Los Alamos National Scientific Laboratory

The former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory said Saturday that North Korea is serious about denuclearizing and is willing to contemplate a program such as that used to help former Soviet republics destroy their nuclear weapons. "This is a big deal," said Siegfried Hecker, referring to North Korea's accomplishments so far in shutting down its main nuclear facility at Yongbyon, 60 miles north of Pyongyang.

The nation's nuclear weapons chief was fired Thursday, after a long series of security breaches at Los Alamos National Laboratory and other weapons sites had prompted strong criticism of his performance. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman issued an unusual public statement Thursday saying he had asked for the resignation of Linton F. Brooks, chief of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which operates eight major bomb facilities across the nation.

Los Alamos National Laboratory has started random drug testing of its scientists, engineers and other employees after finding secret nuclear weapons data in a former worker's residential trailer, lab officials told a House investigation panel Tuesday. Police discovered about 1,500 pages of classified information, along with methamphetamine pipes, while responding to a domestic disturbance call at a trailer park in Los Alamos, N.M., in October.

The Department of Energy on Monday cited the University of California for 15 violations of safety rules in 2005 involving nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, including a case of mishandled materials where low levels of radiation were spread across several states. The violations would have carried a $1.1-million fine, but federal law waves such penalties for certain nonprofit contractors.

The former Los Alamos National Laboratory worker who took classified materials home will face a single misdemeanor charge of negligent handling of classified documents, her lawyer said in Santa Fe. Jessica Quintana, 23, is scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday, attorney Stephen Aarons said. Police found the data on a portable drive and in about 200 pages of documents in October during a drug bust at her Los Alamos home.

The U.S. Department of Energy on Friday proposed a record $3-million fine against the University of California for a security breach last year at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in which a worker took home classified documents on a thumb drive.

The University of California has agreed to pay the federal government $2.8 million over a security breakdown at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Under the settlement, the university has accepted responsibility for the violations, the National Nuclear Security Administration said in a statement.

Michael Anastasio stood before the employees of Los Alamos National Laboratory, his first all-hands meeting with the wary men and women who would soon be working for him. And he quickly made them laugh. "I never in my life imagined that I would be standing here as the new director of Los Alamos," said Anastasio, who has worked for 25 years at Los Alamos' fellow -- and fiercely competitive -- nuclear weapons design center in Livermore, Calif. "And I bet you never imagined it either."

A top official at the Los Alamos National Laboratory who has long raised concerns about nuclear safety practices there has been reassigned effective today, a move he sees as an effort to silence his criticisms. The Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration reassigned the safety official, Christopher M. Steele, to a job overseeing safety training at research and production facilities across the nation.

In the Cold War arms race, scientists rushed to build thousands of warheads to counter the Soviet Union. Today, those scientists are racing once again, but this time to rebuild an aging nuclear stockpile. Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are locked in an intense competition with rivals at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Bay Area to design the nation's first new nuclear bomb in two decades.