Phill Casaus: Satellite campuses make sense for crowded Los Alamos lab

Aug. 12—In my mind, I can see Oppie with his porkpie hat and pipe, scanning the mesas and ravines he'd traveled as a kid — bedazzled by the view, cocooned in the seclusion.

Yup, this is the place.

Perfect for a secret lab.

Los Alamos it is.

Of course, that was the sepia-toned '40s. Today, in see-every-wrinkle high-def, you've got to think there's no way in hell Robert Oppenheimer would pick the Hill to host the place that would become Los Alamos National Laboratory.

But that's the irony, no? One of the great scientific minds of his time never envisioned the mutations that would create a workplace of nearly 20,000 people: far too big for the finger-thin plateaus and gut-dropping canyons that surround his creation.

That's why Los Alamos officials are gingerly proposing branching out — they all but scream preliminary! when broaching the subject — beyond the fence; considering what life could be like if there were, say, LANL branches in maybe Santa Fe or someplace in the Albuquerque/Rio Rancho metroplex.

I know this will go over like a lump of plutonium in the morning coffee for the crowd that would like Los Alamos and its nuclear weapons mission to move off the Hill and head left, maybe 1,000 miles into the Pacific. But here's the bare-knuckled reality: Satellite campuses for the lab only make perfect sense.

For one thing, LANL already is in Santa Fe and has been for years. It's mostly back-end stuff — community outreach and paperwork and some of the accoutrement that comes with a mini-industry that employs scads of workers, with more to come courtesy of your tax dollars.

For another, there's just no more room in Los Alamos — at least not for housing. If there were, I'm guessing three-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath domiciles would be filling every square yard. But they're not.

So, here we are.

That Santa Fe and the Albuquerque area are attractive for satellite campus expansion is pure poetry when you consider a big hunk of lab employees don't live in Los Alamos County. I know of a guy who commutes from Los Lunas every day for his job on the Hill. Yup, Los Lunas. No wonder he bought a Tesla.

Say you've never seen a Formula One race live? I invite you to the intersection of U.S. 550 and Interstate 25 every morning between 5:30 and 7:30 a.m., when commuters from Rio Rancho and Albuquerque put it in fifth gear for the trip north. Surely, many are headed to Santa Fe to work in state government, or in the schools, or in law enforcement (those folks can't afford to actually live here, thus the sprint). But many others in that long line of cars keep rolling north, to Oppie's place.

For those who can't stomach the drive, they try to put down roots right here. Can't understand why Santa Fe's median home prices look like a telephone number, or the reasons behind apartment complexes sprouting like weeds near Cerrillos Road and I-25? It's not all Texans and Californians escaping COVID and other Texans and Californians. It's people who work for the lab.

I'm hoping the creation of another identifiable and permanent lab anchor in Santa Fe would light a fire under government leaders' fannies to create more momentum for planned subdivisions that could house the Los Alamos presence. More globally, anything that takes the pressure off I-25 and U.S. 550, to say nothing of the environment, will be welcomed.

I promise you: If current conditions continue, the confluence of I-25/U.S. 550 soon will require flyovers and frontage roads on par with the Big-I in central Albuquerque. For those keeping the financial books, that's coming out of all our pockets as well.

Though it's sometimes easy to believe federal officials' skulls are thicker than an oak tree stump, they're plenty savvy when it comes to the sensitivity of all things lab. It's why you won't see a plutonium pit factory on Old Pecos Trail or on N.M. 528 in Rio Rancho. They've got enough trouble making that happen on the site in Los Alamos, at least in time for a 2026 deadline to begin production.

But payroll departments? Insurance? Red-tape creators or cutters? Those folks can be placed anywhere. Give them a laptop and a cubicle, and they can live closer to the office, labor more happily, and presumably, fulfill the mission for which they were hired — whether it's advancing national security or just making sure the checks get cut on time.

Eighty years after Oppenheimer started hewing a lab out of a forest, the ironies are never-ending. It's why you can't discuss the lab's future without a nod to its past. And when you look there, you're struck by the fact the lab didn't have to be Los Alamos. It could've been Gallup. It could've been Las Vegas, N.M.

Can you imagine?

In the end, Oppenheimer chose well for his time. But it's now a new day. While the lab isn't ever leaving the Hill, it's time to envision an operation that more closely reflects reality — thus, satellite campuses.

Put more plainly: You shouldn't have to commute from Los Lunas to Los Alamos in a Tesla. Or for that matter, a Chevy.

Phill Casaus is editor of The New Mexican.