Second Letter to Los Alamos National Laboratory from the Los Alamos Study Group

June 10, 2004, by fax and email

Mr. Bill Sprouse
Security Support (S-5)
Los Alamos National Laboratory
[Contact information deleted]

Re: Inspection of Los Alamos pit production facilities (internal) and briefing, Wednesday, August 4

Dear Bill –

This is the second of two letters today regarding citizen inspection activities in early August at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). We would like to bring no more than 20 persons – none from countries on the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) sensitive country list – on a tour of facilities to be involved in pit production at LANL.

Specifically, we would like to visit the interior of the Sigma Facility in TA-3, the interiors of the Plutonium Facility (PF-4) and Nuclear Materials Storage Facility (never used) in TA-55, and the site of the proposed Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Facility, also in TA-55. Our group would also like to receive an unclassified, on-the-record briefing or briefings on all programmatic, budgetary, and infrastructure aspects of pit production at LANL by the cognizant manager of the program and his or her assistants as appropriate.

Persons on this inspection may include interested citizens, visiting experts, elected officials from this country and from others, and journalists. I will be responsible for their behavior while on site. I will provide to you a list of attendees with their respective nationalities. To do this I will need to have some form of overall conditional approval from LANL for this inspection. If we cannot visit all of the above facilities, we would like to visit a subset of them along with the Dual Axis Radiographic Hydrotest (DARHT) Facility and supporting facilities, if time were to allow it.

We anticipate requesting a similar inspection quarterly involving other LANL facilities germane to its nuclear weapons programs, with some of the same (and some different) persons on each inspection. Any of the above facilities that we cannot inspect on August 4 we would like to inspect during the week of November 8, 2004. Should it not be possible for some reason to inspect any of these facilities at this time, please let me know as soon as possible and indicate to me which facilities it would be possible to inspect and receive briefings(s) regarding on August 4. Our interest is the nuclear weapons program at LANL, and within this, our first priority is pit production.

Sincerely,

Greg Mello, Executive Director

cc by email: Langdon Toland, Community Relations Office