Free Republic

It’s a good thing that the Biden administration corruptly shut down the Trump administration’s attempt to stop Communist China from spying on us, manipulating us and robbing us blind to avoid offending anyone… like Beijing. “We have heard concerns from the civil rights community that the “China Initiative” fueled a narrative of intolerance and bias. To many, that narrative suggests that the Justice Department treats people from China or of Chinese descent differently. The rise in anti-Asian hate crime and hate incidents only heightens these concerns.” Goodbye China Initiative and U.S. National Security. At least 154 Chinese scientists who worked...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. – A new report revealed on Wednesday shows dozens of scientists have left Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico and fueled military technology innovation in China. The shocking details show how American taxpayers may have unintentionally helped China’s military become more of a threat to the U.S. over decades, as government-funded defense research later made its way to China’s labs. The report details how China poached talent from New Mexico and then stole American ideas for cutting-edge technology, shining a light on the security of top-secret U.S. research on sophisticated weapons at the country’s top...

A 55-gallon drum of nuclear waste, buried in a salt shaft 2,150 feet under the New Mexico desert, violently erupted late on Feb. 14 and spewed mounds of radioactive white foam. The flowing mass, looking like whipped cream but laced with plutonium, went airborne, traveled up a ventilation duct to the surface and delivered low-level radiation doses to 21 workers. The accident contaminated the nation's only dump for nuclear weapons waste — previously a focus of pride for the Energy Department — and gave the nation's elite ranks of nuclear chemists a mystery they still cannot unravel. Six months after...

Los Alamos National Laboratory packed 57 barrels of nuclear waste with a type of kitty litter believed to have caused a radiation leak at the federal government's troubled nuclear waste dump, posing a potentially "imminent" and "substantial" threat to public health and the environment, New Mexico officials said Monday. State Environment Department Secretary Ryan Flynn issued a formal order giving the lab two days to submit a plan for securing the waste containers, many of which are likely stored outdoors on the lab's northern New Mexico campus or at temporary site in west Texas.

Some 400 to 800 workers will be leaving Los Alamos National Laboratory this spring — preferably by choice, the lab announced Tuesday. Lab Director Charlie McMillan told workers the staff reduction plan has been sent to the National Nuclear Security Administration for approval, calling it a “voluntary separation program.” This chunk will be taken from the 7,585 permanent employees at LANL, explained spokesman Fred deSousa. It will not affect students, post-doctoral, term or union workers, he said, noting that those groups bring LANL’s current employment to 11,127 people. “We are taking these actions now in an attempt to reduce the...

Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists have developed a way to avoid the use of expensive platinum in hydrogen fuel cells, the environmentally friendly devices that might replace current power sources in everything from personal data devices to automobiles.

WASHINGTON, July 13 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Energy has started an enforcement action against Los Alamos National Laboratory. The department and its National Nuclear Security Administration announced Friday they had started a "formal enforcement actions ... against the University of California and the Los Alamos National Security, LLC, the prior and current management and operating contractors of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico." The action was being taken "for violations of classified information security requirements under their respective contracts," the NNSA said in a statement. "Investigations revealed that management deficiencies of both contractors were a central...

What's going on at Los Alamos? The nation's premier nuclear-weapons laboratory appears plagued with continuing security problems. Barely 10 days after revelations of a leak of highly classified material over the Internet, NEWSWEEK has learned of two other security breaches. In late May, a Los Alamos staffer took his lab laptop with him on vacation to Ireland. A senior nuclear official familiar with the inner workings of Los Alamos—who would not be named talking about internal matters—says the laptop's hard drive contained "government documents of a sensitive nature." The laptop was also fitted with an encryption card advanced enough that...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) - A Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist, after more than two decades of work, has figured out how to liquefy natural gas using sound waves _ which could open up more gas fields. "This is a low-cost, low-maintenance technology that can access fields that as of today have a zero value," said John Gorman, a 30-year veteran of the energy industry who runs Houston-based Swift LNG, which has licensed the lab's technology. Gorman and lab physicist Greg Swift _ who has no stake in the company of the same name _ expect the liquefaction technology will...

Congressional leaders aren't finished scrutinizing Los Alamos National Laboratory over its security failures. Members of a powerful House committee have asked Congress' investigative arm, the General Accountability Office, to evaluate the feasibility of moving classified activities to other laboratories "where there is a better track record with respect to security." In a Feb. 16 letter to Comptroller General David Walker, House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders said repeated security problems have cast doubt on whether lab manager Los Alamos National Security and the National Nuclear Security Administration "are capable of assuring adequate safety, security, and sound business management practices." The...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Fed-up lawmakers on a House oversight committee said Tuesday they want to strip a federal nuclear agency of its security responsibilities and threatened to shut down Los Alamos National Laboratory to correct a decade of security lapses there. Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., said he has sat through nearly a decade of hearings in which the Energy Department and the northern New Mexico nuclear weapons lab have promised to fix security problems. "I've been hearing these promises for a long time, and they've become somewhat tedious," he said. Lawmakers blistered the lab for its most recent security breach...

