LANL to open office in downtown Santa Fe
Building will house 75 employees, conference center
SANTA FE — Los Alamos National Laboratory announced Wednesday it will open an office in Santa Fe big enough to house 75 employees with space to hold meetings, events and conferences.
LANL signed a 10-year lease at the recently renovated Firestone building at West Alameda and North Guadalupe that has gone through iterations as a tire shop, bank, music venue, restaurant and, for the past 2½ years, the headquarters for tech startup Descartes Labs.
A news release announcing the lease signing says the building will serve as a hub for community and economic development activities.
“It will facilitate the Laboratory’s educational partnerships, workforce development initiatives, recruiting, and technology transfer,” it says. “It will also give the
Laboratory’s technology transfer division — the Feynman Center — access to additional meeting space in Santa Fe to foster new technology collaborations from both local and national sources.”
The news release plays up LANL’s longtime association with the city of Santa Fe. The first floor of the 28,000 square foot building will include a conference center named for Dorothy McKibbin, who staffed the oncesecret Manhattan Project headquarters just a few blocks away.
“This building will act as an additional entrance point for the Laboratory, just as Dorothy McKibbin’s office at 109 East Palace in Santa Fe did decades ago,” LANL director Thom Mason said in a statement.
Not everyone is happy about LANL having a presence in Santa Fe — especially those opposed to nuclear proliferation. While LANL conducts research into a wide variety of scientific fields, much of its work centers around the development of nuclear weapons.
Last year, about 50 people attended a rally at City Hall urging the city to keep LANL and the National Nuclear Security Administration — the federal agency that oversees the lab — out of plans for the development of the Midtown campus.
“Opening up a facility for weapons of mass destruction in the heart of the Royal City of Holy Faith of St. Francis is repugnant and affects the reputation in Santa Fe in a very negative way,” said Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group, who helped organize last year’s rally. “No one should be confused about what LANL is and how it’s connected to violence across the globe.”
People at the rally carried signs that read “No LANL in Santa Fe,” “LANL: Toxic Science” and “Mayor Webber, listen to the people.”
A city spokesman declined an interview, instead issuing a statement that said in part “LANL’s many agencies bring specialized business assistance in a variety of ways to our community.”
Nuclear Watch New Mexico responded to LANL’s announcement with a news release of its own. It refers to a recent report by UNM’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research that measures the lab’s economic impact as a net loss for county governments surrounding Los Alamos in terms of providing basic services like roads, parks and policing.
“I doubt Santa Feans will be fooled,” said Jay Coghlan, the group’s executive director. “We’ve heard before the Lab’s empty promises of economic benefits while it tries to obscure the fact that expanding nuclear weapons production will always be its bread and butter. The Lab may not get what it wants in that a downtown LANL office will likely become a lightning rod for controversy.”
LANL recently issued a news release that said it spent $413 million with small businesses in New Mexico during fiscal year 2020.
The Santa Fe City Council on Wednesday was expected to pass a resolution requesting that the National Nuclear Security Administration perform a new environmental impact study at LANL and suspend expansion of the production of plutonium pits — the triggering device in nuclear warheads — until the National Nuclear Facilities Safety Board certifies that all nuclear safety issues are resolved.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for Descartes Labs said the company shifted to a remote working structure during the pandemic but it will keep its headquarters in Santa Fe.
“When we are able to reopen an office, we will lease another office in Santa Fe,” the company said in a statement.