Los Alamos nuclear program will be moved to Test Site

Thursday, April 1, 2004 | 10:06 a.m.

A key Energy Department nuclear weapons program will begin a move from New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory to the Nevada Test Site in September, the National Nuclear Security Administration said Wednesday.

The move involves 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, the DOE said.

It will take an estimated 18 months to ship all of the nuclear materials to the Device Assembly Facility at the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, officials said.

Critics have said the New Mexico site is vulnerable to a terrorist attack. Officials with a government watchdog group, Project on Government Oversight, have praised the Energy Department for moving the nuclear facility from New Mexico to Nevada.

NNSA Administrator Linton Brooks said, "Getting this material out of TA-18 and to Nevada will assist the NNSA in more quickly establishing critical national security missions in Nevada while consolidating special nuclear materials in a newer, more secure facility."

While security has been strengthened at TA-18, more than a ton of special nuclear material has already been removed because it is no longer required, Brooks said.

The Device Assembly Facility, or DAF, was built at the Nevada Test Site in the late 1980s to support handling of nuclear materials before underground nuclear experiments. The U.S. halted underground nuclear explosions in September 1992.

The DAF is used to support subcritical experiments, underground explosions that do not sustain a nuclear chain reaction.