Remote Surveillance Trailer in Los Alamos, NM

Swing by the Los Alamos Nature Center on Saturday, August 23, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. for Bear Fest! Hosted by PEEC and LEWF, and proudly sponsored by N3B Los Alamos and Century Bank. This annual celebration brings together fun activities, hands-on learning, and wildlife experts from all over New Mexico.

Scene from previous Bear Fest. Courtesy photo

PEEC NEWS RELEASE

Join the Pajarito Environmental Education Center (PEEC) and the Land of Enchantment Foundation (LEWF) for the 8th Annual Bear Festival on Saturday, August 23, 2025 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Los Alamos Nature Center.

This entertaining and educational event, sponsored by N3B Los Alamos and Century Bank, promises a day full of family-friendly fun, booths, games, and valuable resources on coexisting with black bears and other wildlife in northern New Mexico. Explore engaging crafts, participate in a scavenger hunt, and enjoy delicious food from Manko: Native American Fusion food truck, while learning from local, regional, and state-wide organizations about safe wildlife practices.

Please note that the nature center parking lot will be closed to vehicles during the festival; park across the street at the United Church or walk or bike to the event.

Admission is free. Special thanks to our sponsors for making this event possible!

Additional Bear Fest Events:Friday, August 22: Bear Dinner, co-hosted by PEEC and LEWF, 6-8:30 p.m. Hear from local wildlife expert Dr. Kathleen Ramsay about black bears in New Mexico, and eat like one too! Enjoy a buffet-style dinner catered by Vigilante Pizza, supplemented with appetizers inspired by a black bear’s diet, and of course, dessert. Drinks will include various herbal teas and a cash bar provided by Bathtub Row Brewing. $45/PEEC member, $50/non-member.

Saturday, August 23: River of Bears, 2-2:30 p.m. Join PEEC for a fulldome film in the planetarium, featuring the McNeil River State Game Sanctuary, where over a hundred brown bears gather each summer. Free as part of Bear Fest!

For more information, visit our website at peecnature.org/events. Stay connected with us on social media for updates on each week’s activities.

PEEC was founded in 2000 to serve the community of Los Alamos. It offers people of all ages a way to enrich their lives by strengthening their connections to our canyons, mesas, mountains, and skies. PEEC operates the Los Alamos Nature Center at 2600 Canyon Road, holds regular programs and events, and hosts several interest groups, from birding to hiking to butterfly watching. PEEC activities are open to everyone; however, members receive exclusive benefits such as discounts on programs and gift shop merchandise. Annual memberships start at $35. To learn more, visit peecnature.org/support/membership/.

Los Alamos National Laboratory will start venting radioactive gas on Sept. 13 to release pressure from legacy waste containers, officials said Tuesday. The announcement followed state environment officials’ approval of the plan on Monday.

Over the next two weeks, LANL aims to vent four waste containers filled with tritium and hazardous waste that it packed in 2007 and left at the lab’s legacy waste disposal site, called Area G. In 2016, a laboratory audit found the containers had been packed incorrectly and posed a threat of exploding.

Tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, can be naturally occurring or a byproduct from nuclear power and weapons. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency characterizes the gas as a lower threat, emitting radiation that often cannot penetrate the skin. Tritium is only considered hazardous in large quantities from inhalation, skin absorption or consumed in tritiated water – when tritium replaces the hydrogen molecules in water.

New Mexico Environment Department’s conditional approval came after pressure from federal officials urging the state in a recent letter to finalize a decision and pushback from anti-nuclear and Indigenous groups about the proposal.

“The operation is scheduled to take place over a two-week period and avoids impacting neighboring Pueblo Feast Days,” LANL’s Tuesday notice stated. “It also considers weather conditions to ensure activities occur at the best and safest time possible.”

Tewa Women United and other groups raised concerns that the federal government based its tritium exposure levels of 10 millirem — a measure of radiation dose — on men, and did not take into account the impact on pregnant women and young children.

Based on those concerns, the state will require a “hard stop” limit at 6 millirem, versus LANL’s proposed limit of 8 millirem.

Chenoa Scippio (Navajo/Santa Clara), the environmental justice project coordinator at Tewa Women United, told Source NM the group is still concerned about the potential impacts for pregnant people, noting that tritium can pass through the placental barrier.

“When it comes to the knowledge that’s shared between the labs or the government and the community, it really puts the burden onto the community to research these things to find out what it does to the body to find out how it impacts the land and water,” Scippio said. “That’s not transparency.”

