Dear Santa Fe: Lest we forget, there is a hazardous waste dump called Area G just a few miles from the Plaza.

This marks the second week of wrangling among activists, Los Alamos National Lab (which owns the waste pit) and the New Mexico Environment Department on LANL’s proposal to close Area G; what happens to the radioactive material there will depend not only on the determination of activists like Joni Arends of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety (above, right) but also on LANL’s own future—which in turn depends on a slew of high-level nuke policy talks. After the jump, a round-up of recent nuclear developments and their implications for New Mexico.

Nuclear Posture Review

On April 6, President Obama released his Nuclear Posture Review, a 70-plus explanation of this administration’s nuclear policy. SFR reported that the NPR, as it’s called, advocated both disarmament and maintaining existing nuclear weapons stockpiles—a somewhat dichotomous goal, but a step in the right direction.

Local Upshot: Among the NPR’s conclusions was the following “key investment…required to sustain a safe, secure, and effective nuclear arsenal”:

Funding the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory to replace the existing 50-year old Chemistry and Metallurgy Research facility in 2021.

LANL’s costly proposed expansion of the CMRR has raised protests from activists who see expansion as unnecessary for the simple maintenance of the US nuclear weapons stockpile. But with the NPR’s backing, it looks like revamping the CMRR has a green light.

New Start Treaty

On April 8, Obama and Russian Federation President Dmitri Medvedev signed the second version of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (pdf), a bilateral agreement to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles by 30 percent. The New York Times called the treaty “welcome” but “modest”; the Heritage Foundation deems it “doomed to fail.”

Local Upshot: While perhaps modest, New Start is one of the first concrete steps in the Obama administration’s stated commitment to disarmament. But the CMRR remains funded, and as SFR reported in February, the lab itself got a 21 percent funding spike in Obama’s 2011 budget—a good chunk of which was slated for “weapons activities.”

Nuclear Security Summit

April 13 marked the final day of Obama’s 47-nation Nuclear Security Summit. The summit’s final communiqué calls for—surprise, surprise!—better nuclear security and international cooperation. Obama called it “bold,” Time.com chose “modest and uncontroversial,” and Mother Jones deemed the whole summit a bit backwards: “Nuclear security is not the path to nuclear disarmament. Nuclear disarmament is the path to nuclear security.”

Local Upshot: As the AP’s “Spin Meter” notes, the US—and particularly New Mexico—has had its own security problems: Sandia Lab has had issues securing or removing enriched uranium, per a January DOE report, and an October 2009 GAO report found “a number of security lapses” at LANL. (Not to mention this spy guy.) Maybe we should fix those first…

Los Alamos Hazardous Waste Proposed Permit & Hearing

As SFR reports today, public hearings continue on whether LANL should be allowed to burn hazardous waste in the open air and on proposed closure procedures for certain waste pits. According to Dave McCoy, the director of anti-nuke activist group Citizen Action New Mexico, NMED documents he requested years ago (but just accessed in January) reveal crucial information.

“There’s questions as to whether [LANL has] adequately analyzed the human and ecological risk; one document said the entire [groundwater] monitoring network should be redesigned,” McCoy says.

Local Upshot: Much of McCoy’s concern has to do with Area G, the nuclear waste dump closest to Santa Fe.

“If we would have known about these [documents], we would be in a lot different position right now with respect to operations and cleanup of Area G,” Arends notes, explaining that the group could have made more informed public comments in earlier hearings about groundwater monitoring and contamination.

“Especially when the city of Santa Fe, the county of Santa Fe and Las Campanas are investing $212 million into the Buckman Direct Diversion, directly across from Area G,” Arends adds, shaking her head. “We would’ve been in a whole different situation.”

Hearings will be held today and tomorrow (Thursday, April 15) at Santa Fe Community College in the Jemez Rooms, 9 am – 6 pm. For more information, click here.

US Energy Secretary Steven Chu looks a little dazed.

Today, the Department of Defense released its Nuclear Posture Review, a “roadmap for implementing President Obama’s agenda” on nuclear weapons—a somewhat muddled one, as evidenced in the review:

This NPR places the prevention of nuclear terrorism and proliferation at the top of the US policy agenda…At the same time…the US must sustain a safe, secure and effective nuclear arsenal.

Speculations abound on what the NPR really means—and in New Mexico, its implications are sure to be magnified. Read what some nuke activists are saying after the jump.

