Latest news with #LosAlamosNationalLaboratory
Yahoo
24-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
John W. Dean John W. Dean of Albuquerque NM died peacefully
Jun. 23—John W. Dean John W. Dean of Albuquerque NM died peacefully on Sunday, June 8, 2025 at the Montebello Assisted Living Facility in Albuquerque, NM. John was born on April 6, 1929 in Cambridge, MA to James and Mildred Dean. John spent much of his youth on his uncle Steven's farm in rural Connecticut where he became a Boy Scout and developed an interest in the outdoors. During WW2 he moved with his family to Louisiana where he graduated from high school and enrolled in at LSU. After receiving his B.A. from LSU he was drafted into the US Army and sent to White Sands Missile Range as a mechanic working on rocket engines. After receiving an honorable discharge from the Army, John enrolled in the graduate engineering program at the University of Colorado, Boulder. While attending graduate school, John met and married Margaret (Joy) Blackadar and they moved into a small cabin in Nederland, Colorado and adopted two children, Steven and Nancy. After receiving his Master's Degree in Engineering, John worked for the Bureau of Standards in Boulder, Colorado; Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxford, England; Brookhaven National Laboratory in NY and spent the rest of his career at Los Alamos National laboratory in Los Alamos, NM. After retiring, John began to build and fly ultra-light aircrafts. He spent many hours at the airport in Los Lunas, NM and made many friends in the ultra-light community. He was also a long time member of St. Andrew Presbyterian Church in Albuquerque, NM where he found great community, fellowship, and support. John is preceded in death by his parents James and Mildred Dean, his sister Nancy Humphrey and his wife Margaret (Joy) Dean. He is survived by his two children Steven Dean and his wife Erika Britt-Dean of Salt Lake City, UT and Nancy Johnson of Albuquerque, NM and his five grandchildren Wyatt and Savannah Dean and Emily, Cole, and Davis Johnson. Services will be held at St. Andrew Presbyterian Church, Albuquerque, NM on Saturday, July 12, 2025 at 10:00 am. In lieu of flowers please send donations to the National Alzheimer's Association.
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Richard Garwin, designer of the first H-bomb who also paved the way for MRI, GPS and touch-screens
Richard Garwin, who has died aged 97, was an American nuclear scientist who designed the world's first hydrogen bomb and went on to become a presidential adviser on arms control, while helping to lay the groundwork for such technology as magnetic resonance imaging, high-speed laser printers and touch-screen monitors. The Nobel prizewinner Enrico Fermi called him 'the only true genius I have ever met', but he never became a household name: a 2017 biography was subtitled 'The Most Influential Scientist You've Never Heard Of'. Edward Teller is usually credited, in an unattributed phrase, as the 'father of the sweet technology of the H-bomb'. Due to the secrecy surrounding its development, it was only in recent years that historians have become aware of Garwin's role, following the publication in 2001 of a transcript of a recording made by Teller in which, while not eschewing the credit for devising the bomb, the scientist recalled that the 'first design was made by Dick Garwin'. In 1951 Garwin, then a 23-year-old faculty member at the University of Chicago, was working during his summer holidays at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico where, building on Teller's ideas, he designed the 'Mike', an 82-ton sausage-shaped test device, after working out how to direct the radiation from the atomic device to initiate a fusion reaction in the hydrogen – what he called 'the match for the nuclear bonfire'. 'The shot was fired almost precisely according to Garwin's design,' Teller recalled, on Enewetak Atoll on November 1 1952. The power of the blast – 450 times that of Nagasaki – stunned even those who had watched previous bomb tests, with a mushroom cloud five times the height of Everest and 100 miles wide. Teller subsequently became famous for destroying the career of Robert Oppenheimer, who had run the Los Alamos lab in the Second World War, giving birth to the atomic bomb, but afterwards questioned the morality of devising an even more powerful weapon. When, amid the anti-communist paranoia of the McCarthy years, Oppenheimer had his security clearance removed by the government, Teller was the only member of the scientific community to testify against him. In fact Garwin, a board member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, had a lot of sympathy with Oppenheimer, telling an interviewer that if he could wave a magic wand to make the H- bomb go away, 'I would do that.' But as the clock could not be wound back, he believed that the best hope for human survival lay in the deterrence doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) that suggests that a nuclear attack by one superpower would result in a retaliatory nuclear strike, leading to the complete destruction of both attacker and defender. 