WIPP and Los Alamos

So high political protection at los Alamos created the $1 billion dollars damage and delayed vital rad waste shipments to the Waste Isolation Plant Pilot Project(WIPP). The whole deal makes sense now.   

Los Alamos: Secret Colony, Hidden Truths: A Whistleblower’s Diary By Chuck Montaño

Reviewed by KAY MATTHEWS
Anyone who has read the daily New Mexico press over the last 20 years knows who Chuck Montaño is. This Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) employee, activist, organizer, and whistleblower is now an author as well. His book, Los Alamos: Secret Colony, Hidden Truths: A Whistleblower’s Diary, is a blow by blow account of Montano’s tenure at LANL, and, as you can discern from the book’s title, an indictment of the mismanagement, discrimination, and retaliation he experienced, and witnessed, while there.
When Chuck was first writing his book a few years ago he gave me his media file—an extensive collection of newspaper articles and documents he’d kept to help him write his book—to look through for possible contributions to the Southwest Archives at the University of New Mexico. Even though I’ve covered issues at LANL since the early 2000s for La Jicarita, I was shocked at the sheer number of articles, mostly in the Santa Fe New Mexican and Albuquerque Journal, dealing with one controversy after another at the Lab. Chuck quotes from many of these articles in his book to substantiate his story, even an acknowledgement of the many problems there from Pete Domenici, head cheerleader for the Lab throughout most of his career:
“I have found myself increasingly defending the laboratory for failures of basic management . . . and security. While critics have carped, I have worked to ensure that none of the attacks harmed the laboratory, but that effort has come at great cost. Today, in Washington Los Alamos’ reputation as a crown jewel of science is being eclipsed by a reputation as being both dysfunctional and untouchable.” (“A Nuclear Lab’s Cowboy Culture,” Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2004)
Chuck was born and raised in Santa Fe and actually worked occasionally in White Rock, the LANL suburb community, with his dad, who was a mason. He went to college, got an accounting degree, and worked as a bank auditor before getting a job at LANL, with the help of an old college friend who was already working there. While Chuck’s way into the Lab was aided by the guidance of another worker, not management, one of the conditions he complains of in the book is that “LANL managers there were known for playing favorites with friends and relatives.” The nepotism involved in these kinds of hiring’s often discriminated against the Hispano community of the Española Valley, as most of the managers at the Lab were Anglo and often from out of state. Chuck failed several times to get promotions with many years of seniority: in the early 1980s, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) determined there was systemic bias in LANL employment practices, but the ruling did little to effect change.
While Chuck’s first job with the Lab was measuring materials that contained “Special Nuclear Material,” he spent most of his career in various accounting and auditing positions. As such he quickly learned that “Laboratory managers routinely ignored what auditors reported. Because of this, serious security and financial lapses occurred that otherwise could have been averted . . . and ended up costing the taxpayers lots of money.” One of the most tragic situations that arose from this was the case of Wen Ho Lee. Lee, a Taiwanese scientist, was accused of leaking design information on a warhead to the Chinese, largely based on the fact that he had copied files from his work computer to his personal computer for safe keeping, which was common practice at the Lab, despite warnings from auditors. More on the Wen Ho Lee case later...