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Los Alamos National Laboratory says it's planning another hiring blitz in FY2026

  • By Alaina Mencinger amencinger@sfnewmexican.com

    • July 30, 2025

    LOS ALAMOS — In the years that Angela Mielke has spent at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the executive officer and deputy directorate for science, technology and engineering has seen the lab’s hiring strategy shift.

    Over the past decade, much of the lab’s workforce has retired, Mielke said. To fill those gaps, the laboratory used to pull talent largely from coastal schools. But the new recruits weren’t always happy when they arrived in Northern New Mexico.

    Now, Mielke told legislators at a Wednesday meeting of the interim legislative Science, Technology and Telecommunications Committee, LANL focuses more on in-state and regional recruits — and emphasizes the natural resources available in the Land of Enchantment.

    “We focus more heavily on the New Mexico schools, but also the regional schools, going to … Montana or Utah, where our environment here is much more similar to where they’re coming from,” Mielke said as she updated lawmakers on the lab and spoke about an anticipated hiring boom.

    “So, they wouldn’t get here and immediately lose their minds that there’s no shopping malls or restaurants open past 8 o’clock,” she added.

    Workforce to grow again

    After six years of workforce growth, Los Alamos National Laboratory is planning another hiring blitz. Considering a funding boost in the Department of Energy’s proposed budget, the lab’s next year would be about continuing momentum, Mielke said.

    Lab officials estimate between 800 and 1,000 people could be hired in the upcoming fiscal year, although some would be brought on board to fill positions left because of retirements and other departures.

    At the same time, Sandia National Laboratories — which is looking at a much smaller budget increase compared to its northern neighbor — is planning to cut between 1% and 3% of its staff through a voluntary reduction-in-force program.

    Hiring isn’t the only workforce change anticipated. Mielke said the lab is going through a reorganization, with some employees moving from less technical to more technical roles as priorities shift.

    The balance sheet is looking different for national laboratories in the upcoming fiscal year. Budget proposals show increases for weapons programs, and cuts to renewable energy programs and labs managed by the Office of Science.

    Farrah Harris, a program manager for technology transfer at the National Nuclear Security Administration, affirmed the federal agency’s interest in dual-use research that can apply to both national security and other sectors.

    “Technology transfer is and will remain an incredibly important facet of our mission,” Harris said in a livestreamed talk Wednesday from the Santa Fe Farmers Market Pavilion at the Railyard.

    Harris was speaking at the 2025 Los Alamos Demo Day, where members of the New Mexico Lab-Embedded Entrepreneur Program made pitches to panels of investors. Technologies pitched at the event included everything from platforms propelled by sunlight to collect data in typically unreachable areas of the atmosphere to fingertip-sized sensors that could be deployed in nuclear waste.

    LANL looks forward

    LANL scientist Carleton Coffrin talked quantum computing to lawmakers Wednesday, which he expects will see major growth in the coming years.

    Quantum computing requires advanced cooling mechanisms, Coffrin said, so it requires less water than artificial intelligence data centers. The energy needs are also “modest,” he added.

    “It’s generally expected they’re going to be more energy efficient for the types of computations they can do, which is a very limited, special subset of all computations,” Coffrin said.

    Quantum computing can be useful in everything from designing new magnets to potentially reducing the energy requirements of agriculture and medical technologies, he said.

    Rep. Joy Garratt, D-Albuquerque, called Coffrin’s presentation the “most exciting” she’d heard.

    “This has so many positive implications for a water-poor state,” Garratt said.

    Lab officials also touched on infrastructure needs. Student housing is a priority in the near future, said Kathy Keith, director of LANL’s community partnerships office.

    This summer, the lab welcomed close to 2,000 interns — but reports of interns camping in the forests near the lab due to a shortage of available housing have caused alarm.

    “It’s really a critical need that we have to address, that this laboratory is finding safe and secure housing for those students who come for internships,” Keith said.

    Published comments by Greg Mello

    Statements linking quantum computing to any solutions to New Mexico's lack of water are idiotic and unworthy of the New Mexican. What is the point of repeating them uncritically? The whole myth of "technology transfer" and "dual use technology" as being a) a significant part of LANL and b) somehow beneficial to New Mexico seems to have an unreal life of its own.

    Coghlan, below, offers his usual mix of posturing, misdirection, and some truth.

    Yes, energy efficiency and renewable energy research is to be completely zeroed out for the coming year. But what are they now, under the Biden budget? Right now, EE and RE are about $8 million, a whopping 0.2% of LANL's budget. Yippee. See https://lasg.org/budget/FY2026/doe-fy-2026-laboratory-table-v2.pdf. We do not believe LANL should do that tiny sliver of work, in any case. That work should be at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Colorado, where there is more real expertise.

    LANL is not a "science" lab -- this is apparently news to this newspaper and the New Mexico legislature -- and shouldn't be one. The sliver of non-weapons "science" that LANL does is all better done elsewhere, where the overhead is much smaller, the science is better, and the political distortions created by desire to have a show of "dual-usability" aren't as strong.

    Coghlan keeps bringing up the bogeyman of the U.S. returning to nuclear explosive testing for the purpose of warhead design. NNSA has better tools for warhead design today, and the nonproliferation costs of testing are widely understood to be prohibitive. All cost, no benefit. Not going to happen.

    Investments in pit production at LANL is a program Coghlan has endorsed for more than two decades to national audiences and in federal court, despite what he may say. Nuclear Watch refuses to join others in clearly opposing pit production at LANL, a brand new mission which LANL is struggling to get its arms around. Now is the time, Jay, to stand up and be counted.

    In 2009, Nuclear Watch tried to bring all the nation's tritium processing to LANL, along with all the uranium processing and manufacturing and a lot else. See Transforming the U.S. Strategic Posture and Weapons Complex, Nuclear Weapons Complex Consolidation Policy Network, Apr 2009. The pit consolidation being pursued by NWNM to this day is the last remaining bit of that nutty plan.  So it's rich to seize upon, while factually distorting, the tritium venting issue. LANL does not want to intentionally release 30,00 curies of tritium, for goodness sake. LANL plans to filter most of the tritium from that effluent.

    Returning to this article and the New Mexican's reportage, Santa Feans typically lack an accurate understanding of what LANL is, and does, and is planning to do. The propaganda runs hot almost everywhere, in all directions. The paper's reporters are great, but somehow I get the impression that management does not want to know, or report upon, what is going on. There is a very tight echo chamber between the state's political leaders, the labs, and its news media -- a lack of critical distance. It's something we can all work on.

     
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