'The capability for MAD,' Garwin said 'is not a theory, but a fact of life'. In the 1980s, when Teller convinced President Ronald Reagan to invest in a defensive shield that, he claimed, would make it probable that enough Americans would survive a nuclear conflict to ensure the US's continued existence, Garwin was vocal in his criticism of the so-called 'Star Wars' initiative as ineffective and wasteful. He saw a Soviet-American balance of weaponry and arms-control measures as the best way of avoiding nuclear Armageddon. Richard Lawrence Garwin was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 19 1928, the older of two sons of Robert Garwin and Leona, née Schwartz. His father was a high school teacher; his mother a legal secretary. From Cleveland Heights High School Garwin graduated in physics in 1947 from what is now Case Western Reserve University, followed by a master's degree and doctorate under Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago. He joined the faculty, but at Fermi's suggestion spent his summers at the Los Alamos lab, where he returned every year until 1966. For 40 years from the early 1950s Garwin was a researcher at IBM, maintaining a faculty position at Columbia University and advising presidents (excepting Reagan) from Eisenhower to Clinton on nuclear weapons and arms-control issues. As a researcher he contributed to a huge range of scientific discoveries and innovations, and in 2016, when he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama, the president recalled: 'Ever since he was a Cleveland kid tinkering with his father's movie projectors, he's never met a problem he didn't want to solve. Reconnaissance satellites, the MRI, GPS technology, the touch-screen – all bear his fingerprints. He even patented a mussel washer for shellfish: that, I haven't used. The other stuff I have.' In 1991 Garwin chaired a conference to discuss solutions to staunching the Kuwaiti oil leaks during the first Gulf War. He advised the Obama government on dealing with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. From 1993 to 2001 he chaired the State Department's Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board. His belief in the vital importance of nuclear balance led him to oppose any policy that might upset that balance. In 2007, in evidence to the British Commons Defence Select Committee, he described Prime Minister Tony Blair's claim that work must start soon on replacing the ageing Vanguard-class subs of Britain's nuclear submarine fleet as 'highly premature''. The subs' working life could be extended to 45 years or more, he argued, putting off the need for a replacement into the late 2030s or beyond. In 2021 he was one of 700 signatories to an open letter to President Biden, asking him to pledge that the US would never be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict and calling for curbs on his role as sole authority in ordering the use of nuclear weapons – as 'an important safeguard against a possible future president who is unstable or who orders a reckless attack'. The plea fell on deaf ears. In 1947 Richard Garwin married Lois Levy. She died in 2018, and he is survived by two sons and a daughter. Richard Garwin, born April 19 1928, died May 13 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
State environment department adds terms for Los Alamos National Lab radioactive gas release
A Flanged Tritium Waste Container (FTWC) is a stainless-steel certified pressure vessel designed for long-term storage of tritium-contaminated waste items. The Laboratory is planning to vent headspace gases from four of these containers. (Photo courtesy Los Alamos National Laboratory) The New Mexico Environment Department says Los Alamos National Laboratory will need to meet additional conditions before the state will sign off on a release of radioactive gas, and lambasted the lab for allowing the problem to mount over decades. The issue concerns four containers the lab packed in 2007, which contain radioactive gas tritium and some hazardous waste, and require pressure release by 2028 in order to be transported and disposed of. LANL has requested state officials sign off on a plan to release small amounts of gas over time to relieve the pressure, and said the releases will not harm the environment and human health. Tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, can be naturally occurring or a byproduct from nuclear research, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA characterizes the gas as a lower threat, emitting radiation that often cannot penetrate the skin and leaves the body quickly when consumed as tritiated water. In a June 9 letter to officials at the National Nuclear Security Administration and private contractor Triad National Security, which operate LANL, NMED Secretary James Kenney decreed the lab will need to hire an independent technical reviewer for the plan; hold public meetings and tribal consultations; and submit to an audit of hazardous waste disposal operations, before approval will be given. 'In closing, the historical gross mismanagement of these waste streams by DOE and NNSA have placed NMED in an untenable situation. Now, the risk of inaction poses a far greater threat than a technical solution, but no technical solution is free from risk,' Kenney wrote. 'Your disregard of state laws and rules governing these wastes for almost 20 years greatly exacerbated this situation and put New Mexicans, tribal communities, and our environment at risk.' The state believes the laboratory can conduct the steps needed for approval within three months, New Mexico Environment Department Resource Protection Division Director Rick Shean said in an interview with Source NM Tuesday. He said the time pressure from LANL on the plan could have been mitigated in the years since the waste containers were found in 2007. 'If they had dealt with that closer to that discovery time, we wouldn't be in this situation right now,' Shean said. 'So it was their lack of action when the problem was identified that has made this problem worse.' The letter accompanied a complaint the New Mexico Environment Department filed over a failure of the federal government to fund the state's independent oversight of national lab activities. While the funding was eventually restored, the complaint said, the department incurred a little more than $8,400 in administrative costs and jeopardized water, air and soil monitoring programs — including for tritium releases. The complaint requests that federal officials sign a commitment for future funds, issue reports to Congress on the funding and explicitly request the NNSA be named as a responsible party. Federal officials have the chance to appeal the complaint in a hearing process before NMED. Source NM emailed officials at Triad and the NNSA for comment late afternoon Tuesday, and will update the stories with further statements as needed.