Scippio said people concerned about exposure should stay indoors during the weekend venting sessions.

“That’s really the best we can offer, which is unfortunate,” she said.

Representatives from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state environment department will be onsite to view the venting process, officials told Source NM on Monday.

The Venado supercomputer is now running the latest OpenAI reasoning models on its NVIDIA Grace Hopper GPUs to accelerate national security-related science.

Los Alamos, NM, Aug. 28, 2025—After moving to a classified network earlier this year, the Venado supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory is now running OpenAI’s latest o-series reasoning models to accelerate national security research. Venado, which uses NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, is the 19th-fastest supercomputer in the world and serves as a shared resource for researchers at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) laboratories.

“Artificial Intelligence will be the defining technology of the 21st century, and NNSA is already examining how AI intersects with our national security mission,” said Acting NNSA Administrator Teresa Robbins. “We are currently harnessing our premier computing power to support AI integration by analyzing diagnostic data, optimizing experimental designs and improving our facility operations. Los Alamos’ new partnership with OpenAI will assist Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and, Sandia national laboratories with our most pressing national security problems.”

In its first year of operation, Venado enabled researchers to make a number of remarkable scientific breakthroughs in various areas, including materials science and design, DNA and disease treatment, and energy grid resiliency.

While Venado has been speeding up science, the plan was always to move the machine to a secure network to focus on science in support of national security. Moving forward, Venado will be used for national security-related science applications—including studying plutonium aging, ensuring effective guardrails against biological threats, and addressing other pressing national security research areas.

“This is the first time that OpenAI’s reasoning models are being used for national security applications on a government computing resource like Venado,” Laboratory Director Thom Mason said. “This partnership is laying the groundwork for greater collaboration between government and industry and is an important step in ensuring that the United States maintains a competitive advantage in AI.”

These computational and scientific advances for Los Alamos national security missions were made possible because of collaborative efforts with other national labs, industry, and academia.

Laying the groundwork for government-industry collaboration

Since its inauguration in 2024, Venado has supported a new level of integration between AI industry and national labs. Los Alamos was among the first within the Department of Energy—and even within the federal government—to build relationships with AI industry leaders such as NVIDIA and OpenAI.

The ability to use these models on a classified system is now allowing for even deeper contributions to national security.

“Today, I have the privilege of visiting Los Alamos National Laboratory and witnessing firsthand the dedication of its researchers,” said OpenAI’s Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil. “I’m more convinced than ever that AI can accelerate breakthroughs in science—what once took years could happen in months. By partnering closely with institutions like Los Alamos, we’re committed to unlocking discoveries that improve lives and strengthen our future.”

Los Alamos has previously collaborated with OpenAI on other projects that have improved AI safety and assessed the reasoning capabilities of their models. OpenAI models are now regularly used across the national laboratories for hundreds of applications spanning a range of scientific and national security missions.

Moving forward, these collaborative efforts can serve as a framework for increased partnership between government, industry, and academia—a crucial element to ensuring that the United States maintains a competitive advantage in AI.

Investing in the future of AI and supercomputing

Venado was built in 2024 with 2,560 direct, liquid-cooled NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips in an exascale-class HPE Cray EX supercomputer. The system also uses 920 NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchips; at the time of installation, it was the first large-scale system with NVIDIA Grace CPU superchips deployed in the United States. NVIDIA packs 144 Arm cores in a Grace CPU Superchip, delivering an immediate performance boost to a wide range of HPC applications.

The NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips combine an Arm-based NVIDIA central processing unit with an NVIDIA Hopper architecture-based accelerated computing platform to address high-performance computing and giant-scale artificial intelligence applications. The superchips can execute millions more instructions per second at a lower cost and energy than preceding chip technology.

“Venado is not only a lighthouse instrument for science—it’s now a frontier AI factory,” said Ian Buck, vice president of hyperscale and HPC at NVIDIA. “With NVIDIA accelerated computing at its core, this supercomputer empowers researchers to simulate the unobservable, reason through complexity, and generate scientific discovery itself. It’s a time machine for science, and now, a forge for intelligence.”

Venado’s success has highlighted the need for AI-powered supercomputers.

As the Laboratory continues to invest in AI, and expands on its collaboration with NVIDIA and OpenAI, Los Alamos will have even more AI computing resources available in the future. The Lab plans a next-generation deployment in 2026, which will be another AI-powered machine dedicated to basic scientific research.