Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Thom Mason, center, and LANL’s Science, Technology, and Engineering Executive Officer Angela Mielke, right, address attendees during the Tuesday, Jan. 21 virtual LANL Town Hall. Reporter Screenshot
A collage from LANL director Thom Mason’s online presentation during Tuesday’s virtual town hall. Reporter Screenshot
BY MAIRE O’NEILL
maire@losalamosreporter,com
The last year has been incredibly busy at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Director Thom Mason told community members in attendance at Tuesday’s virtual town hall. He said LANL is working hard across all its missions, using major facilities such as the 50-year old LANSCE Accelerator, which he noted has received approval for a modernizatiom. He also mentioned activities connected to LANL’s nuclear deterrence missions.
“Some of the really exciting work is in the emerging field of artificial intelligence, which is really building on our long tradition of high-performance computing,” Mason said. “Given all of that work, we were very pleased then to receive from the National Nuclear Security Administration a rating of excellent on our report card for the work we did in 2024 and it reflects the progress we made across that full spectrum of missions.”
Calling it obviously a big ticket item, Mason noted that LANL has been reestablishing the nation’s pit production capability, which underpins deterrence.
“We brought the Venado and Crossroads supercomputers online, which are helping us to continue with the important work we do in modeling and simulation so that we can certify our deterrent without testing but also with Venado in particular, explore the tremendous opportunities of artificial intelligence,” he said.
LANL has made a lot of investments in infrastructure – working to improve facility availability and working conditions and make it easier to conduct work in a safe and envirommentally respectful way, Mason said.
“Along that same line we shipped over 8000 cubic meters of waste off site for disposal and we continue to work to enhance our operations in the safety culture. Right now the role that continues to be kind of front place, the national security mission, is thriving. The science, technology and engineering is all based in meeting that challenge,” he said.
Mason said right now the prospect for the LANL budget is looking stable but that the Lab is obviously are in the middle of a continuing resolution and doesn’t have the final budget yet for 2025.
“Our hiring is leveling off after experiencing several years of pretty rapid growth. We’re approaching the level we need to be at given the mission work that is on our plate right now and although there’s obviously been an election, our work has generally enjoyed bi-partisan support over the years. The expectation is that we will continue to work,” he said.
In looking back at FY 2024, Mason said LANL the first production unit of the W87-1 warhead,
“The warhead is designed by our colleagues at Livermore, but we are responsible for making the plutonium pit, and there is very rigorous quality assurance that goes into making sure that the pits we produce meet the needs, that they are qualified to enter the stockpile, and bear the diamond stamp. This allowed LANL to transition from years of development work where we made multiple pits to develop the processes to prove them out,” he said. “The next step for us now is to build from minimal production to a capacity of at leasr 30 pits per year, and it’s going to take the next several years of modernizing equipment, taking out obsolete and used equipment out of our PF4 Facility and replacing it with modern, state of the art manufacturing equipment that will allow us to do that.”
Mason said one other thing that’s been attracting a lot of notice locally is the Electric Power Capacity Upgrade Project (EPCU).
“The purpose of the EPCU project is to increase the capacity, reliability, capability, and resiliency of our electric supply. Right now the two high-powered lines lead into Los Alamos. The demand for electricity has been growing. We’re shifting a lot of our power usage to electricity to and that trend is expected to continue,” Mason said.
He explained that the timing of the proposed electric power capacity upgrade is really driven by anticipating a new computer that will arrive to replace Crossroads in 2027.
“When that computer goes online, our power consumption will exceed the capacity of the lower capacity of one of the existing lines. That’s a problem because we are required to have redundant electric supply. The regulatory commission that oversees power distribution required for Los Alamos and since our demand would be greater than would be supplied by one line, we would not have that redundant supply. So that’s what’s pushing the desire do to that, Mason said.
There has been a lot of dialog with federal, tribal, state and local entities, there’s a process that the U.S. Forest Service is overseeing…. It’s very important that we complete this on time so that we can support the delivery of that next generation of supercomputer
LANL’s Science, Technology, and Engineering Executive Officer Angela Mielke took over the conversation to talk about a few of the highlights of what’s currently going on at LANL.
“We are partnering with Sandia National Laboratory as well as a number of educational institutions across the state with a goal of leveraging the high-performance computer capabilities Thom talked about. Along with our AI background and computational science background at the two laboratories, leveraging that with the universities, enabling the faculty to build strong proposals that are much larger than they’ve been able to in the past, ultimately building the pipeline within our state of folks who can then work in AI industry as well as at the national laboratory. And so it builds that pipeline and ultimately the goal is to bring new entrepreneurs and start-ups from the AI world into New Mexico,” Mielke said.
Mielke said just as LANL and Sandia have very strong partnerships with the New Mexico universities, they also have those types of partnerships across the country with the universities.
“We have had long-term ongoing partnership with the University of Michigan and we’re excited that we have a new agreement that we’re working with them to build a new data center for AI research, as well as we’ll be doing advanced manufacturing and materials science there,” she said. “Again, this creates a great pipeline, it creates a great partnership between our scientists and the University of Michigan faculty researchers to address national security challenges that we have across the country. Areas like cybersecurity and biohazards as well”
Mielke said LANL goes from discovery and open science all the way to national security work.
“That span, that breadth is really important to what the national labs bring to assist in the research system. Discovery and open science is a way to bring our pipeline in and then we’re able to leverage that, and one example – we’ve been talking about AI a lot – the highlight from the AI perspective is with our computational modeling” she said. “So let’s just focus on our earth systems modeling in particular. This is an area where we can really focus on the open and discovery science. Again it has national security implications.”
She mentioned the fires in the past few weeks in Los Angeles.
“Being able to model that matter. They create instabilities in local areas. When we see massive hurricanes that create instabilities in regional environments and of course, the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated its story on a global level. That’s how we tie back in, and then we take it one step further and demonstrate that discovery science all the way to address global challenges that we have across the country,” Mielke said. “I like to highlight that because it’s a little bit of my background as well – the work that we’ve done in space.”
She explained that the Lab has beeninvolved in space since the 1950s and that LANL currently develops instruments and payloads that go on satellites for treaty monitoring.
“So that’s our global security mission, but we’re also developing plutonium batteries to go on NASA missions. For example on Curiosity and Perseverance rovers they’re using our plutonium technologies. And we also have our own mission that’s on board both of those rovers on Mars. So that’s all the way at the end of discovery science. Pulling all that together demonstrates that breadth of world class science that we have at the laboratory,” Mielke concluded.
Editor’s note: Article to come on question and answer session following Mason and Mielke’s comments