Four takeaways from the Los Alamos National Laboratory 'State of the Lab'

Los Alamos National Laboratory is planning to further the field of artificial intelligence and will increase its capacity for manufacturing new plutonium pits in the coming year, according to Lab Director Thom Mason’s State of the Lab town hall this week.

LANL is the only facility in the country capable of producing plutonium pits, a crucial component of nuclear warheads, and has been tasked with increasing plutonium pit production as the U.S. modernizes its nuclear arsenal. The laboratory has also historically played a role in advancing computing and has plans to bring a new supercomputer online. That should hasten AI development but will also require a controversial new electric transmission line.

“Science is a real feedback loop, and innovations in one area allow other areas to move faster,” Mason said. “So, when we get a tool like (AI), it’s going to speed up the pace of discovery in a way that is probably pretty unprecedented.”

Here are four takeaways from Tuesday’s town hall:

1. The lab successfully built the first new plutonium pit

In 2024, Los Alamos made the first production unit for the W87-1 warhead. It was designed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

A sphere shell of plutonium the size of a bowling ball, a plutonium pit is a key part of a nuclear warhead, according to the Department of Energy website.

For years, the lab has been doing development work — making multiple pits to develop the process and prove the designs.

Now Los Alamos is tasked with building new plutonium pits to modernize the country’s nuclear arsenal. While the United States is not increasing its number of nuclear weapons, Mason said, old warheads are being retired as new ones are built to replace them. The Air Force will retire Minuteman missiles and their warheads and replace them with new intercontinental ballistic missiles that will use the new W87-1 warheads.

In the coming years, the lab will work to increase its pit production capacity to 30 plutonium pits per year.

“It’s going to take the next several years of modernizing equipment, taking out obsolete equipment and aged equipment out of our PF-4 facility, replacing it with modern, state of the art, advanced manufacturing equipment that will allow us to do that,” Mason said.

LANL has awarded contracts for new gloveboxes — sealed containers that protect employees from nuclear materials as they work. The gloveboxes are just part of rebuilding the domestic supply chain for the nuclear industry, Mason said.

“There are efforts underway to look at some of the advanced reactor technology, which is something that we’re involved in. There has to be a supply chain to go with it,” Mason said. “But so far, in terms of the pit production mission, we’ve been able to find and qualify vendors who have the capabilities that we need to get that done.”

2. Los Alamos needs to increase its power supply

Los Alamos has plans for a new electric transmission line, to increase its power supply. The location of the line has garnered pushback from Indigenous communities and environmental groups because the 14-mile line would cross through the Caja del Rio Plateau.

The electric power capacity project is meant to increase the capacity, reliability and resiliency of the lab’s electric supply, Mason said. There are two existing high-power feeds into Los Alamos, which serve the lab and the town of Los Alamos.

The lab’s need for electricity has grown because the size of the lab has grown, and much of the power usage has shifted to electricity, Mason said — a trend he expects to continue as the vehicle fleet is electrified and high-performance computing needs increase.

In 2027, Los Alamos will get a new supercomputer to replace Crossroads. When the supercomputer goes online, it will exceed the capacity of one of the existing lines.

“That’s a problem because we are required to have a redundant electric supply,” Mason said.

3. LANL is using AI to accelerate scientific research

The ribbon was cut on the lab’s new Venado supercomputer in April. The supercomputer will accelerate the integration of AI into the lab’s work, because it can execute millions more instructions per second at a lower cost with lower energy consumption, said Science, Technology and Engineering Executive Officer Angela Mielke.

“We’ve seen a lot of improvement in what are called reasoning models, which go beyond simply synthesizing data that’s been collected from the internet and trying to produce a paragraph or a document that maybe summarizes it,” Mason said. “It now has the capability to go through reasoning steps, particularly in areas of math and science, where there are right answers, and do it in a way that can assist our scientific staff in moving faster.”

AI is the next evolution in “leveraging computational power to help us do our science,” Mason said.

The Venado computer runs on a Grace Hopper superchip, which consists of a normal CPU — a computer processing unit like a typical computer — and a modified GPU. GPUs are graphic processing units, originally designed for gaming computers to create graphics, but Venado’s is modified to make it good at physics calculations.

4. Los Alamos leadership expects continued support under Trump

Although newly sworn-in President Donald Trump and a Republican-led Congress represent a significant political shift in Washington, Mason does not expect support for the lab to waver. Los Alamos has typically had strong bipartisan support, and he believes that will continue.

The lab’s budget looks stable, Mason said. At present, funding is being provided under a continuing resolution, which will expire in March.

Congress also approved $1.5 billion for plutonium modernization at the lab, and $275 million for defense environmental cleanup at Los Alamos with the National Defense Authorization Act, which passed in December.

Hiring at the lab is leveling off after several years of rapid growth, Mason said. And while federal employees have been ordered to return to the office via a Trump executive order, LANL staff are employed by Triad National Security, which manages and operates the lab. So lab staff will likely not be required to return to the office, Mason said. The majority of lab employees already work in person, and the ones who work remotely often do so because the lab does not have space for them to work in person, Mason said.