Los Alamos National Laboratory Information: Established: 1943 Director: Michael R. Anastasio City/Location: Los Alamos New Mexico United States Budget: $2.2 billion Type: National security and fundamental science Staff/Employees: 12500 Campus: 36 square miles (93 km2) Students: 700 Operated by: University of California Bechtel Corporation BWX Technologies Washington Group International (under the legal name Los Alamos National Security LLC) Website: lanl.gov Nicknames: LANL LANS Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory U.S. National Register of Historic Places U.S. National Historic Landmark District Location: Central Ave. Los Alamos New Mexico Coordinates: 355254N 1061754W / 35.88167N 106.29833W / 35.88167; -106.29833 Built/Founded: 1943 Architect: Unknown Architectural style(s): Bungalow/Craftsman Modern Movement Other Governing body: Department of Energy Added to NRHP: October 15 19661 NRHP Reference#: 66000893
Los Alamos National Laboratory (or LANL; previously known at various times as Site Y Los Alamos Laboratory and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security (LANS) located in Los Alamos New Mexico. The laboratory is one of the largest science and technology institutions in the world that conducts multidisciplinary research for fields such as national security outer space renewable energy medicine nanotechnology and supercomputing.
It is the largest institution and the largest employer in northern New Mexico with approximately 12500 LANS employees plus approximately 3300 contractor personnel. Additionally there are roughly 120 DOE employees stationed at the laboratory to provide federal oversight of LANL's work and operations. Approximately one-third of the laboratory's technical staff members are physicists one-fourth are engineers one-sixth are chemists and materials scientists and the remainder work in mathematics and computational science biology geoscience and other disciplines. Professional scientists and students also come to Los Alamos as visitors to participate in scientific projects. The staff collaborates with universities and industry in both basic and applied research to develop resources for the future. The annual budget is approximately US$2.2 billion.
Los Alamos is one of two laboratories in the United States wh

ere classified work towards the design of nuclear weapons is undertaken. The other since 1952 is Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Contents 1 History 1.1 The Manhattan Project 1.2 Post-Cold War 1.3 Contract changes 2 Extended operations 3 Controversy and Criticism 4 Directors 5 See also 6 References 7 External links // History The Manhattan Project Main article: Manhattan Project
The laboratory was founded during World War II as a secret centralized facility to coordinate the scientific research of the Manhattan Project the Allied project to develop the first nuclear weapons. The laboratory was officially known as Site Y12. In September 1942 the difficulties encountered in conducting preliminary studies on nuclear weapons at universities scattered across the country indicated the need for a laboratory dedicated solely to that purpose. Manhattan Project scientific director J. Robert Oppenheimer who had spent much time in his youth in the New Mexico area scouted the area along with General Leslie Groves and physicist Ernest Lawrence and decided upon the mesa which was once the Los Alamos Ranch School. Oppenheimer became the laboratory's first director.
During the Manhattan Project Los Alamos hosted thousands of employees including many Nobel Prize-winning scientists. The location was a total secret. Its only mailing address was a post-office box number 1663 in Santa Fe New Mexico.citation needed Though its contract with the University of California was initially intended to be temporarycitation needed the relationship was maintained long after the war. Until the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan University of California president Robert Sproul did not know what the purpose of the laboratory was and thought it might be producing a "death ray".citation needed The only member of the UC administration who knew its true purposeindeed the only one who knew its exact physical locationwas the Secretary-Treasurer Robert Underhill who was in charge of wartime contracts and liabilities.citation needed The first stages of the explosion of the Trinity nuclear test.
The work of the laboratory machined by Rudolph Vergoth and George Hackbarth2 culminated in the creation of several atomic devices one of which was used in the first nuclear test near Alamogordo New Mexico codenamed "Trinity" on July 16 1945. The other two were weapons "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" which were used in the attacks

