Los Alamos

A series of safety accidents, not just security lapses, prompted the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory to halt nearly all operations there Friday. Los Alamos, one of the nation's two nuclear weapons laboratories, is under heavy criticism because of the disappearance on July 7 of two computer data storage devices containing classified information from its weapons physics division. But in broadening a shutdown of classified work Thursday to include the entire laboratory Friday, G. Peter Nanos, the laboratory's director, cited safety and environmental concerns as well as security issues.

President Obama has called for an "all hands on deck" response to the Gulf oil spill, but what does that mean? Similar to the Apollo 13 incident, outside-the-box thinking is desperately needed to solve this disaster. The president needs to get outside the industry experts from leading schools and companies: MIT, Cal Tech, Los Alamos, NASA, NOAA, Navy Seals, anybody with brain power, to come up with a creative solution, now! Relying on BP and the Coast Guard to solve this is a joke. Geoffrey S. Baker

SANTA FE, N.M. - With a scathing indictment of the federal response to fires that have now burned nearly 80 square miles of northern New Mexico and more than 400 homes, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said yesterday that the government was wholly to blame and would do whatever possible to compensate victims. "The calculations that went into this were seriously flawed," Babbitt said at a news conference in which federal officials described how a planned burn for a small section in Bandelier National Monument quickly raged out of control, overtaking wide areas beyond, including the city of Los Alamos and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a nuclear facility.

LOUIS ROSEN, 91 Scientist worked on Manhattan Project Louis Rosen, a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project and later created an influential neutron center at the facility, died Thursday in New Mexico. The Lujan Neutron Scattering Center at LANSCE credits Dr. Rosen with leading the way in developing the world's most powerful linear accelerator, culminating in construction of the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility, known today as the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center, or LANSCE.

THE BIGGEST casualty of the wildfire now sweeping through north New Mexico may not be the hundreds of homes burned in Los Alamos. It could well be the credibility of the National Park Service and sister agencies that manage hundreds of millions of acres of publicly owned lands. Particularly vulnerable is the long-accepted practice of controlled burning -- setting small fires to burn off dried brush and trees to prevent the eruption of wildfires. Hundreds of thousands of acres are purposely burned each year to create fire breaks, cleared areas beyond which natural or accidental fires cannot advance because of a lack of fuel.

McLEAN, Va. - Northrop Grumman Corp. plans to bid on a seven-year contract to manage Los Alamos National Laboratory, a Department of Energy facility now run by the University of California. The contract is worth about $2.2 billion a year and has extension options that could add 13 years to the management deal, putting the total value at about $44 billion over a 20-year period, the Los Angeles-based aerospace and defense company said yesterday. Northrop, with $29.85 billion in sales for 2005, said it has experience with many of the scientific areas under research at Los Alamos.

109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos, by Jennet Conant. Simon & Schuster. 432 pages. $26.95. The 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki this year has unleashed a flurry of books about the Manhattan Project and some of its most colorful figures. But in 109 East Palace, Jennet Conant stakes out less-trafficked territory, producing an engaging portrait of life on the remote mesa that served as backdrop for the world's most audacious scientific enterprise.

A blog rebellion among scientists and engineers at Los Alamos, the federal government's premier nuclear weapons laboratory, is threatening to end the tenure of its director, G. Peter Nanos. Four months of jeers, denunciations and defenses of Nanos' management recently culminated in dozens of signed and anonymous messages concluding that his days were numbered. The postings to a public Web log conveyed a mood of self-congratulation tempered with sober discussion of what comes next. "Some here will celebrate that they have been able to run the sheriff out of Dodge," Gary Stradling, a veteran Los Alamos scientist who is a staunch defender of Nanos, wrote Tuesday on the blog.

LOS ALAMOS, N. M. - From a distance, the bristly stand of ponderosa pine behind this formerly secret mesa looks like it's got a bad case of five o'clock shadow, cast perhaps by a rogue thundercloud. But drive a little closer and you see the violence: row upon row of charcoal skeletons where healthy trees used to be. Roll down the window and it fills your nose: the stale stench of a sooty incinerator. Eight weeks after the Cerro Grande wildfires roasted 47,000 acres of once-lush forest and several neighborhoods, residents here in the birthplace of the atomic bomb are struggling to rebound.

