Experts: Labs' nukes should be put in one basket

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Jul 16, 2005 | by Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER

The federal government should end handling of nuclear weapons and weapons mater-

ials in at least eight sites, including Lawrence Livermore weapons lab, and collect that work at one heavily guarded facility, a panel of advisers said in a report Thursday.

Experts charged with studying the future of the nation's nuclear weapons complex say the government has too many duplicate weapons activities at multiple sites, with huge costs -- especially for securing all of those sites against a terrorist attack.

"The three (H-bomb) design laboratories, consumers of approximately two-thirds of the nuclear weapons budget, routinely compete with each other and set their own requirements as justification for new facilities and redundant research funding in the fear that one laboratory may become superior," the panel found.

Many of those labs and factories were built in remote areas during the Manhattan Project and the early Cold War.

Now they are surrounded by homes, with residences less than half a mile from Livermore lab's plutonium facility, known as Superblock, and neighborhoods closing on its New Mexico sister, Los Alamos, as well as the nation's sole weapons assembly and disassembly plant near Amarillo, Texas.