ALBUQUERQUE — Los Alamos National Laboratory is tearing down a legacy of the Cold War.

Lab officials have invited dignitaries to a Tuesday ceremony to watch an excavator begin breaking down the walls of one of the largest buildings at Technical Area 21, a 22,000-square-foot structure used as an administration building for decades.

The demolition is part of a program to dismantle a quarter-mile complex that was the second generation of buildings at the lab, which grew out of the secret Manhattan Project that developed the world's first atomic bomb during World War II.

Most of TA-21's buildings were used into the 1980s, although a few operated past that.

The area lies south of the Los Alamos community's airport, outside what is now the laboratory's main research complex. The site is surrounded by security fences, but the guard towers that once marked it have long since been torn down.

A lab historian, Ellen McGehee, was with the ecology group — lab biologists, archaeologists and cultural resources managers — that was the administration building's last tenant.

The building had "great bones," she said.

The group could still see the old showers, break room and nurse's office, and could look down a central corridor that once connected much of TA-21, past a gate toward long-closed processing labs for plutonium.

"We could see the vestiges of what it was like to work there" in its heyday, she said, adding, "You could tell it had history."

The group moved out in 2006.

"We had been prepared for it to be torn down, but we'll really miss it," said McGehee, co-author of a December 1999 report to the Department of Energy about buildings at TA-21.

The technical area was the last place the lab and the town of Los Alamos intersected, McGehee said.

"When it's gone, when the whole facility, the whole mesa, is down to greenfield, you won't have that presence in the downtown Los Alamos area," she said. "The lab then is clearly on the other side of Los Alamos Canyon. To me, that's kind of the end of the era."

Over the years, various buildings — some dating from the 1940s — housed everything from offices to uranium and plutonium processing to early work on the nation's space program and an artificial heart.

Architecturally, they're unexciting, industrial-looking beige buildings, many built of cinderblock. Lab spokesman Fred deSousa describes them as "typical vintage '50s and '60s lab buildings."

The nuclear weapons lab has long planned to demolish the structures, but stimulus money is allowing the work to move more quickly. The lab received
$212 million in stimulus funds this year for environmental cleanup and monitoring and is spending $80 million to tear down core buildings at TA-21.

The first four buildings slated for demolition were not used in work with radioactive elements, deSousa said. The administration building is the largest of those; the other three already have been razed.

It will take more time to tear down structures that housed projects using radioactive materials, he said.

Greg Mello of the watchdog Los Alamos Study Group said his organization is happy with the demolition.

"It's long overdue," he said. "TA-21 is a very dirty place. ... There's a reason it's taken so many years to get this cleanup going. It requires a lot of care."

DeSousa said another TA-21 project involves excavating and cleaning up the lab's first landfill, which operated from 1944 to 1948.

Officials believe that, among other things, it contains a truck used at Trinity Site in Southern New Mexico when Manhattan Project scientists tested an atomic bomb in July 1945 before the United States dropped weapons on Japan the following month, ending the war.

"They just drove it into the pit and left it there," deSousa said.

The contaminated soil will be removed and replaced to standards high enough that houses could be built on the site, deSousa said. Eventually, the DOE could turn the area over to Los Alamos County.




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