Nukes and AI Deepen New Mexico’s Water Crisis

High Country News reported on the planned expansion of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in northern New Mexico, which marks its largest growth since the Manhattan Project era. The U.S. Department of Energy projects LANL's annual water consumption will double to approximately 504 million gallons for at least the next decade, a significant portion of which will support a new 100,000-square-foot facility dedicated to artificial intelligence supercomputers. This projected increase, equivalent to 1.4 million gallons per day, is a major concern in a state already grappling with severe water shortages and a looming groundwater crisis. Joni Arends, executive director of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, highlighted the disparity between the lab's water use for nuclear weapons and farmers' use for food production. Most of LANL's water originates from the Española Basin, a sole-source aquifer also serving eight tribes and towns, including Santa Fe, where well levels have been declining since the 1970s. Los Alamos County's water conservation plan acknowledges increasing temperatures and decreasing precipitation as factors straining resources, with Philo Shelton, manager of the county's Public Utilities Department, noting the additional challenge of a chromium plume contaminating the aquifer. While the federal government's environmental impact statement asserts negligible impacts and states that continued pumping is sustainable for hundreds of years, public sentiment in New Mexico has been strongly against high water-demand technological facilities, including AI data centers like the controversial Project Jupiter and Meta's facility. An executive order by President Trump, which rescinded the National Environmental Protection Act, curtailed local residents' ability to influence the federal government's final decision on the lab's expansion and its increased water use.