Friends and colleagues say Charles McMillan guided Los Alamos National Laboratory through a time of great advancements and significant challenges. He was a mentor and a leader — but also an amateur astronomer, a musician and a photographer.
The former lab director, who made Los Alamos his home after his retirement in 2017, died in a car crash early Friday morning on the hill, the lab announced Friday afternoon. He was 69.
“On behalf of the entire Laboratory, I would like to express deepest sympathies to the McMillan family and to the many current and former employees who worked closely with Charlie and knew him well,” lab Director Thom Mason said in a statement.
Another former lab director, Terry Wallace, who briefly succeeded McMillan, described him in a Facebook post Friday as “one of my closest friends and colleagues.”
“Charlie will always be known first as a former Los Alamos National Laboratory director, but that hardly captures this man,” Wallace wrote. He went on to describe McMillan as “passionate, honest and dignified.”
Los Alamos police responded to reports of a two-vehicle crash at the intersection of N.M. 502 and Camino Entrada shortly after 5 a.m., Los Alamos County said in a news release. Emergency crews from the Los Alamos Fire Department also responded, providing treatment to three patients.
A 22-year-old woman and McMillan were taken to Los Alamos Medical Center, where McMillan succumbed to his injuries.
The accident remains under investigation by the Los Alamos Police Department, the news release said.
McMillan, a physicist who became the 10th director of the lab in 2011, retired in 2017 after six years at the helm. Wallace then stepped in for less than a year before Mason took office.
McMillan oversaw the lab during a time of expansion that also saw multiple safety incidents, including a 2014 incident at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Southern New Mexico, in which a waste drum improperly packaged at the lab burst in an underground panel, causing a radiation leak that shut down the storage facility for nearly three years.
The National Nuclear Security Administration issued a report in 2015 finding the lab in violation of eight health and safety rules, and it was docked more than $10 million in performance awards.
Mason also pointed to McMillan’s work to develop a vaccine for HIV and new modeling to better understand climate change.
“He rightfully deserves a lot of credit for the advancements the lab made during his tenure,” Mason said.
In McMillan’s time at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and at the start of his career at LANL, he brought state-of-the-art capabilities to deal with nuclear weapons stockpile challenges, Mason said, pointing to two supercomputers that have McMillan’s “fingerprints” on them.
McMillan joined Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2006 when friend and mentor Michael Anastasio became director. He served as the principal associate director for weapons programs before becoming director.
The New Mexico lab was facing significant controversy over “operational upsets” at the time, Mason said.
“It was a time at the lab that was actually quite challenging,” he said. “There was a lot of uncertainty about the future of the lab and a lot of the work that needed to be done.”
Mason said he first met McMillan about 13 years ago as he was taking the helm at LANL; Mason was then the director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He grew to know McMillan more after coming to LANL and described him as a dedicated mentor, with a “warm” and “personable” manner.
Outside the lab, McMillan was an avid amateur astronomer, Mason said, and a musician who once built a “technically sophisticated” electronic pipe organ.
Mason said he was still processing McMillan’s death.
“Charlie was always very upbeat, led a healthy life, and was actively contributing,” Mason said. “To see that cut short is really devastating.”
Linda Marianiello, executive director of the New Mexico Performing Arts Society, said she knew McMillan through his involvement in the music world. McMillan played the recorder, organ and harpsichord. He was an amateur, she said, but at a high level, and could hold his own with the society’s professional music players.
He played on the organization’s series last year, she said.
“He was an extremely nice man,” Marianiello said. “Very kind, supportive, smart … both in his understanding of music and generally speaking.”
He was a “low-key” person, she said, but threw himself fully into music, exploring musical interpretations at a deep level.
“He was very engaged in that way,” she said. “He wasn’t passive at all about his musical ideas and always wanted to get into the nitty gritty and the details and the style and the interpretation and the dance form.”
Marianiello said the New Mexico Bach Society’s concert Friday evening at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Santa Fe would be dedicated to McMillan’s memory.
Wallace wrote in his post McMillan was a talented musician and photographer and had taken up stargazing.
“Charlie and I traveled a difficult journey at Los Alamos from contract changes, wildfires, accidents, and national security challenges,” Wallace wrote. “He was a man that I truly could trust — humble but skilled, and always respectful. His fingerprints are all over things that are good at the lab — and his influence on friends is deep.”
Tributes to McMillan began to roll in from across New Mexico on Friday afternoon.
U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich said in a statement he had spoken to McMillan recently and that his death was “a loss to Los Alamos and the entire scientific community.”
“As a leader and an individual, Charlie made invaluable contributions to our state, to science, and to our national security,” Heinrich said in the statement. “I will always be grateful to Charlie for his leadership at LANL, his work and partnership on supercomputing and artificial intelligence, and his commitment to serving the greater good.”
Nella Domenici, Heinrich’s Republican challenger for Senate, said in a statement McMillan’s “tragic accident is a great loss to the scientific community and his family.”
Domenici is the daughter of the late U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, a champion of LANL. After Domenici’s death in 2017, McMillan described him as “beloved at Los Alamos for decades.”
Following retirement, McMillan and his wife, Janet McMillan, continued to live in Los Alamos. The couple have three children, according to an NNSA biography.
The lab said in its news release Charles McMillan had remained active in national security work after his retirement and had taken an interest in the geopolitical implications of artificial intelligence.
While Marianiello was grieving her friend, she said she also was angry about the way he died.
“The state has no political will to enforce driving safety,” she said. “That was a wasted life there.”
Another LANL employee recently died in a crash, Mason noted, adding McMillan’s death was a “stark reminder for people to take care.”
“The reality is, the most dangerous thing we do every day is driving to work,” Mason said.
In late February, 44-year-old Santa Fe resident Philip Leonard, who worked at the lab as a chemist, died in a three-vehicle crash on N.M. 501.
Just a week later, two people were sent to the hospital after a four-vehicle collision on N.M. 502 near the intersection of Camino Entrada.
Shortly after that accident, the U.S. Energy Department installed four traffic cameras on East Jemez Road, commonly known as the Truck Route, to curb what officials described as a pattern of reckless driving on the way to and from the lab.
“Our No. 1 priority is that everyone gets to work and home safely every day,” lab spokeswoman Jennifer Talhelm wrote in an email at the time.
