Mark Anthony will move to New Mexico from Lund, Sweden, where he directed construction of a multibillion neutron source, to lead the new plutonium infrastructure directorate at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the lab said this week.
Anthony’s appointment, effective Nov. 1, follows a four-month search for someone to head the plutonium infrastructure directorate, which is nested within Los Alamos’s Weapons Program. That’s according to an announcement from the lab.
As head of the new directorate, Anthony will quarterback construction of the lab’s planned plutonium pit factory at the PF-4 Plutonium Facility and supporting infrastructure. The laboratory has been staffing up the pit directorate this summer after director Thomas Mason publicly announced its creation in April.
Anthony, who has a masters in engineering management from Drexel University and a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Penn State, was most recently project director for
European Spallation Source in Sweden, according to his LinkedIn profile. The facility, still under construction at deadline, will bombard heavy elements with high-energy protons to release neutrons for researchers to observe.
Prior to that, Anthony did stints with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy in Europe, and Exelon in the U.S.
Together, a planned pit facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. and the Los Alamos pit factory are expected to cast at least 80 fissile nuclear-weapon primary triggers by the early or mid 2030s. The Los Alamos plant will come online first and, the National Nuclear Security Administration has said, cast at least 30 pits annually by 2026.
