Washington

Under threat? Los Alamos health research laboratory. Credit: LANL

Concern is growing at the US Department of Energy's laboratories that the planned creation of an agency to run their nuclear weapons research will undermine other programmes, including $3 billion worth of scientific research each year.

The laboratories, which employ 30,000 people, conduct most of the basic physics research in the United States as well as important programmes in environmental science, biology and other disciplines.

A National Nuclear Security Administration will come into being next March if, as expected, President Bill Clinton signs a defence authorization act that legislates for its establishment, passed by both houses of Congress this month. The agency will be semi-autonomous within the Department of Energy (DoE).

The establishment of the agency is supported by many researchers at the three huge weapons laboratories — Los Alamos and Sandia in New Mexico, and Lawrence Livermore in California. They hope it will free them from some of the bureaucracy that has characterized their management by the DoE.

But scientists working on non-weapons programmes in these labs worry that support for their work will erode over time, as the laboratories focus on the new agency's mission of nuclear weapons research. Each of the three laboratories receives annual funding of around $1 billion, of which one-third at Livermore and one-quarter at the two New Mexico labs is for non-weapons programmes.

Managers and scientists elsewhere in the department's huge network of laboratories fear that their needs have been overlooked in the reforms, which were rushed through Congress this summer in response to allegations of Chinese spying at Los Alamos.

In the short term, the non-weapons labs fear that support will be undermined for the work they do for the weapons programme. About one-third of the work of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington state and the Oak Ridge laboratory in Tennessee serves missions that will be transferred to the new agency. But both laboratories will remain under the direct control of the DoE.

“We don't think that, for a change of this magnitude, this has been properly thought through,” says Bill Madia, director of PNNL. Madia says the legislation makes it clear that the weapons labs will continue to do science work, but says nothing about the weapons work done by the science laboratories.

This includes $150 million worth of work at his lab on nuclear non-proliferation, much of it involving safeguarding nuclear facilities in the former Soviet Union. “The question is whether the science laboratories will contribute to the new agency: at the moment, this is very unclear.”

Breaking away: distribution of DoE's budget for 2000, showing money destined for new agency.

Even staff at laboratories that do no weapons-related work are worried about where the reform will leave the energy department in the longer term.

Once the $6 billion worth of weapons work has been transferred to the agency, an unreformed DoE will be left with $6.5 billion to cope with the seemingly intractable task of cleaning up old weapons-production facilities, $2 billion for politically contentious energy-related programmes, and $3 billion for its science programmes.

The reform “will leave the DoE as a hollow shell, with not much of a budget,” says an official at one of the physics laboratories.

With weapons research in the new agency, the DoE's many enemies in Congress will be better placed to attack the rest of the department's budget. “It's going to make it easier for Congress to abolish the department,” says Steve Dean of Fusion Power Associates, a fusion-research advocacy group, and a long-time observer of the department.

Representative William Thornberry (Republican, Texas) framed the reform legislation setting up the new agency along with Senator Pete Domenici (Republican, New Mexico). Thornberry admits that the interests of the nuclear weapons programme came first. “For me, the most important mission of the department is the maintenance of a safe and reliable stockpile of nuclear weapons,” he says.

He adds that it was not feasible for the legislation to reform the rest of the department. Thornberry, and congressional staff involved in writing the legislation, say that scientific exchange should continue between the weapons and the non-weapons labs. But they say it is up to the Department of Energy to work out how this should be done, as it implements the law over the next few months.

Energy secretary Bill Richardson has opposed the reforms and called on Clinton to veto them. The president is unlikely to do so because of the margins by which the law passed. So the DoE is starting quiet preparations to implement the reforms and is said to have begun sounding out candidates to run the agency.

Environmentalists are perturbed by the autonomy to be granted to the agency. They sought to derail the agency proposal in Congress on the grounds that it would weaken environmental controls in the nuclear weapons complex. Backers of the reforms counter that the agency will have to adhere to existing environmental laws.