Talk:Los Alamos National Laboratory/Archive 1

War restrictions
Does anyone know what kind of restrictions were put on civilians travelling to or working in Los Alamos during WWII and the cold war? Could Los Alamos fit the description of a "Closed city"? Seabhcán 11:00, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Since the Closed city article specifically defines them as being in the Soviet Union, I would have to say probably not. :-) However, access to the town was restricted well into the 1950s, so the analogy isn't bad.  Bill-on-the-Hill 00:50, 8 September 2005 (UTC)


 * They were thought to be pretty loose if you go by books such as Brotherhood of the Bomb by Gregg Herken CaseyCastle 00:13, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

What is the controversy surrounding the Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test Facility?
The article calls the Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test Facility "controversial," but doesn't say why. Nor does the article on the facility. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ronstew (talk • contribs) 04:32, 16 May 2007 (UTC).


 * There was a lot of questions in the 1990s over whether it violated the spirit or law of the CTBT or not (which even though the US never ratified was considered something which it was basically abiding by). --24.147.86.187 23:18, 2 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the answer. The question now is whether the word controversial should be left alone, explained or deleted. I don't think that it should be left alone; it invites questions like mine. An explanation would require a citation, though.Ronstew 00:46, 4 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Seeing no backup offered for the word "controversial", I've removed it. John Fleck 00:30, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Additional thoughts
It would be a good idea to mention or link to the Los Alamos Museum. I seem to recall, that Los Alamos has one of the highest church per capita ratios in the US. If this is true, it would be worth mentioning. -- Solipsist 22:10, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)
 * Why? 128.165.87.144 18:11, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Wen Ho Lee
"Lee was suspected for a time of having shared U.S. nuclear secrets with China, but investigations found this not to be true."

That's not quite right. Investigations failed to discover what happened to the data, which is rather a different thing.128.165.87.144 18:11, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject University of California
Several editors are organizing a WikiProject to better organize articles related to the University of California. A preliminary draft is available here. You are invited to participate in the discussion at Talk:University of California. szyslak 21:59, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Poor focus
In my opinion, this article spends far too much time discussing very recent management difficulties at the lab and gives too little attention to accomplishments and projects over 65 years of operation. --Philopedia (talk) 15:02, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

I completely agree with Philopedia. This article is pathetic. I presume that at least some of the authors of the article work at LANL. I think that a complete rewrite is in order and I don't propose to do it myself. I might be willing to try to organize LANL workers to write an article about the lab. It is important and worth doing. It would be fine with me to get somebody else like the "Los Alamos Study Group" which is strongly anti-LANL to contribute as well provided all their claims are documented. LANL is a complex place full of human potential both good and bad. It would be great to see an article in which it is discussed in its entirety. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.19.15.220 (talk) 01:20, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

The new "Controversy and Criticism" section only adds to this problem, by stating as fact (rather than as opinion and identifying who is expressing that opinion) that the Lab is badly managed. Yaush (talk) 15:35, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

Controversy and Criticism Section
I revised the controversy and criticism section in an attempt to reduce the bias that seemed to be there before. I took out opinion language (such as that referring to the plant's "mismanagement and security problems") except where the source of the opinion could clearly be stated (aka DOE, whistleblowers, the nonprofit group) and left only facts that could be verified by the cited sources. 70.108.27.64 (talk) 13:14, 12 July 2010 (UTC)bob

Where's the actual controversy? It just seems like the POGO group makes up stuff to attack LANL with. "including employees charging personal expenses to government accounts" -- there was never any proof of this, everyone involved agreed that it was part of an official project and no one was every charged. POGO has removed the related FBI warrant for investigation from their site. "lost equipment or documents (including hundreds of computers containing classified information)" -- again, POGO is making stuff up and claiming it to be fact, no one has confirmed that any classified information was on the computers. It should also be noted that loosing hundreds of computers over 70 years of operation is amazing, it's well under what the GSA claims to be acceptable losses in property. "a memorandum to employees to "be careful what they say" to safety and security inspectors" -- no crap, do they want employees to give false information to investigators? Taking a phrase out of context isn't for an encyclopedia. The next paragraph is entirely about POGO. Considering that the "controversy" is unfounded, I'm going to remove that as well. fintler (talk) 18:52, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

I have occasionally recommended their "Map of the Nuclides" as a simple organized presentation of a stable nuclides chart, but then I noticed that the organization of the data between adjacent elements is not correctly represented, and then I pointed that out since it misrepresents the data relationship between elements. But nothing has been done about it so far.WFPM (talk) 20:07, 17 March 2011 (UTC)The importance of this matter is related to the fact that a proper organizational relationship of this chart will show up the existence of (diagonal)"nuclear stability trend lines" within the stable isotopes over a range of isotopes, with the formula being that A = 3Z - an even number.


