Joe Martz looked into the huge pit, crawling with workers in hard hats, that he said will launch a new era at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Past the fence behind the fast-talking, quick-witted nuclear weapons program director, there's a place with several buildings that you're not supposed to look at, at least not with a camera, he said.

Classified stuff goes on there, in the area dubbed Technical Area 55 — stuff involving plutonium.

"Imagine ninjas descending from the skies and grabbing your camera," Martz joked. "Something like that might happen if you tried to take a picture of that."

But the 42-year-old Martz, who grew up in Los Alamos, doesn't want to focus on what's behind him anyway. It's the future he's looking at, down in that hole.

That's where they're building the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement project, which when finished will be two large buildings connected with underground passageways.

But it's not what most people think it is, Martz said emphatically. "This is not a pit manufacturing facility," he said, adding that nuclear bomb cores called pits are made in a building in TA55, the area where photography is a shooting offense.

What the project will create is a compact, more modern version of a facility already at the lab, called the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research building.

That building is a 570,000-square-foot monstrosity built in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and it looks like a prison, Martz said.

"At the time it was constructed, it was the second largest concrete building in the U.S., next to the Pentagon," he noted.

The CMR is where scientists work with plutonium. But it's old, several parts of it have been closed, and the lab space is becoming harder and more expensive to use as time goes on.

"One of our primary goals is to consolidate work here," Martz said. "By putting all that in a smaller, more modern building, our work will be safer and more secure."

The new CMRR is about half the size of the old building, and officials were planning it long before the Department of Energy decided to start making new pits at Los Alamos, said Rick Holmes, division director of the project.

"We're on schedule and on budget," Holmes added proudly, watching the 170 or so workers manipulate concrete and rebar in the lower half of the first building, which will be called the RLUOB, or Radiological Lab Utility Office Building.

It's been said that LANL never met an acronym it didn't like, he added with a chuckle.

The RLUOB will have modern lab facilities: 19,000 square feet of lab space, office space for 350 people and a training facility. It should be finished in 2011, when employees can start moving in.

And people in the facility won't be working with large amounts of plutonium or other radioactive elements. The maximum amount of radioactive materials anybody can work with in that building is 8.4 grams, Martz said. "That's about the weight of my pocket change," he said, pulling a quarter and a nickel out of a pants pocket.

The building isn't just about nuclear weapons. It's a place where scientists will work with a class of radioactive materials called actinides, which includes plutonium, he said.

"Plutonium is interesting stuff," he said. "Even if we built no pits, this facility is essential just for the plutonium research we do."

Plutonium is used in the batteries of spacecraft sent to Mars and other planets by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, he said. It's used in nuclear power plants in other countries; it's used to train International Atomic Energy Association inspectors; and it's needed in small amounts so scientists can develop detectors that can see it and protect people from a potential terror threat, Martz said.

"There are applications for actinides that most people don't know about," he said, noting the lab's work with other radioactive elements. There's americium in smoke detectors, for instance, and nuclear isotopes used in medicine, he said.

"We make all of that here and send it to hospitals around the country," Martz said.

LANL will start constructing the second building, the Nuclear Facility, sometime later this year. It's scheduled for completion in 2013.

That building, which will become part of TA55 and be surrounded by fences and other security, will have a vault capable of storing 6 metric tons of plutonium — which is the size of about two to three sport-utility vehicles. And it will be connected with an underground tunnel to another building, where the pits are made, in TA55.

The Nuclear Facility will have 22,000 square feet of lab space, dedicated mostly to plutonium research. It may also end up housing all the plutonium work from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as the Department of Energy complex consolidates nationwide, Martz said.

The total project should cost between $745 million and $975 million, according to LANL's Web site.

All of this construction is part of a project to upgrade aging infrastructure at Los Alamos. It's not actually part of the larger phenomenon called "complex transformation," although it will play into it, Martz said.

Complex transformation is a departmentwide plan to update and consolidate the country's national laboratory system to make it more efficient.

And several activist groups have said they're worried about that plan because they think it could add more nuclear contamination to the environment around the lab, and Los Alamos will use it as an excuse to build a new generation of more powerful nuclear weapons.

But that's not really the objective, Martz said.

What people don't understand about the complex transformation concept is that the goal is to have a lot fewer nuclear weapons in the stockpile. "I want to get rid of nuclear weapons," Martz said. "A lot of people are surprised to hear me say that."

Under that plan, which is in the public comment phase right now, activities across the Department of Energy complex will shrink. Los Alamos will become a plutonium and supercomputing "center of excellence," which means it will be the main place to go for those activities.

And overall, the goal is to decrease the nuclear weapons staff in the complex by 20 percent, he said, adding at LANL, a lot of those people will just move to other areas.

"During the Cold War, activities were spread out across the complex, and duplicated, because it made things safer in an attack," Martz said. "We don't need to do that anymore, so now we're consolidating."

Nuclear weapons scientists often note the weapons are most effective as a deterrent, a warning to other countries it might not be wise to attack us, he said. But nobody really wants to use them, he said. So the new plan is not to make more of them, but to be able to make more of them if it's necessary, he said.

"That's another thing people don't understand about pits here," Martz said. "We need to demonstrate that we can make 50 to 80 pits a year, but that certainly doesn't mean we will make that many — it just means we have to be capable of it."

In fact, the nation's stockpile has already dropped from 35,000 during the Cold War to about 2,500 weapons, and it should drop even more, although Martz doesn't know how much more. "That's above my pay grade," he said with a laugh.

The old mass-production of nuclear weapons from the Cold War was aimed at destroying Soviet tank columns. The U.S. decided it was cheaper to make lots of nuclear weapons to destroy them rather than making lots of tanks to meet them head-on, Martz said. "So actually, at the time, making lots of weapons saved the U.S. money," he said.

The trick in the new complex will be to add the capability of making a new stockpile to meet an emerging threat within five years — but not to actually make it, he said.

That's also why the Department of Energy wants to work on new nuclear weapons called Reliable Replacement Warheads, even though Congress has told them not to, Martz said.

"RRW is about stockpile transformation, and it has benefits," Martz said. "I think those (benefits) have been lost in the debate. Legacy weapons (like those in the current stockpile) are difficult to build and difficult to work with. If we can remove those problems, it makes complex transformation a lot easier to deal with."

But with or without new weapons designs, and even with or without complex transformation making it through public hearings, the CMRR will continue, he said. "Either way, we'll still need these facilities," Martz said.

Contact Sue Vorenberg at svorenberg@sfnewmexican.com.

IF YOU GO

The Department of Energy will hold public hearings in New Mexico on its proposed complex transformation process this week.

Here's where you can attend and share your views:

TODAY: Albuquerque Convention Center, 401 2nd St. N.W., 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 6 to 10 p.m.

WEDNESDAY: Los Alamos, Hilltop House, 400 Trinity Drive at Central, 6 to 10 p.m.

THURSDAY: Los Alamos, Hilltop House, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

THURSDAY: Santa Fe, Genoveva Chavez Community Center, 3221 Rodeo Road, 6 to 10 p.m.

MARCH 27: Española, San Gabriel Mision y Convento, Plaza de Española, 1 Calle de Las Españolas, 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.

More information is available online at www.complextransformationspeis.com.