AUSTIN, Texas -- Texas A&M has named Dr. Thomas Mason, a physicist who previously worked at the Department of Energy, as the new director of the newly acquired Los Alamos Labs.
In a forum, held in Austin and moderated by the editor of Texas Monthly, Texas A&M Chancellor John Sharp announced Mason’s appointment and took questions on how the TAMU system was able to land the contract.
“[TAMU’s] nuclear engineering is one of the best on the planet and its one of the reasons why a Texas school was able to, for the first time ever, become a co-equal partner in a national weapons lab,” said Chancellor Sharp.
TAMU will co-manage Los Alamos alongside the University of California Berkeley. Both universities have equal control in a non-profit company, called Triad, that will manage the lab’s day-to-day operations and research.
Los Alamos was the primary site of the Manhattan Project, which created the first nuclear bombs in the late 1940’s.
Today, Los Alamos’ mission is still nuclear-based. But, they mainly in weapons research and non-proliferation testing, rather than full-scale nuclear tests, which are banned.
“It’s responsibility is to bring science and justice to bare around our most pressing challenges, particularly the nuclear deterrent” said Mason.
Perhaps the lab’s most interesting work comes from nuclear research outside the country, including treaty verification, which checks up on other nuclear powers and ensures they’re using weapons legally and not improperly testing them.
“The work of the lab is critically important to retaining our [nuclear] deterrent and but its also that expertise that gets brought to bare in understanding what other countries are doing,” Mason added.