 * This academic work on the culture at LANL appears to give important additional information that should be incorporated into the article. Hans Adler 13:21, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Number of classified nuclear research facilities in the US
The lead section of this article gives two laboratories, yet at the article of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the figure is given as three. Shuipzv3 (talk) 10:26, 11 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Sorry for the late reply. Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore are responsible for the design of the nuclear components of nuclear weapons. Sandia National Laboratories is responsible for the non-nuclear components of nuclear weapons, such as the arming, fusing, and firing systems. So whether it's two or three is kind of a semantics question. However, it might be nice to be consistent between the two Wikipedia articles. --Yaush (talk) 14:19, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Coordinates
I just changed the latitude/longitude coordinates, but now I'm contemplating changing them back. They were embedded in the National Register of Historic Places template. They pointed to a location that was clearly in the town of Los Alamos, not in the lab itself. However, I found this document from the NRHP: http://pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NHLS/Text/66000893.pdf

This document describes how the National Historic Landmark district is technically some buildings basically north of Ashley Pond (in the town, not the present-day lab). It gives UTM coordinates 13(North) 382600 3971790 for the northwest corner, and 13(North) 383000 3971000 for the southeast. I converted these via http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/utm_getgp.prl and they match up roughly with the coordinates (in the town, not the present-day lab) before I changed them.

So, I don't know. Should the coordinates at the top of the page refer to the historic spot or to the current spot? Evidently it causes an error if there are two coordinate specs (one at top of page and one in NRHP box). I do know it was super annoying converting those UTM coordinates. --Officiallyover (talk) 02:30, 18 January 2013 (UTC)


 * You might want to split this into two articles 1) the current lab, here at Los Alamos National Laboratory and 2) the historical site, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, which currently redirects back to this article. Something we run into all the time at WP:NRHP is a church congregation that moves out of the old church building. The basic rule of thumb we use is to split if there is any confusion between a historical site and the entity that shares the history of the site, unless the result would be 2 stubs.  This strongly suggest splitting, but I see at least one problem with splitting.  There's nothing in this article about a new location: just your new coords - Are you sure you can post the "new" coords? :-)  Could you give some info on the move?  Also there are other articles that in some way seem to be the same site (or part of it, or including it): Los Alamos, New Mexico,  Los Alamos County, New Mexico, but more importantly articles on the school and the museum.  We obviously don't want too many different articles on the same place!
 * How does having two coordinates in the same article cause problems? - just wondering.
 * I'll post something over at WT:NRHP and suggest that the conversation be kept in one place - here. Smallbones( smalltalk ) 04:15, 18 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Ah-ha! I just answered my own question. Problem solved. It was a matter of reading the NRHP infobox documentation and finding out about the "inline" parameter. Without that, a "coord" template at the top of the page resulted in big red text that says "coordinates: cannot have more than one primary tag per page."


 * In any case, thank you for responding to my question. Probably the fact that somebody else cared has motivated me to fix this.


 * To answer your other questions, I got the new coords basically from inspection of Google Maps and correlation to maps from the LANL official site such as this. The new coords also match the photo on this current article. I just picked a set of coords within the lab site. I lean toward the view that this is not original research (but I'm flexible). Doubt I can find an official publication that explicitly includes the coords. Re: the move of the lab, the PDF that I cite in my 1st comment above (from NRHP) says "In 1947... the Technical Area was shifted across the Canyon...." Re: other articles that are the same site, I'm not aware of other articles about precisely the same places. --Officiallyover (talk) 05:03, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

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UT has new bid worked up to take over LANL
In the retirement announcement of the UT system chancellor it mentions that UT is bidding again to take over LANL.

http://www.dailytexanonline.com/2017/12/15/chancellor-william-mcraven-to-leave-ut-system-in-may

Perhaps an update is in order to this article. TMLutas (talk) 20:36, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

Triad National Security, LLC. manages LANL - red linked, needs a page
"Triad is a nonprofit, public service-focused organization made up of three members: Battelle Memorial Institute, The Texas A&M University System and the University of California." https://www.triadns.org

Triad National Security takes the helm at Los Alamos National Laboratory - 50.80.243.237 (talk) 14:32, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

Untitled
I propose that everything below "manhattan district be moved to History of the Manhattan Project jengod 22:12, Jan 30, 2004 (UTC)

I plan to over the next little while to delete the entire History section and start over. Here's why:

1. It's currently nothing much more than a slightly edited copy-and-paste from a historical essay written at the Los Alamos National Laboratory website, which is (c) the University of California, which clearly says that the material can be reproduced and distributed only without charge provided that the copyright notice and a statement of authorship are reproduced on all copies. I'm almost completely sure this violates the GNU Free Documentation License.

