Nuke weapons project may move to NTS

Wednesday, July 3, 2002 | 9:31 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The plan to move a key Energy Department nuclear weapons program from New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory to the Nevada Test Site may be near a final phase. The move would involve relocating sensitive nuclear materials, including several tons of plutonium, enriched uranium and other bomb-making devices.

Los Alamos' Technical Area 18, or TA-18, facility is used for testing and measuring nuclear materials, as well as training, according to the DOE.

Former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson in 2000 said the site was safe, but that its facilities were between 30 and 50 years old and increasingly expensive to maintain.

More recently critics have said the site is vulnerable to terrorist attack.

Now the department has nearly finished a massive study of where to best house the TA-18 programs. Among the "four or five" options are moving the program to another site at Los Alamos, or moving it to Nevada's remote Test Site, said Lisa Cutler, a spokeswoman for the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages the Test Site and the nation's nuclear weapons programs.

A decision about where to move TA-18 is expected within a few weeks, Cutler said.

Officials with the government watchdog group Project on Government Oversight said their sources within the DOE have confirmed that the decision has already been made to move the facility to Nevada. They lauded the decision, saying TA-18's home at Los Alamos is the most vulnerable facility in the nation's nuclear weapons complex.