on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Laboratory received the Army-Navy E Award for Excellence in production on October 16 1945.
After the war Oppenheimer retired from the directorship and it was taken over by Norris Bradbury whose initial mission was to make the previously hand-assembled atomic bombs "G.I. proof" so that they could be mass-produced and used without the assistance of highly trained scientists. Many of the original Los Alamos "luminaries" chose to leave the laboratory and some even became outspoken opponents to the further development of nuclear weapons. During the late-1950s a number of scientists including Dr. J. Robert "Bob" Beyster left Los Alamos to work for General Atomic (GA) in San Diego.3
In the years since the 1940s Los Alamos was responsible for the development of the hydrogen bomb and many other variants of nuclear weapons. In 1952 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was founded to act as Los Alamos' "competitor" with the hope that two laboratories for the design of nuclear weapons would spur innovation. Los Alamos and Livermore served as the primary classified laboratories in the U.S. national laboratory system designing all of the country's nuclear arsenal. Additional work included basic scientific research particle accelerator development health physics and fusion power research as part of Project Sherwood. Many nuclear tests were undertaken in the Marshall Islands and at the Nevada Test Site.
It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1965.45 Post-Cold War
At the end of the Cold War both labs went through a process of intense scientific diversification in their research programs to adapt to the changing political conditions that no longer required as much research towards developing new nuclear weapons and has led the lab to increase research for non-war science and technology. Los Alamos' nuclear work is currently thought to relate primarily to computer simulations and stockpile stewardship. The development of the Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test Facility will allow complex simulations of nuclear tests to take place without full explosive yields.citation needed
The lab has made intense efforts for humanitarian causes through its scientific research in medicine. Three vaccines for the AIDS virus are being tested by lab scientist Bette Korber and her team. These vaccines might finally deal a lethal blow to the AIDS virus says Chang-Shung Tung leader of the Labs

Theoretical Biology and Biophysics group.citation needed
There is also development for a safer more comfortable and accurate test for breast cancer by Lab scientists Lianjie Huang and Kenneth M. Hanson and collaborators. The new technique called ultrasound-computed tomography (ultrasound CT) uses sound waves to accurately detect small tumors that traditional mammography cannot.citation needed
Other research performed at the lab includes developing cheaper cleaner bio-fuels and advancing scientific understanding around renewable energy.citation needed
Non-nuclear national security and defense development is also a priority at the lab. This includes preventing outbreaks of deadly diseases by improving detection tools and the monitoring the effectiveness of the United States vaccine distribution infrastructure. Additional advancements include the ASPECT airplane that can detect bio threats from the sky.citation needed
The laboratory has attracted negative publicity from a number of events. In 1999 Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee was accused of 59 counts of mishandling classified information by downloading nuclear secrets"weapons codes" used for computer simulations of nuclear weapons teststo data tapes and removing them from the lab. After ten months in jail Lee pled guilty to a single count and the other 58 were dismissed with an apology from U.S. District Judge James Parker for his incarceration.6 Lee was suspected for a time of having shared U.S. nuclear secrets with China but investigators were never able to establish what Lee did with the downloaded data.7 In 2000 two computer hard drives containing classified data were announced to have gone missing from a secure area within the laboratory but were later found behind a photocopier; in 2003 the laboratory's director John Browne and deputy director resigned following accusations that they had improperly dismissed two whistleblowers who had alleged widespread theft at the lab. The year 2000 brought additional hardship for the laboratory in the form of the Cerro Grande Fire a severe forest fire that destroyed several buildings (and employees' homes) and forced the laboratory to close for two weeks.
In July 2004 an inventory of classified weapons data revealed that four hard disk drives were missing: two of the drives were subsequently found to have been improperly moved to a different building but another two remained unaccounted for. In response directo

