Director of Los Alamos lab named
SANTA FE — Los Alamos National Laboratory will soon be under direction of a hometown boy — Terry Wallace, who grew up in Los Alamos, worked at the lab as an undergraduate student and has held various highranking positions at LANL since 2003.
The lab announced Tuesday that Wallace will become the 75-year-old lab’s 11th director — and the first actually from Los Alamos — on Jan. 1, succeeding retiring director Charles McMillan. He takes over as the lab faces scrutiny over safety issues and is transitioning to a new operating contract.
“This is my family,” Wallace, 61, said of LANL in an interview. “All 11,000plus employees are my family, the weird uncles and all.”
Wallace was chosen for the labs’ top job by the board of Los Alamos National Security LLC (LANS), the private consortium including the University of California and the Bechtel corporation that has managed the lab since 2006.
“Terry’s expertise in forensic seismology, a highly-specialized discipline, makes him an acknowledged international authority on the detection and quantification of nuclear tests,” said Norman J. Pattiz, LANS board chairman, in a news release. Wallace currently serves as the lab’s principal associate director for Global Security.
Wallace becomes LANL director as the U.S. Department of Energy has put the $2.5 billion-a-year LANL management contract out for bid, with the winner of the competition taking over next October.
LANS failed to gain contract extensions beyond this fiscal year after receiving inadequate performance reviews, particularly after a drum of radioactive waste improperly packed with a combustible mix at Los Alamos breached at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant at Carlsbad in 2014. The contamination caused a costly shutdown of the nation’s nuclear waste repository.
The lab also has had a series of lesser safety issues recently, including improperly shipping radioactive material on a commercial cargo plane and exceeding plutonium limits by putting two pieces close together.
“No accident is acceptable. They are avoidable. We have to do better,” said Wallace, adding, “I also think that the context is also important.” He said LANL is “by far” the largest and most complex of the national labs. “It would be wrong from me to say we don’t have a safety problem, because we have issues,” added Wallace. “But in fact I think we have a remarkably good path forward,” as the lab works on what he called a “learning safety culture.”
A frequent lab critic wasn’t impressed with Wallace’s history at LANL. “Wallace is a lab good ol’ boy,” said Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “He’ll no doubt have his hand out for more taxpayer dollars for more nuclear weapons programs.”
Wallace is the son of the lab staffer Terry Wallace Sr. and state Rep. Jeannette Wallace, both deceased. “I may have gone and been an academic for 20 years and everything else,” he said of his tenure as a University of Arizona professor, “but this is the only place that’s home to me.