Council on International Relations, retired Los Alamos National Laboratory engineer Arvid Lundy spoke on a range of subjects related to the very salient theme of Iran’s nuclear weapons project.

After close to an hour of photos, statistics, histories and thoughts on Iran, SFReeper asked Lundy to clarify a point to which he had alluded: that were no one to intervene in Iran’s nuclear plans (for power or otherwise), Iran would end up with nuclear weapons “sooner.” So…no matter what happens, they’ll have nuclear weapons at some point?

“I think it’s likely,” Lundy replied.

Continue reading »

The New Mexico “Green Jobs Cabinet report” was released yesterday. It’s 98 pages of wonkery not intended for the casual reader.

Not to nitpick—or fearmonger—but there’s a word missing in the report. It’s kind of important. The word is earthquakes.

Although the report spends a good amount of space assessing New Mexico’s potential for geothermal energy—and exploring “Synergies with the Oil and Gas Industry”—it fails to mention, even in passing, one major potential downside of this particular “green” power source: It can cause earthquakes. Continue reading »