BY GREG MELLO
Managing Director
Los Alamos study group
Every US nuclear warhead and bomb contains a plutonium core or “pit”. These age slowly. If for some reason the US is still building nuclear warheads in the late 2030s and 2040s – which is sure to be an era of deepening climate collapse, global famine, and other major crises – those responsible for building these new warheads might need new pits .
But for reasons ultimately based on an ideology of global dominance and corporate self-interest, the US now has a fabulously expensive crash program to dig new pits, not then, but now. In 2019, the Defense Analysis Institute warned the defense authorities against such a program. A rushed program, they said, was more likely to fail.
The pits are “needed” for a new Air Force warhead, which must be manufactured in sufficient quantities to place up to three warheads on each missile, a practice the US abandoned a decade ago. Right now there are enough high-precision, modern warheads to put you on any missile without new pits. Alternatively, if for some reason a super duper new warhead is needed (e.g. to give the nuclear labs and facilities something expensive), there are plenty of “young” pits of the right kind – with one warhead per missile.
It gets worse. In 2017, the National Nuclear Security Administration, then under the leadership of former Air Force General Frank Klotz, officially determined that the plutonium plant in Los Alamos, which was built in the 1970s for research and development, was too old, too small and otherwise was too important to be a manufacturing facility. To build enough pits and have a factory that would last until it was really needed, either a new facility would have to be built at Los Alamos National Laboratory or a partially completed facility in South Carolina could be converted. Unsurprisingly, NNSA found that the SC facility would be cheaper, faster, and less risky.
The New Mexico senators and their allies had a cow.
By 2018, Klotz, an Obama holdover, had disappeared. His successor, Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, made the non-Solomonic decision to build two mine factories to keep everyone happy. Until then, no one had seriously considered building two such beasts.
A factory was to be built in LANL’s old R&D facility – exactly what NNSA said should never happen. This would start production in the mid-2020s. The SC factory would be bigger, more durable and more resilient, but it would take longer.
Two factories were going to be expensive to build, but it wasn’t clear HOW expensive. Meanwhile, Gordon-Hagerty and others have outmaneuvered OMB and DOE to force Trump, then under threat of impeachment, to increase spending on warheads by an unprecedented 25%.
As a result, the money in this program is not currently capped. However, the Biden administration will soon have to make some mature decisions as costs skyrocket.
Apparently LANL promised more than it could deliver. Early last year, NNSA belatedly announced that LANL’s cramped factory would require 24/7 operations to build just 30 pits a year, adding 2,000 employees, more infrastructure, and an unprecedented ballet of complexity. The cost of ownership would be a billion a year.
Then this year the projected cost of capital for SC was very high. LANL’s nuclear construction costs also increased by billions.
Start-up costs for the two locations are now between $ 32 billion and $ 39 billion through 2033, far more than anyone had imagined, with $ 27 billion to $ 34 billion pending, more than half at LANL. LANL pits will cost north of $ 50 million apiece, which will at least triple the cost of new warheads, again assuming production runs perfectly. It will not. Even assuming total reliability, LANL cannot dig enough pits on its own.
Meanwhile, the brand new SC facility, five times the size of LANL’s run-down facility and much safer, is being designed to make all the pits that DoD says will be needed in a production shift.
The new administration inherited Gordon-Hagty’s folly. What are you going to do?
The obvious answer, which could be bipartisanly supported in the future, is to limit the role of LANL to providing evidence and training, or at most to single-shift operations on the order of 10 pits per year. Such a step could cut the total cost of the program almost in half and still achieve the goal of 80 pits per year in the current plan at the latest.
The advantages for LANL – which would then remain a laboratory, as opposed to a laboratory and a production agency – would be considerable. The benefits to the county’s residents are too numerous and obvious to list.
Noteworthy are the energetic efforts LANL management has put into making this mission possible. The smarter way would have been to pick up the phone and say something as soon as the enormous amount of effort put into achieving the program goals became apparent.
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