Latest Los Alamos News

US nuclear weapon production sites violated environmental rules, federal judge decides

Oct. 03, 2024 19:36 PM EDT

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — The National Nuclear Security Administration failed to properly evaluate its expansion of plutonium pit production at sites in South Carolina and New Mexico in violation of environmental regulations, a federal judge has ruled. Plaintiffs challenged a plan...

Declassified memo from US codebreaker sheds light on Ethel Rosenberg's Cold War spy case

Sep. 10, 2024 20:50 PM EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) — A top U.S. government codebreaker who decrypted secret Soviet communications during the Cold War concluded that Ethel Rosenberg knew about her husband's activities but “did not engage in the work herself,” according to a recently declassified memo that her sons say proves...

Former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory dead after car crash in New Mexico

Sep. 07, 2024 18:55 PM EDT

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) — A former top official in U.S. nuclear weapons research at Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories has died from injuries after an automobile crash in New Mexico, authorities said. He was 69. Charles McMillan, an experimental physicist, spent...

'We were expendable': Downwinders from world's 1st atomic test are on a mission to tell their story

Aug. 25, 2024 12:16 PM EDT

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) — It was the summer of 1945 when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan, killing thousands of people as waves of destructive energy obliterated two cites. It was a decisive move that helped bring about the end of World War II, but survivors and the generations that...

Watchdogs want US to address extreme plutonium contamination in Los Alamos' Acid Canyon

Aug. 15, 2024 21:55 PM EDT

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Watchdogs are raising new concerns about legacy contamination in Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb and home to a renewed effort to manufacture key components for nuclear weapons. A Northern Arizona University professor emeritus who analyzed...