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
As drought threat looms, Los Alamos National Lab works to reduce its wildfire risk
Burned trunks from previous fires remain in the scrub oak brush and stands of aspens in the Jemez mountainside just overlooking portion of Los Alamos National Laboratory property. LANL leadership told media during a May 28 tour that they were taking steps to prepare and mitigate the risk of wildfires. (Courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratory) As New Mexico water and fire managers prepare for increased drought and wildfire danger this summer, Los Alamos National Laboratory officials say the lab has taken steps to mitigate those threats on its campus. LANL provided a media tour mid-week to highlight those steps, but did not allow outside photography or recording. 'We're very proud of our preparedness efforts for wildfire,' said Deputy Laboratory Director of Operations Mark Davis from the floor of the Emergency Operations Center, as videos of the 2022 Cerro Pelado fire played across six screens on the wall. 'We want to show our efforts to communicate how our mitigation efforts will protect the lab, workforce, community and environment.' The state has identified the towns of Los Alamos and White Rock as high risk areas for wildfire threats, including LANL, which spans 36 square miles of mesas and canyons. The lab and surrounding town have been evacuated twice in the past 30 years due to fires. That included evacuations for two weeks during the Cerro Grande Fire in 2000, which burned 43,000 acres total, including 45 lab buildings and 7,500 acres of LANL property. Los Alamos evacuated for another 10 days during the 2011 Las Conchas fire, which burned more than 156,000 acres, though only one acre on the lab's property. In 2022, during the same time the Hermit's Peak-Calf Canyon fires raged, the Cerro Pelado fire, also caused by a controlled burn, sparked up and ultimately burned 45,000 acres, requiring the lab to move to remote work in preparation for an evacuation. In 2022, at the request of the Biden Administration, LANL released its Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment and Resilience Plan, which showed that increased wildfire presented the highest risks to equipment, electricity systems, onsite radioactive waste processing, buildings, water systems and communications systems. Critics say climate threats to the laboratory are compounding. LANL's proposed thinning is 'a slow job, but certainly necessary,' said Greg Mello, the executive director of nuclear nonproliferation nonprofit Los Alamos Study Group. But he said the hazards with climate change are stacking up. 'We just wish that the laboratory wasn't straining against every single environmental constraint that there is on that plateau,' Mello said. 'The laboratory is too big and trying to do too much in a place that was never appropriate for a laboratory of the present scale, let alone the additional laboratory facilities and staff that they envision.' The approximately 18,000 people employed at LANL work mostly in science and engineering, from modeling infectious diseases to increasing the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. 'Our missions are vital and critical to national security and they cannot fail,' Davis said. The Jemez wilderness bears scars from the Cerro Grande and Las Conchas fires. Large bald patches with skinny charred remains of the ponderosa pines stand among scrub oak brush replacing the once-forested area. Recent scattered rainstorms offered a small reprieve, but the area remains in Stage 1 fire restrictions — an elevated threat level that restricts all campfires or outdoor burning. Laboratory facilities are interspersed on the top of mesas to higher elevation ponderosa pine forests, separated by canyons and arroyos filled with brush. The lab is bordered by federally managed forests; San Ildefonso and Jemez Pueblos; and Santa Fe and Los Alamos County land. The patchwork of agencies has complicated firefighting and mitigation efforts in the past, said Jeff Dare, who leads the Emergency Operations Center, but Cerro Pelado offered a framework for more cooperation with members of county government and liaisons for surrounding federal agencies and tribal governments. The lab is part of the Master Cooperative Wildland Fire Response Agreement, which allocates additional resources such as helicopters and personnel to fight any wildfire that does appear, Dare said, adding: 'It protects the laboratory before it can get here.' The more recent focus has been trimming back the areas around lab buildings, roads and utility lines, said Richard Nieto, LANL's wildland fire program manager. Trimming has occurred on an estimated 12% to 15% of lab property. 'Hope is not a strategy,' Nieto said, adding that the area needs to better adapt to fires when they happen. 