Los Alamos National Laboratory is seeking to lease as much as 100,000 square feet for another off-site facility to house a growing workforce its main campus can no longer accommodate.

The lab issued a notice requesting “light laboratory” space within a 50-mile radius of its campus on Pajarito Plateau, making Santa Fe again a prime location because it offers the most leasing options in that area.

As with the lab’s other off-campus sites, no hazardous work would be done there.

“A light laboratory is akin to a facility where you would get your blood or drinking water tested,” lab spokeswoman Jennifer Talhelm wrote in an email.

The number of employees and length of the lease will be

determined as more information becomes available about possible space, Talhelm said.

The space would be nearly the combined size of the two other Santa Fe sites for which the lab has signed 10-year leases as it looks to establish a presence in the city for the first time in a half-century.

One lease is for a Pacheco Street office complex totaling 77,856 square feet. About 500 employees are expected to move into this site in the fall to do administrative work, including human resources, procurement, finance and information technology.

In February, the lab signed a lease for 28,000 square feet in the downtown Firestone Building, which had housed Descartes Labs at North Guadalupe and West Alameda streets.

About 75 employees could move into that building as early as summer. Some will be part of a community partnerships team that works with officials in public schools, colleges, local governments, nonprofits and high-tech industries. Communications and government relations also will have offices there.

In addition, the lab this month is opening an employee training academy in a 49,000-square-foot facility it’s leasing in downtown Los Alamos. The academy will accommodate up to 120 workers.

At an online community forum last week, Thom Mason, the lab’s director, said the 1,150 employees the lab hired last year alone requires finding more space outside the campus. The lab expects to hire 1,200 people this year.

“Because of the hiring that we’ve been experiencing, we’re actually pretty much out of space at the lab,” Mason said. “We’ve been supplementing that with leased space.”

An anti-nuclear activist who opposes the lab branching into Santa Fe said the lab pursuing large chunks of rental space reflects a hawkish entity growing too much.

“We think LANL is twice as big as it needs to be for its missions,” said Greg Mellow, executive director of nonprofit Los Alamos Study Group.

Mello contends the lab is making room for the workers it is hiring to produce plutonium pits that trigger nuclear warheads.

He also argues that expanding its presence in a city is a way to flex its political muscles.

“They want to get these local governments aligned with their mission so they don’t have pushback,” Mello said. “Everyone recognizes how controversial the pit production mission is.”

Under a federal plan known as the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, Los Alamos National Laboratory would produce 30 pits by 2026, and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina would manufacture an additional 50 pits by 2030.

Lab officials have played down pit production as the driver for obtaining Santa Fe office space. Aside from having the most available space, the city offers a convenient hub for the laboratory to engage with industry partners, government entities and other organizations, they say.

The lab previously proposed opening office space on the city-owned midtown campus on St. Michael’s Drive as part of a massive redevelopment still in the planning stages.

That proposal isn’t included in the most recent plans for the site.