Here’s Jay Coghlan, the director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. He calls the review’s stated nonproliferation goal “laudable” but says in a statement that it “needs to be matched on the ground.” To wit:

Of importance to northern New Mexico is the conclusion to fund the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement (CMRR) Project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Apparently bowing to pressure from the weapons laboratories, the NPR stated that the CMRR was needed to sustain the nuclear arsenal. But it also goes past that and calls for “some modest capacity [that] will be put in place for surge production in the event of significant geopolitical “surprise.” Once that capacity is installed we believe the door remains open for expanded plutonium pit production at LANL.

Production remains tied to reduction. It’s not clear to us how, as stated in the NPR, expanding production infrastructure will allow excess warheads to be retired along with other planned stockpile reductions. “Funding the CMRR allows increased weapons production capacity and has nothing to do with retiring warheads,” said Scott Kovac, operations director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, “it’s surprising that the administration is allowing the funding of this $4.5 billion project to blight an otherwise great NPR.”

Why, Hillary! Your hair is looking so...girly!

Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group offers a “preliminary opinion,” also via written statement:

[I]t is a status-quo document that makes only minor adjustments in nuclear weapons policy.  These it makes in what the Administration hopes will be somewhat more effective global power projection plan overall.  It perpetuates all the major nuclear myths, temporizes with respect to all the tough issues, and offers a great deal of what the Bush Administration offered, just in different, Democrat-friendly language.  It attaches the greatest salience to nuclear weapons which do not exist and attaches relatively little to which do.  Policy continuities from the previous two presidents seem to dominate, by far.
Of special interest to New Mexico journalists, the NPR blesses the massive Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF), the largest public works project in New Mexico history in constant dollars by a factor of about 9, not including the interstate highways in New Mexico.

Stay tuned for some more detailed analysis later. For now, though, I’m off to the public hearing on whether Los Alamos National Lab should be allowed to burn hazardous waste in the open air!

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.

Even though some of LANL’s budget increases are for things like hydrogen and fuel cell technologies—$13.1 million, to be precise—the roughly $336 million increase in “total weapons activities” (not all of which is strictly about weapons-building; ) seems to contradict Obama’s State of the Union address, in which he called nuclear weapons “perhaps the greatest danger to the American people.”

“There hasn’t been an increase like this since the Manhattan Project, and it never translates into jobs,” Greg Mello, director of the nonprofit nuclear disarmament group Los Alamos Study Group, tells SFR. “The procurement of specialized materials and the hiring of staff [are] substantially from out of state,” Mello adds. “Los Alamos is not well-connected to the New Mexico economy.”

The lab declined to comment on its windfall, which Mello maintains will do little to help regular New Mexicans. Here’s Mello again:

“If the DOE were to invest in energy rather than bombs in New Mexico, we could make literally tens of thousands of jobs in the short run. It’s a choice the Obama administration has made to fund wealthy contractors and high-paid scientists and engineers—a few of them—at the expense of hiring and building careers for the blue-collar craftsmen, technicians and engineers we need to build a sustainable infrastructure.”

Mello apologized for his wordiness; “I’m just really mad,” he said. “This represents a complete capitulation to Senate Republicans and hawks. This is a politically motivated increase.”

That VP Joe Biden’s op-ed on the administration’s nuclear weapons policy ran in the Wall Street Journal last Friday could be seen as a confirmation of Mello’s suspicions.

“For almost a decade, our laboratories and facilities have been underfunded and undervalued,” Biden writes. More:

“The budget we will submit to Congress on Monday both reverses this decline and enables us to implement the president’s nuclear-security agenda. …State-of-the art facilities, and highly trained and motivated people, allow us to maintain our arsenal without testing. …To achieve these goals, our budget devotes $7 billion for maintaining our nuclear-weapons stockpile and complex, and for related efforts. This commitment is $600 million more than Congress approved last year.”

But Biden’s op-ed itself comes on the heels of a Dec. 15 letter sent by Senate Republicans to the President, urging that “funding for a [weapons] modernization program…begin…in earnest in your 2011 budget.”

Obama’s official nuclear policy is scheduled to be released this March, and a treaty to replace START (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between the US and Russia) is said to be in the works. But if the Obama 2011 budget passes, at least some of LANL’s rocket scientists will be sitting pretty.

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.”

The agreement to which deSousa refers is a 2007 work plan—an outline for cleaning up Area G, part of Technical Area 54. According to deSousa, both LANL and the state agreed to a particular work plan for the cleanup through a 2005 consent order. In Bearzi’s view, the latest state-DOE dustup is just another tick on a long timeline of disagreements over LANL’s inability to responsibly mitigate its environmental impact.