2. It has almost no information on the laboratory from 1945 until the present -- since the history pasted from LANL's site was only a retrospective of the events leading up to the first atomic bomb test, hence the entry makes it seem like Los Alamos stopped doing anything interesting in July of 1945! In reality they have been one of the most prominent members of the AEC/ERDA/DOE National Lab system from 1945 to the present, with lots of prominent work on the hydrogen bomb, anti-missile systems, computing, biology, nanotechnology, and so forth, plus a nice amount of scandals and espionage and other fun things. This needs to be reflected in the article; it cannot simply be a retelling of Los Alamos' role during the Manhattan Project. This should be done on the Manhattan Project page, and even there does not need this level of detail (someone looking for that much information can easily visit the LANL website or get a printed reference like Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb).

This might take awhile and it might look very sad at first -- deleting a HUGE page and replacing it with likely a lot less -- but I think it is necessary and a good idea anyway. I myself feel confident that I could write a sparse but functional history of LANL which hopefully others could add to over time. Anyway I'll probably not start this for a few days so if anyone has any objections please post them here. --Fastfission 20:48, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)


 * I think you misread the copyright notice at lanl - it said technical and scientific information were copyright University of California - which does not apply to the document used. It does require that the copyright notice be included with copies (I am not sure how this might apply to derivative works) and any statements of authorship - but the documents which have been used did not include any statements of authorship, so that is not a problem. Anyway this doesn't matter much, since you will be rewriting the history section anyway, which is great. But if you want to keep any of the original article I think we could do it fairly, and should add a link to the original article in either case to make the full information more available to the reader. I'll check in on the article and try to give you some feedback as you begin reworking the material - good luck. Trelvis 15:31, Jun 15, 2004 (UTC)


 * Well, I don't think I misread the copyright statement, but anyway it doesn't matter a whole lot and is not worth debating. :) (I'm pretty sure the "All information" applies to this, and that it still requires the copyright notice and that distribution be done without charge, both of which violate the GNU FDL if I understand it correctly) --Fastfission 16:40, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Disambiguation
Los Alamos currently redirects to this page. There are also Los Alamos place names, so instead of a redirect there should be a disambiguation page. Willmcw 21:40, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

In the press somewhere
I am not paid. For UN weapons inspectors.

"So Ra social memory complex has been averaging Texas State Troopers and federal agents as material. This is not a problem for me on any actual basis. As you head towards the border, these people gain polarity in their averaging. I am willing to let that polarity hit levels that exceed Agent Smith. I am not going to take credit for the border crisis due to this averaging, but the Texas Governor is certainly hailed by Ra social memory complex and some of the most intelligent parts of Creation. Only because I refuse to learn Spanish from Mexico against my genetic predispositions. I don't care if you send paddy wagons south of me. It isn't my problem. Somebody wants it to be my problem. But my business is always public record as here.

I am letting you know the Sun is hailing police south of me to increase enforcement action. I don't care. The police have always been the Sun. Just know it will give badges to anyone as reserve police or Agent Smith if need be.

I have done my paperwork here.

RA SMC HAILS WHY TEXAS RANGERS GHOSTS STORING OUR POLARITY FOR WORK THAT HAS BEEN DONE FOR OVER A CENTURY IN OUR COMPLEX :)

Police are universal retrieval agents. A posse can extend across dimensions.

SEALED AS FINAL WARNING OF KLARION THE WITCH BOY" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.8.134.170 (talk) 12:20, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Hello. This is a talk page about the article Los Alamos National Laboratory. UN weapons inspectors are likely not watching this talk page, if you wish to contact them. Also, there is no genetic predisposition for or against learning Spanish, and I have no idea how this would even make sense. Chaotıċ Enby   (t · c) 12:23, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
 * PS: Always the Sun is from The Stranglers, not The Police. Chaotıċ Enby   (t · c) 12:26, 23 December 2023 (UTC)