r Peter Nanos shut down large parts of the laboratory and publicly rebuked scientists working there for a lax attitude to security procedures. In the laboratory's August 2004 newsletter he wrote "This willful flouting of the rules must stop and I don't care how many people I have to fire to make it stop". Nanos is also quoted as saying "If I have to restart the laboratory with 10 people I will". However a report released in January 2005 found that the drives were in fact an artifact of an inconsistent inventory system: the report concludes that 12 barcodes were issued to a group of disk drives that needed only 10 but the two surplus barcodes nevertheless appeared on a master list. Thus auditors wrongly concluded that two disks were missing. The report states "The allegedly missing disks never existed and no compromise of classified material has occurred". This incident is widely reported as contributing to continuing distrust of management at the lab. In May 2005 Nanos stepped down as director. Contract changes
Continuing efforts to make the laboratory more efficient led the Department of Energy to open its contract with the University of California to bids from other vendors in 2003. Though the university and the laboratory had difficult relations many times since their first World War II contract this was the first time that the university ever had to compete for management of the laboratory. The University of California decided to create a private company with the Bechtel Corporation Washington Group International and the BWX Technologies to bid on the contract to operate the laboratory. The UC/Bechtel lead corporation - Los Alamos National Security LLC (LANS) - was pitted against a team formed by the University of Texas System partnered with Lockheed-Martin. In December 2005 the Department of Energy announced that LANS had won the next seven-year contract to manage and operate the laboratory.
On June 1 2006 the University of California ended its 60 years of direct involvement in operating Los Alamos National Laboratory and management control of the laboratory was taken over by Los Alamos National Security LLC. Approximately 95% of the former 10000 plus UC employees at LANL were rehired by LANS to continue working at LANL. Other than UC appointing three members to the eleven member board of directors that oversees LANS UC now has virtually no responsibility or direct involvement in LANL. UC policies and regulation

s that apply to UC campuses and its two national laboratories in California (Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore) no longer apply to LANL and the LANL Director no longer reports to the UC Regents or UC Office of the President. Also LANL employees were removed from the UC's 403(b) retirement savings and defined benefits pension program and placed in a LANS run program. While the LANS retirement program provides rehired UC employees with pensions similar to what UC would have given them LANS no longer guarantees full pensions to newly hired LANL employees instead it only provides them with basic 401(k) retirement saving options.
Concern has been voiced about the new contractor's effectiveness in correcting the perceived problems in safety security and financial management that were cited as the reasons for bidding the contract and Bechtel's lack of transparency (as a private corporation) and increasing control of national nuclear facilities.citation needed
Award of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory contract to LLNS LLC was announced to take effect October 1 2007 rounding out Bechtel's control of the bulk of the US nuclear weapons facilities including LANL (design) LLNL (design) Savannah River Site(nuclear materials) Hanford Site (nuclear materials) Pantex Plant (assembly/disassembly) and Y-12 National Security Complex (nuclear materials). Extended operations
With support of the National Science Foundation LANL operates one of the three National High Magnetic Field Laboratories in conjunction with and located at two other sites Florida State University in Tallahassee Florida and University of Florida in Gainesville Florida.
Los Alamos National Laboratory is a partner in the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) located in Walnut Creek California. JGI was founded in 1997 to unite the expertise and resources in genome mapping DNA sequencing technology development and information sciences pioneered at the three genome centers at University of California's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and LANL.
The Integrated Computing Network (ICN) is a multi-security level network at the LANL integrating large host supercomputers8 a file server a batch server a printer and graphics output server and numerous other general purpose and specialized systems.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory also used to host the arXiv e-print archive. The arXiv is current

ly operated and funded by Cornell University.
In the recent years the Laboratory has developed a major research program in systems biology modeling known at LANL under the name q-bio. Controversy and Criticism
LANL has been the subject of several controversies in the past including employees charging personal expenses to government accounts9 lost equipment or documents (including hundreds of computers containing classified information)101112 and a memorandum to employees to "be careful what they say" to safety and security inspectors.13 Most recently in 2009 69 computers disappeared although plant officials insisted that the computers did not contain the most highly classified information 14. 2009 also saw a scare in which 2.2 pounds of missing plutonium prompted a Department of Energy investigation into the plant. The investigation found that the "missing plutonium" was a result of miscalculation by LANL's statisticians and did not actually exist but the investigation did lead to heavy criticism of the plant by the DOE for security flaws and weaknesses that the DOE claimed to have found.1516 The Project On Government Oversight a government watchdog group has conducted numerous investigations into Los Alamos by working with whistleblowers from inside the plant who come forward with information about what they perceive as waste fraud and abuse in the plant. POGO has frequently published reports articles and letters criticizing what they see as weaknesses in the plant as well as publicizing secret documents given to them by whistleblowers that expose these supposed weaknesses.17 Directors J. Robert Oppenheimer (19431945) Norris Bradbury (19451970) Harold Agnew (19701979) Donald Kerr (19791986) Siegfried S. Hecker (19861997) John C. Browne (19972003) George Peter Nanos (20032005) Robert W. Kuckuck (20052006) Michael R. Anastasio (2006present) See also Anti-nuclear movement in the United States Association of Los Alamos Scientists Bradbury Science Museum Clarence Max Fowler David Greenglass Julius and Ethel Rosenberg History of nuclear weapons Hydrogen Moderated Self-regulating Nuclear Power Module Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Manhattan Project Ed Grothus Timeline of Cox Report controversy University of California Venona Project Wen Ho Lee References "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. 2008-04-15. http://www.nr.nps.gov/.  George Ha