“The laboratory has a history of denial,” Bearzi says. “If you go back 15 years, the laboratory denied that anything toxic or dangerous could even get to the aquifer”—to the point that the state basically had to force it to put in the necessary monitoring wells, he says.

“Most of the wells they put in found something,” Bearzi says. “Then, in 2005, we learned about the chromium contamination in the regional aquifer that was eight times the state groundwater standard. And the lab has consistently denied whatever the next step is.”

“We acted in good faith and installed new wells and gathered new data and continue to do so,” deSousa says. “We believe we submitted compliant reports.”

That debate could continue forever—and it already has, in hundreds of incarnations. But what’s interesting about this one is the jurisdiction question: Who’s in charge of keeping New Mexico’s groundwater safe?

In numerous instances, LANL and its operator, the US Department of Energy, have expressed the opinion that the lab is perfectly capable of monitoring and mitigating its own pollution. But the New Mexico Environment Department maintains that state standards for radionuclide levels apply to LANL, too—primarily because, as Environment Secretary Ron Curry put it in a written statement yesterday, “DOE self-regulation of dangerous radioactive pollution does not work.” While the EPA is generally responsible for regulating hazardous waste, it also makes a common practice of authorizing states to implement their own rules, as it did for New Mexico in 2007—which seems to suggest that the state should have the final word.

Update: New Mexico Environment Secretary Curry said the following in an e-mail to SFR:

We have the authority to require monitoring and reporting of radionuclide contamination if it is associated with our regulation of RCRA hazardous waste (i.e., chemical waste). That is the case here. DOE does not acknowledge that we have such authority. We received state authorization for our hazardous waste rules from EPA  long before 2007. We received that authorization in 1985.

Even so, that big-budget federal agencies (LANL’s the Nuclear Nuclear Security Administration’s 2010 budget request is a whopping $9.9 billion) would respond to the environmental posturing of a small, blue, nearly-broke Western state seems dubious, but Bearzi says assessing penalties has a certain efficacy.

“We’ve already assessed over $2 million in penalties for other violations of the [2005] consent order, and they’ve paid them,” Bearzi says. “And every time, even after fighting and arguing about it, ultimately, they’ve not only paid the penalty, but they’ve corrected the violation.” According to the 2005 consent agreement, the penalty for LANL’s failing to comply with the agreed-upon standards would be penalized at  $1,000 a day for the first 30 days of noncompliance and $3,000 a day thereafter.

But LANL’s record still isn’t, as any New Mexican knows, pristine. An $1.87 fine assessed for water contamination last May still hasn’t been paid; if LANL respectfully disagrees with the state’s assessment, who’ll make them pay?

“We consider this another in the long line of actions we have to keep taking to keep [LANL] from straying off the course of cleanup and to keep them focused on the promises that they made to New Mexico,” Bearzi says.

“They’re putting in decent wells now, but it’s too little and it’s too late,” he adds.

On whether LANL plans to pay the penalty, deSousa says, “It’s too early to say.”

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.

In addition to his position at LANL, Lundy has worked as a technical adviser to the US Department of State and has consulted with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for  years. He’s tall, broad-shouldered and balding, and he speaks slowly, a big smile spreading across his face whenever he gets to explain a convoluted idea or theory. For years, Lundy has had an abiding interest in Iran, and especially in its nuclear program, which essentially began in 1967 with the startup of a US-supplied—yes, US-supplied—research reactor at Tehran University. (Interesting fact: Lundy says that’s the same reactor for which the US is now trying to make Iran buy its uranium from Russia and France, a demand Iran has not accepted.) Ever since the IAEA asked him to find out what he could about Iran, Lundy has spent his free time poring over books, technical articles and Iranian blogs.

After explaining what he knew of Iranian culture (“I can hardly call myself an expert,” he said humbly) and giving a brief rundown of the country’s nuclear history, Lundy showed slides of the various nuclear plants currently in operation (and under regular IAEA inspection). But he suspects Iran’s nuclear program goes much further—into the realm of weapons-grade uranium hidden deep in tunnels and bunkers.

“We haven’t found proof that they’re running a weapons program,” Lundy told an audience of 80 at the Santa Fe Hilton. “I have no doubt that they are.”

The smoking gun, according to Lundy, is the fact that Iran won’t just buy its enriched uranium from somewhere else; instead, its leaders have been insisting for years that they want to do their own enrichment—which suggests they’re going for something other than nuclear power generation. What’s more, Lundy says, two potential weapons-related sites were quickly razed before international agencies could inspect them.