On Thursday, the Department of Energy canned the guy in charge of the country's nuclear weapons program. On Thursday, Los Alamos National Laboratory told staffers to get ready for random drug tests. On Thursday, Democrats took control of Congress. Looks like Department of Energy and LANL officials are running for political cover after another year of throwing millions of taxpayer dollars at security improvements to see if they stick. "Why" doesn't matter as much as "what took so long?" The latest DOE/LANL embarrassments involve a DOE computer security breach in Albuquerque (the theft of more than a thousand employee Social...

Study says bees can find explosives By DEBORAH BAKER, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 27 minutes ago SANTA FE, N.M. - Here's the latest buzz on detecting explosives: bomb-sniffing bees. A study at Los Alamos National Laboratory has found that honeybees can be trained to detect explosives, even in tiny quantities. "These bees really perform," said bee biologist Timothy Haarmann, the study's leader. Whether honeybees will ever be enlisted in the war on terror looks doubtful at this point. In thousands of trials conducted over the past 18 months at the nuclear weapons lab, bees stuck out their tongues when...

Researchers in the US have used an artificially-structured "metamaterial" to build a device that can control highly-elusive terahertz (THz) radiation. The modulator is claimed to be ten-times better at switching a THz beam than previous designs and could pave the way for the use of the radiation in a wide range of applications in chemistry, astronomy and even airport security (Nature 444 597). Sandwiched between the microwave and infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum (at about 300 GHz to 10 THz), THz radiation is notoriously difficult to work with. It is too high frequency to be manipulated electrically like microwaves...

A federal investigator blasted Los Alamos National Laboratory on Tuesday for "non-existent" and "seriously flawed" security in relation to an incident where classified information apparently left the nuclear weapons laboratory. The government has already spent "tens of millions" to upgrade lab security and undertaken two major cyber-security initiatives, and the lab went into a 2004 shutdown in an effort to fix problems involving the handling of secret data, a report from the U.S. Department of Energy's Inspector General said. The FBI is investigating how what appears to be classified information left the lab and ended up on a computer flash...

The former Los Alamos National Laboratory subcontractor at the center of a federal security breach investigation faced three hours of questioning from FBI agents on Wednesday, according to her lawyer. Attorney Stephen Aarons said that Jessica Quintana, 22, is being open with investigators and is hoping to avoid jail time for apparently mishandling classified documents. The FBI is investigating how hundreds of those LANL documents— in both paper and electronic form— ended up in Quintana's mobile home. She has not been charged with a crime. Aarons has said that Quintana, who worked as an archivist at the lab, took the...

WASHINGTON -- Wen Ho Lee, the former nuclear weapons scientist once suspected of being a spy, settled his privacy lawsuit Friday and will receive $1.6 million from the government and five news organizations in a case that turned into a fight over reporters' confidential sources. Lee will receive $895,000 from the government for legal fees and associated taxes in the 6 1/2-year-old lawsuit in which he accused the Energy and Justice departments of violating his privacy rights by leaking information that he was under investigation as a spy for China. The Associated Press and four other news organizations have agreed...

WASHINGTON — A Texas congressman has received "most of the materials'' he requested about why the U.S. Energy Department awarded a contract for Los Alamos National Laboratory to a team that includes the University of California, his spokeswoman said. Lisa Miller, spokeswoman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee that Joe Barton heads, said discussions between DOE and the committee were continuing. She had no details about Barton's reaction. Barton, R-Texas, demanded the information last month when the DOE awarded the contract to run the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab to UC and three corporations instead of to a team...

A team led by the University of California has won the contract to manage Los Alamos National Laboratory, sources say. The Department of Energy is scheduled to make an official announcement at 2 p.m. today in Washington, D.C. (noon Mountain Time).

The Shroud of Turin is much older than the medieval date that modern science has affixed to it and could be old enough to have been the burial wrapping of Jesus, a new analysis concludes. Since 1988, most scientists have confidently concluded that it was the work of a medieval artist, because carbon dating had placed the production of the fabric between 1260 and 1390. In an article this month in the journal Thermochimica Acta, Dr. Raymond N. Rogers, a chemist retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory, said the carbon dating test was valid but that the piece tested was...