CORRECTION: The salary for George Miller of Lawrence Livermore has been corrected in this story.

Sandia National Laboratories Director Tom Hunter makes $1.7 million per year, according to data made public this week.

Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Michael Anastasio makes $800 thousand per year.

The numbers became public this week when the labs reported them as one of the conditions of accepting money under the federal stimulus program.

The compensation triggered outrage from critics of the nuclear weapons research centers.

"I think they're exhorbitant," said Don Hancock of the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, a group that monitors federal nuclear programs.

Hancock pointed out that Anastasio makes twice as much as President Barack Obama, and Hunter makes four times as much.
Sandia spokesman Neal Singer defended the salaries.

"They are making complex decisions that are actually affecting the security of the United States," Singer said. "They're paid for the difficult decisions they make."

Los Alamos spokesman Jeff Berger noted that not all of the lab directors' compensation comes from taxpayer money.

Department of Energy contracting regulations cap the taxpayer-funded portion of the executives' compensation at $684 thousand per year, Berger said, with the rest coming from the corporations that manage the labs.

George Miller, the director of the nation's third nuclear weapons lab, Lawrence Livermore, makes $442,000.

Because the three nuclear weapons research centers are run for the government by private companies, the directors' salaries were not previously a matter of public record, but were recently posted on the federal government's stimulus act web site.