An obvious question arose: Why does Iran want nuclear weapons?

They’re fiercely independent, they have a deep distrust of the world, and the theocracy wants to maintain authority at all costs,” Lundy says. Not that Iran’s mistrust of the US is unfounded; it’s pretty much public knowledge that the CIA helped overthrow the democratically elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosadeq, in 1953, and US-Iranian relations have been strained at best since then.

On Thursday, Lundy said he didn’t expect Iran to accept the US and UN’s current offer of a regulated nuclear program, but he points out that even just communicating with Iran is a step forward.

“This is a very open project,” he says of Iran’s nuclear program, “compared to the North Korean project, or the Pakistani project.”

The Santa Fe Council on International Relations meets to listen to speakers like Lundy about eight times a year. For more information, visit www.santafecouncil.org.

Graphic courtesy of Wikimedia.

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.

From The New York Times earlier this summer:

Power companies have long produced limited amounts of geothermal energy by tapping shallow steam beds, often beneath geysers or vents called fumaroles. Even those projects can induce earthquakes, although most are small. But for geothermal energy to be used more widely, engineers need to find a way to draw on the heat at deeper levels percolating in the earth’s core.

Some geothermal advocates believe the method used in Basel, and to be tried in California, could be that breakthrough. But because large earthquakes tend to originate at great depths, breaking rock that far down carries more serious risk, seismologists say. Seismologists have long known that human activities can trigger quakes, but they say the science is not developed enough to say for certain what will or will not set off a major temblor.

New Mexico’s geothermal wells could go very deep indeed. “One of the largest costs in geothermal power systems is the drilling of the wells necessary to access the high temperature resources. These wells may need to be 10,000 ft deep or more,”the green jobs report says.

What’s the big deal? In case you missed it, here’s a story from yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. It’s titled, “Study finds quake risk at Los Alamos: Seismic activity at the nuclear lab could result in deadly amounts of airborne plutonium, federal experts say.”

A big earthquake and resultant fire could trigger potentially deadly releases of radioactive materials from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico due to “major deficiencies” in the nuclear weapons lab’s safety planning, federal safety experts warned Tuesday.

SFR’s Alexa Schirtzinger delved into the LANL safety report here yesterday.

I’m not a geologist. But it’d seem wise for state and federal scientists study these risks fully before the energy industry starts exploiting this particular “synergy” anywhere near the nukes.

On Monday, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board released a damning report on the safety of the main plutonium facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The crux of the report is that in the case of a “seismic event,” or major earthquake, along the geologic fault that underlies the lab, the ensuing damage (think earthquake triggers fire triggers big radioactive explosion) would be more than 100 times the allowable federal standard.

Unfortunately, that’s not the worst of it. The Safety Board—along with LANL—has known this for the past five years. In 2007, the Safety Board, an independent federal agency charged with overseeing safety at all 14 sites in the US Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons complex (which in New Mexico includes LANL, Sandia National Laboratories and the WIPP), released official findings that the likelihood of a seismic event along the Los Alamos fault was much higher than previously thought. The natural conclusion, of course, was that the relevant safety systems would have to be improved immediately—but according to Safety Board Vice Chair John E. Mansfield, that wasn’t how it happened.

Around the time the new risk assessment came out, Mansfield says, the Safety Board was involved in an effort to get all the DOE’s nuclear facilities to install active ventilation systems—ones that would keep working even in the event of a cataclysmic accident. When the increased seismic risk at Los Alamos became apparent, getting better ventilation and fire suppression systems at LANL became even more important, and Mansfield says the Safety Board “took special care to point out to Los Alamos” that its safety system was inadequate.

“Los Alamos’ answer was very much delayed,” Mansfield recalls, “and when we finally got it, it effectively said, ‘Well, we’re not going to worry about it.’” According to Mansfield, LANL was one of only two facilities that excused itself from federal safety guidelines.

“We just couldn’t buy that,” Mansfield says. “What we’d hoped they would say was, ‘It’s going to be extremely difficult; it’s going to take a lot of money; it’s going to take a lot of years; and we’re going to commit to try to get funding,’” he continues. “But they didn’t say that. They just said, “[We’re] not required to meet the overall safety strategy.”

