Los Alamos National Laboratory

Area nonprofit organizations will receive more than $180,000 from Los Alamos National Security (LANS), LLC during a recognition event beginning at 9:30 a.m. June 12, at Fuller Lodge in downtown Los Alamos.

LANS contributions are determined by the number of volunteer hours logged by Los Alamos National Laboratory employees and retirees through a web-based organization called VolunteerMatch and through the Los Alamos Retired Seniors Volunteer Program (RSVP).

Deputy Laboratory Director Beth Sellers is scheduled to be the keynote speaker and present awards. Sellers also will recognize the top volunteers and nonprofit organizations.

“The genuine care and commitment laboratory employees and retirees have for their communities are clearly demonstrated by the number of hours volunteered to these nonprofit organizations,” said Kurt Steinhaus, director of the Community Programs Office, which manages the laboratory’s volunteer program.

Since the laboratory joined VolunteerMatch and RSVP in 2007, nearly 3,000 Los Alamos employees and retirees reported more than 1.2 million volunteer hours. In 2012, more than 269,000 hours of volunteer service were reported through the lab’s Vecinos volunteer program. Vecinos is Spanish for neighbor. Additionally,

WASHINGTON — House appropriators are looking to provide nearly $200 million less than the Obama administration has sought for nuclear weapons programs in fiscal 2014, even as fellow Republicans on other committees argue the administration is not requesting enough.

The draft energy and water spending bill released by the House Appropriations Committee on Monday would provide $7.7 billion for nuclear weapons activities, nearly $193 million less than the $7.87 billion the White House requested. It is nearly $400 million less than the $8.08 billion that would be allowed by the annual defense authorization legislation drafted by the House Armed Services Committee and approved by the House on Friday.

Republicans on the House Armed Service Committee have argued that the administration’s request is not enough to meet the terms of a 2010 deal made during lawmaker negotiations on ratification of the New START arms control deal with Russia, in which the president agreed to spend $85 billion over 10 years on nuclear arms complex modernization.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory will not be fined after a lab machinist was exposed to higher-than-allowed levels of beryllium. That news comes from a May 29 letter addressed to LANL Director Charlie McMillan from the Department of Energy’s Office of Enforcement and Oversight.

The letter stated that the ignored procedures for collecting and controlling personal exposure assessment air samples and didn’t keep accurate hazard assessment and exposure control records when an employee was exposed to more than 0.2 micrograms per cubic meter of beryllium during an eight-hour shift, exceeding DOE’s “action” level.

The letter from Office of Enforcement and Oversight Director John Boulden stated, “the facts and circumstances indicate weaknesses in LANS’ collection and documentation of industrial hygiene exposure assessment information and the application of that information to anticipate, identify, evaluate, and control beryllium hazards. These weaknesses may prevent LANS from establishing a definitive cause for an event and identifying appropriate corrective actions when occupational exposure limits are exceeded.

Coming home to Los Alamos was an easy decision for Steven Honig, a 2002 Los Alamos National Laboratory Employees’ Scholarship winner.

Now a Research and Development Engineer III in the Global Security Directorate at Los Alamos National Laboratory, he is senior engineer responsible for analog and digital circuits. Growing up on the Hill, he always enjoyed the small town pace and the surrounding plateaus and mountains. In fact, as a boy he considered becoming a forester so he could enjoy the outdoors all the time.

The lab, he says, allows him the responsibility and freedom to do the type of research and problem solving that commercial engineering firms wouldn’t. And he gets the added benefit of backpacking, camping in the forests, climbing the rock faces and skiing Pajarito Ski Area. Skiing was a sport he took up at 16, rather late in life for Los Alamos residents, because his parents, natives of Texas, didn’t ski.

“My mom would sit with a cup of tea and look out the window and wait for the snow to melt,” Honig recalls.