'This area was meant to burn; it's what we have to deal with, ecologically.' But overgrowth is a challenge. Much of the higher-elevation ponderosa forests sport 400 to 1,300 trees per acre, rather than the healthier 50 to 150 trees per acre, he said. Habitats for two endangered species and archeological sites also require consideration. Beyond trimming, the lab is working on developing plans for prescribed burns, but will take another three to five years to realize, he said. On the other side of lab property, fences looped with concertina wire and sporting signs warning of radiological hazards contain Area G. Vaguely merengue- shaped white tents — coated in fireproof material — stand amid the juniper and piñon scrub. Inside, under crisscrossed steel frames, stacked white containers on metal pallets contain legacy waste from the lab's work in the nuclear program. The facilities are geared to reducing fire concerns, said Gail Helm, the facility operations director for N3B, which is contracted to manage the 10-year $2 billion dollar cleanup of Cold War Era legacy waste. The tents include fire detection and suppression. Concrete barricades surround them to prevent vehicle accidents and potential fires. Under the Stage 1 fire restrictions, a water truck remains onsite at all times. To the west of Area G lies Technical Area 53, where the lab logs and stores new transuranic nuclear waste — such as gloves contaminated with plutonium — produced at the new plutonium pit production site. The waste is eventually disposed off-site at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project outside of Carlsbad. Thomas Vigil, the deputy group leader at the Chemical and Waste Facilities said LANL is doing 'its due diligence' to follow every protocol to keep the public and workers safe. 'This is my state, this is where we live,' he said. 'I live just down the road, and it's important to me.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Life on Mars? Paper co-authored by LANL scientist says more terraforming research needed
It might be surprising to hear planetary scientist Nina Lanza use the word 'disappointing' in the same sentence as 'Mars.' After all, the Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher has dedicated her entire career to the Red Planet. Lanza personally has been fascinated with Mars since seeing images taken of the surface during the 1997 Pathfinder mission. But she said the earlier Viking missions in the 1970s were a letdown to many, leading to a longtime lack of interest in Earth's rusty neighbor and an approximately two-decade gap before the next Mars mission. 'We saw a bunch of rocks,' Lanza said. 'That's not actually unexpected — that's what planets are made out of. But there was so much hype, I think, built up from 100 years of study of Mars as having canals, with these civilizations moving water. All of that was built up so much that when we actually saw the surface of Mars as it is, people couldn't help being disappointed.' That's changed. Lanza, who recently co-authored a perspective paper on the potential to terraform Mars, said the fourth planet from the sun is going through a renaissance. Technological advances, Space X and Andy Weir's The Martian have returned Mars to the forefront of the public's imagination. An idea popularized by astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan in 1971 is having a renaissance as well: terraforming. 'Mars has been a lot more of a complex, dynamic place than we really gave it credit for when we first landed with Viking,' Lanza said. 'It's a place with a lot of resources. It's a place that I think we can, yet again, start to imagine ourselves going to and being there on the surface.' Nina Lanza X post Nina Lanza, a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who has dedicated her career to Mars, documents milestones in red planet research on her X account. Her perspective paper, published in Nature Astronomy, asks two main questions: Can the currently inhospitable Mars be warmed enough for life? And, once that question is answered, another arises: Should it? The paper makes a case for more terraforming research. But there's a long way to go before the red planet turns green. Terraforming has, in the past, been relegated to the pages of novels. A 2018 study published in Nature Astronomy suggested there's not enough readily accessible carbon dioxide left on Mars to warm the planet sufficiently with greenhouse gases alone. But Edwin Kite, associate professor of planetary science at the University of Chicago and another co-author on the perspective paper, said there's been technological advances in the past couple of years that have made terraforming seem more in reach. 'It hasn't been a goal in the past because it's been seen as science fiction,' Kite said. '… It's only in the last few years that there's been a big increase in our ability to move mass around the solar system, and these new warming efforts that make it seem like something we might actually do — as opposed to science fiction.' A friendlier climate New Mexico and Mars are both deserts, Lanza noted. Water scarcity is a big problem in the Southwest, but it pales in comparison to the lack of readily accessible water on Mars. The majority of the planet's water reserves are in its coldest parts, according to her paper. Mars was likely once a warmer, wetter place, but that's not the case now. Cold, dry and radiation heavy, its surface is 'worse than the worst deserts on Earth,' Lanza said — more akin to the frozen desert of Antarctica. New Mexico is 'like a tropical jungle compared to Mars,' she said. Mars also has a thin atmosphere. Nina Lanza 'Right now, Mars is not a great place to go if you're a human — or any kind of microscopic life. It's a really harsh environment,' Lanza said. '[But] you can make it less harsh, even if you can't recreate Earth.' Kite said there's several potential ways to address these challenges and warm Mars. For example, in a 2024 article co-authored by Kite, researchers looked at using artificial aerosols made of materials readily available on the planet's surface, rather than greenhouse gases, and found it potentially could warm the planet more effectively. The recent perspective paper also delves into using solar sails and other methods to potentially increase the planet's average global temperature by 'tens of degrees' over the course of several years. Raising ethical questions But 'can' and 'should' are two different words. The paper delves into the ethics of terraforming — and putting humans on Mars in general. 