About 50 people heard Sandia National Laboratory director Jill Hruby speak. (Photo Courtesy of Tom Vaughan of FeVa Fotos)

Below, Hruby discussed the laboratory's activities in detail.(Photo Courtesy of Sandy Feutz of FeVa Fotos)

By Mary Alice Murphy

Friday evening, about 50 people showed up at Western New Mexico University's Besse-Forward Global Resource Center Auditorium to hear a presentation by Sandia National Laboratory Director Jill Hruby.

WNMU President Joseph Shepard led off the evening by announcing Saturday evening's annual Bash to welcome new and returning students to Western. He also said the school has 50 more freshmen enrolled this year over last year's number.

"Monday is the start of school," Shepard said. "It's an exciting time for students, staff and faculty."

Jane Foraker-Thompson of the local Friends group told the audience: "One of our members worked tirelessly to get Jill here. Tom Vaughan was persistent."

The event was sponsored by WNMU, the Gila Resources Information Project, KURU radio and the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.

"Allyson Siwik and Jamie Newton of KURU will interview Jill tomorrow live and it will run several more times," Foraker-Thompson said.

Shepard introduced Hruby. "It's not often we get a director of Sandia Labs to Silver City." He asked how many in the audience had worked at Sandia or Los Alamos. One hand went up for Sandia and none for Los Alamos.

Hruby graduated from Purdue, as did several in the audience, and, in mechanical engineering from University of California, Berkeley.

"Jane was right," Hruby began. "Tom was tireless in having me agree to come to Silver City."

"The state of New Mexico is a pretty special state," Hruby said. "I hope I can tell you some things about it."

She titled her talk: A vibrant, multi-mission engineering national lab.

She noted New Mexico has two large labs, with Sandia and Los Alamos, being part of a large system of national laboratories.

"We support collaboration and competition," Hruby said. "Science has to be reviewed critically, so the labs are set up to compete and collaborate."

The 17 Department of Energy labs represent 30,000 scientists. "Some are single program labs, and some are multi-purpose science or multi-purpose security."

She said Los Alamos and Sandia have nuclear operations. Sandia also has a branch in California, across the street from the Livermore National Laboratory.

The roots of Sandia came after the Manhattan Project. "It's a different culture for science and engineering labs," Hruby said. Sandia was established as an engineering laboratory. Most national laboratories are run by universities, but Sandia has continued to be under a private corporation.

President Harry Truman asked Bell Labs to run Sandia, which it did for $1 a year from 1949-1993. At that time, the government decided it wanted to pay someone to run the lab under a management contract and for the contractor to have the liability. AT&T wasn't interested, so it was rebid and Martin Marietta won the competition, and then after the merger with Lockheed, Lockheed Martin has run the laboratory since then.

The contract runs out in 2017, and Lockheed-Martin has partnered with New Mexico State University, New Mexico Tech and Purdue to bid on that contract. Other bidders are also competing.

She showed a chart of the budget, not including nuclear weapons. "For the first 15 years, our only mission was nuclear weapons. In the 1960s we almost doubled our number of employees to 7,400, and started doing engineering other than nuclear weapons. In the 1970s, with the first energy crisis, the Department of Energy got us involved in renewable energy. We had our first and only layoff because the programs were fluid."

In the 1980s, energy was healthy, so the lab began doing missile defense. From 1980-2003, the non-nuclear weapon budget was around 50 percent of the total budget. In the 2010s, the lab has been modernizing nuclear weapons. "We are rebuilding the weapons to keep them in the stockpile, because some have old technology."

"The engineering at the laboratory is engineering rooted in science," Hruby said. "We are detail-oriented. It is important that every last thing is solved. Our first priority remains a safe, secure nuclear weapons stockpile. To keep the best engineers, we work on many other things and with many other people. Engineering evolves rapidly. Our engineers proudly partner and work on other things to stay at the leading edge."

She said the laboratory's people are at the heart of the work. "We have hired a lot of engineers. We have partnerships with universities, called academic alliances, with universities from which we hire a lot of engineers and scientistsG