After going back and forth with LANL over safety guidelines for the better part of this year, Mansfield says the Board finally warned Los Alamos that it would issue a public recommendation for safety improvements at the lab. The DOE has 45 days to accept, partially reject or reject the recommendations and 135 days to publish an implementation plan. According to Mansfield, the Safety Board even warned LANL that the recommendations would come out this month: “We said…‘It would be good if you had an immediate response instead of having this thing hang out there with no word from you.’” To an extent, LANL did so; SFR received e-mails yesterday from LANL communications director Jeff Berger, who cited eight actions taken by the lab in 2009 to improve fire safety, and from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s deputy public affairs director, Jennifer Wagner, who wrote:

“NNSA has made numerous improvements in the safety posture of its plutonium operations in recent years, which include…the approval of the first comprehensive safety analysis since 1996. That analysis identified the need for additional facility upgrades to meet the NNSA’s safety goals. Although the analysis concluded that operations are currently safe, a more sophisticated analysis is needed…”

That sounds like a lot of analysis to me. If the latest analysis underscored the need for better safety…was the current safety infrastructure really “safe”?

In the end, the Safety Board’s recommendations for more stringent and effective fire suppression and ventilation systems at LANL are just that: recommendations. They’re not binding, but Mansfield says no Energy Secretary has ever rejected a Safety Board recommendation.

But according to Greg Mello, executive director of the Albuquerque-based Los Alamos Study Group, “the Safety Board has never exerted itself like this before.” Mansfield’s Oct. 26 letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu uses words like “severity” and “urgency” to “argue forcefully for the Secretary to avail himself of the authority under the Atomic Energy Act” to implement the recommendations—wording Mello says reveals the crucial nature of the safety situation at LANL.

Still, Mello, a longtime disarmament activist, says that any action LANL takes will depend on politics. “If [US Sen. Jeff] Bingaman or [US Sen. Tom] Udall tell the lab that they better listen hard to the DNFSB, [that] they have to follow the rules,” Mello says, “That will affect [LANL’s] behavior.” According to Mello, LANL brings too much money and too many jobs to New Mexico for anyone to want to properly question it—or, for that matter, to make a nuclear weapons lab spend a bunch of money on decidedly un-sexy safety upgrades.

“LANL has its own problems,” Mansfield says. “It’s got older facilities. It’s got a mindset that made it great, that protected the nation for 60 years now, and it’s the best scientific lab in the country, just about. We just need to convince them that some things you have to control.”

Before a big earthquake convinces them, that is.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia.

I’ve got an email out to a media rep at the Lab and will update this post when I get a response.

Updated July 7: LANL spokesman Jeff Berger told SFR yesterday afternoon that the rumor is false. “We do not have plans for layoffs,” Berger says.

Period?

“Period.”

What about going forward?

“If the budget necessitates layoffs, we would go there,” Berger says. “But we’ve anticipated and experienced in recent years relatively flat budgets. That’s what we continue to anticipate.”

Via US Sen. Jeff Bingaman’s Office, a letter from New Mexico’s Congressional delegation to Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag opposing the move:

“For decades, Sandia and Los Alamos laboratories have strongly supported the civilian mission of maintaining our nation’s nuclear stockpile – a mission that was first envisioned with the passage of Atomic Energy Act of 1946. We believe that civilian control of our stockpile recognizes the crucial differences between nuclear weapons and conventional military munitions. Shifting to military control could be a dangerous precedent, causing other nuclear weapons states, such as Russia and China, to do the same.”

Hm…”Could” is the operative word, there.

The delegation also told Orszag that the labs’ multiple missions have helped foster a creative environment that keeps our nation’s top scientists and engineers engaged … [blah blah blah] This research has not only helped our government meet its needs, some of it has also been commercialized to create high-tech jobs in our state,” they wrote.

Finally, the delegation said that moving the laboratories from DOE to DOD would jeopardize President Obama’s desire to work toward a nuclear free world. They said they feared that under DOD control, general science funding for the laboratories likely would decline, which in turn would put at risk the labs’ ability to verify and certify the nuclear stockpile without nuclear testing. Absent that capability, the delegation is concerned that the United States would have to revert to nuclear testing, giving other nations the go-ahead to test as well, and endangering the prospects for passage of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Follow that logic?  The Pentagon would cut the labs’ science budget, therefore they’d have no choice but to start setting off nuclear weapons again, which would lead to an international incident.

The rest after the cut.

The delegation acknowledged to Orszag that there are problems with the current structural relationship between NNSA and DOE.

“However, we believe that the appropriate time for such a review is at the conclusion of the Nuclear Posture Review, due out in January 2010,” they wrote. “In the meantime, we urge the Office of Management and Budget to withdraw its directive to study moving the NNSA laboratories to DOD.”