ckbarth and the Bomb "George Hackbarth and the Bomb". http://web.mac.com/dnelson/iWeb/GeorgeHackbarthLosAlamos/Introduction.html.  Dr. J. Robert Beyster with Peter Economy The SAIC Solution: How We Built an $8 Billion Employee-Owned Technology Company John Wiley & Sons (2007) p.192 "Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory". National Historic Landmark summary listing. National Park Service. http://tps.cr.nps.gov/nhl/detail.cfmResourceId679&ResourceTypeDistrict. Retrieved 2008-06-28.  IN PROCESS WEBSITE DOWN ADD LATER ( 19). "National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination: " (PDF). National Park Service. http://pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NHLS/Text/66000893.pdf. Retrieved 2009-06-21.  and Accompanying photos exterior and interior from 19PDF (2.65 MB) Judge Parker Opinion in the Wen Ho Lee Case Wen Ho Lee http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/USenergydepartmentrevealsworld%27sfastestcomputer Schactman Noah. (November 8 2002) "Los Alamos on Hot Seat Again. Wired News. Kilian Michael. (January 3 2003) "Los Alamos Loses Director Under Clouds of Scandals". Chicago Tribune. Trulock Notra. (March 5 2003) "Lab Scandal Undermines Nuclear Credibility. Accuracy in Media. Trounson Rebecca and Ralph Vartabedian. (January 29 2005) "A Slew of Safety Security Weaknesses Found at Los Alamos. Los Angeles Times. Wald Matthew. (July 5 2003) "Arms Official Brushes Off a Complaint About Audit". New York Times. Reichbach Matthew. (February 12 2009) "69 Computers Missing at LANL". The New Mexico Independent. Vartabedian Ralph. (March 26 2009) "Los Alamos' Security Flaws Exposed". Los Angeles Times. Webb Greg. (February 27 2009). "New Security Lapse at Los Alamos Triggers Angry Response from Energy Department". NTI. Los Alamos National Laboratory Links. The Project On Government Oversight Website. Lillian Hoddeson Paul W. Henriksen Roger A. Meade and Catherine Westfall Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos during the Oppenheimer Years 1943-1945 (Cambridge University Press 1993) ISBN 0-521-44132-3 External links Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos  Overview of Historical Operations Los Alamos National Laboratory (official website) Los Alamos History (History/ official website) Annotated bibliography on Los Alamos from the Alsos Digital Library Los Alamos National Security LLC University of California Office of Laboratory Management (offic

ial website) Los Alamos Neutron Science Center "LANSCE" Los Alamos Weather Machine LANL: The Real Story (LANL community blog) LANL: The Corporate Story (follow-up blog to "LANL: The Real Story) LANL: Technology Transfer an example LANL: The Rest of the Story (ongoing blog for LANL employees) "Protecting the Nation's Nuclear Materials". Government Calls Arms Complexes Secure; Critics Disagree NPR. Los Alamos Study Group  an Albuquerque-based group opposed to nuclear weapons Site Y: Los Alamos A map of Manhattan Project Era Site Y: Los Alamos New Mexico. Los Alamos National Laboratory Nuclear Facilities 1997 1 Machinists who assembled the atomic bomb. v  d  e University of California Regents of the University of California Campuses Berkeley  Davis  Hastings  Irvine  Los Angeles  Merced  Riverside  San Diego  San Francisco  Santa Barbara  Santa Cruz Hospitals UC Davis Medical Center  UC Irvine Medical Center  UCLA Medical Center  UCSD Medical Center  UCSF Medical Center Research
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