Referring to "systemic management failures" by the University of California, the U.S. Energy Department announced yesterday that it will for the first time hold an open competition for the contract to run Los Alamos National Laboratory when the university's deal expires in 2005. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said he has decided not to break the university's contract immediately, though, because it could cause significant disruption at the New Mexico lab, the United States' premier nuclear weapons design center.

Changing Light Nora Gallagher Pantheon / 224 pages / $22 Self-consciousness is not, by any means, limited to literary types. But writers and readers often seem to possess an extra dose of it. I like to think of it as a kind of third eye: Now I am shopping like a maniac to distract myself from desperate loneliness; here I am looking longingly at the oncoming train that could end my life; will the person standing next to me in this silent elevator be...

109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos, by Jennet Conant. Simon & Schuster. 432 pages. $26.95. The 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki this year has unleashed a flurry of books about the Manhattan Project and some of its most colorful figures. But in 109 East Palace, Jennet Conant stakes out less-trafficked territory, producing an engaging portrait of life on the remote mesa that served as backdrop for the world's most audacious scientific enterprise.

A blog rebellion among scientists and engineers at Los Alamos, the federal government's premier nuclear weapons laboratory, is threatening to end the tenure of its director, G. Peter Nanos. Four months of jeers, denunciations and defenses of Nanos' management recently culminated in dozens of signed and anonymous messages concluding that his days were numbered. The postings to a public Web log conveyed a mood of self-congratulation tempered with sober discussion of what comes next. "Some here will celebrate that they have been able to run the sheriff out of Dodge," Gary Stradling, a veteran Los Alamos scientist who is a staunch defender of Nanos, wrote Tuesday on the blog.

McLEAN, Va. - Northrop Grumman Corp. plans to bid on a seven-year contract to manage Los Alamos National Laboratory, a Department of Energy facility now run by the University of California. The contract is worth about $2.2 billion a year and has extension options that could add 13 years to the management deal, putting the total value at about $44 billion over a 20-year period, the Los Angeles-based aerospace and defense company said yesterday. Northrop, with $29.85 billion in sales for 2005, said it has experience with many of the scientific areas under research at Los Alamos.

WASHINGTON - Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed a muon cosmic ray screening device that can accurately detect smuggled nuclear weapons and materials in any vehicle or container, the nuclear lab reported yesterday. According to Los Alamos officials, the device would provide an enormous advantage over X-ray scanning equipment, which can generate dangerous amounts of radiation and cannot penetrate lead containers and other shielding. Several test models of the scanner have been built and successfully operated, and work on a full-size prototype has begun, the laboratory said.

A series of safety accidents, not just security lapses, prompted the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory to halt nearly all operations there Friday. Los Alamos, one of the nation's two nuclear weapons laboratories, is under heavy criticism because of the disappearance on July 7 of two computer data storage devices containing classified information from its weapons physics division. But in broadening a shutdown of classified work Thursday to include the entire laboratory Friday, G. Peter Nanos, the laboratory's director, cited safety and environmental concerns as well as security issues.

JUST WHEN YOU THINK all the great ideas have been thought of, scientists dream up a concept so radical, and so innovative, that you wonder if they've been smoking reefers the size of Yule logs. Such is the case with a group of scientists from the National Research Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M. ("Los Alamos" is Spanish for "More than One Alamo"). According to an Associated Press story that I am not making up, these scientists are proposing to build an elevator that would be 62,000 miles high.

WASHINGTON - The Energy Department has ordered a full review of security at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory after discovering security lapses that officials called "unacceptable." Federal officials ordered the review of the laboratory in Northern California on Friday after learning that the loss of an electronic access badge had gone unreported to senior managers for six weeks. The badge could help gain access to 3,000 offices at the facility, some containing classified material.