'Indeed, any movement of humans beyond Earth raises ethical issues,' the paper states. 'It is a trope of science fiction that, even though humans have already restructured Earth's land surface, nitrogen cycle and so on at the planetary scale, attempts to do the same for other worlds will be seen as dysfunctional.' Much of that swirls around a lingering question left unanswered by David Bowie: Is there, or has there ever been, life on Mars? If there is, researchers argue, that totally changes the discussion about terraforming. While the planet appears dead on the surface, Kite said, there could be life lurking in the deep subsurface. And Lanza said rocks studied with Mars rovers have displayed 'fascinating chemistry' that could be an indicator of ancient life on Mars. 'If we had seen it on Earth, it wouldn't be a question to us that this was formed by life,' Lanza said. 'But because it's on Mars, it requires much, much larger burden of proof.' In some ways, the perspective paper is a call to action: More research is needed. Such research could also inform our knowledge of Earth, Lanza said, noting the planet's changing climate. Mars has gone through its own climate change, becoming drier and colder; terraforming would be yet another change. The surface is also much more ancient than Earth's, Lanza said, allowing for a more complete geologic record. But, while similar, Mars and Earth have fundamental differences, Lanza said. Terraforming could make them more similar, but Mars will never become a copy of Earth. 'Earth is unique, Mars is unique, and Mars will continue to be unique,' Lanza said. 'Planets are never going to be identical.' Nina Lanza Stalled sample mission Evidence of life could be in samples of matter collected on the planet's surface, which NASA had planned to return to Earth for study. The Mars rover Perseverance has been collecting samples, but they might not make it to Earth. An early proposed budget report said costly missions like Mars Sample Return, described as 'grossly over budget,' should be terminated. The need for research on samples would be fulfilled by human missions to Mars, the report stated. It's not the first time the high cost of the mission has raised eyebrows. An independent September 2023 report expressed concerns over an 'unrealistic budget and schedule expectations.' The mission was unlikely to meet proposed timelines, the report said, and the proposed fiscal year 2024 budget wouldn't be enough to get the program off the ground. However, the value of the samples is high, the report stated. The return would 'revolutionize' the understanding of the inner solar system and answer 'one of the most important scientific questions we can answer' — whether there is, or was, life off of Earth. But NASA struggled to communicate the importance of the mission to the public, the report stated. Last year, then-NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the agency was working on a plan to address the issues. 'Mars Sample Return will be one of the most complex missions NASA has ever undertaken. The bottom line is, an $11 billion budget is too expensive, and a 2040 return date is too far away,' Nelson said in an August news release. 'Safely landing and collecting the samples, launching a rocket with the samples off another planet — which has never been done before — and safely transporting the samples more than 33 million miles back to Earth is no small task. We need to look outside the box to find a way ahead that is both affordable and returns samples in a reasonable timeframe.' Nina Lanza Lanza said the Mars Sample Return mission is critical. She doesn't see human missions as an alternative — the human presence can disrupt the planet's landscape, potentially obscuring any record of ancient or current life. The samples can also help protect humans, and their equipment, on future Mars missions, she said. She pointed to lunar regolith, sharp dust on the moon that can be damaging to breathe. 'Understanding what Mars is made out of and how it might pose any particular hazards to health, that's really important if you're going to send people into that hazard,' Lanza said. Kite had a different perspective. Although the samples have been 'judiciously chosen,' he said, they won't answer every question about Mars — and the high cost makes it unlikely other sample return missions will be approved. 'Even if it had been pursued, it would have been the last sample return, because taxpayers would never sign off on a second one that was very expensive,' Kite said. '… Making it that expensive is a very eggs-in-one-basket approach, because it seems that your first bunch of samples will answer all questions about Mars.' He added, 'I don't think that's likely.'
