August 28, 2025

"Radiation contamination found in LANL's plutonium hub; safety board said protocols not followed," and some elephants in the room

Dear friends --

Yesterday, the Santa Fe New Mexican (reporter, Alaina Mencinger) did a great job following up on a recently-posted Weekly Site Report from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) discussing a very sloppy situation discovered in the basement of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) main plutonium facility (PF-4), with over 750,000 disintegrations per minute  of contamination per 100 cm2 of area. Several workers' booties were contaminated, waste bags were broken and oil had leaked out beneath. Rules were broken to say the least, and not for the first time. 

I added the following comment: 

In 2018, Congress requested an independent study of NNSA's pit production plan. That study was done by the Institute for Defense Analyses. It concluded, in part, that "[t]trying to increase production at PF-4 by installing additional equipment and operating a second shift is very high risk." (p. vii at https://lasg.org/MPF2/documents/IDA-NNSA-plutonium-strategy-ES_Mar2019.pdf). Congress has ignored the study it commissioned. So has NNSA. The LANL contractor, headed by its factotum Thom Mason, just salutes and says, "Will do. Just give us the money please. We are good boys and girls."

At the time IDA did its study, NNSA was sure LANL could complete its preparations and start making 30 pits per year by 2026, at a total cost of $3 billion (see slide 9 at https://lasg.org/MPF2/documents/PlutoniumPitProductionAoA_Nov2017_9pg.pdf.) Now, preparations won't be complete until at least the end of FY2032 (when the Los Alamos Plutonium Pit Production Project is complete; see p. 169 in NNSA's budget request at https://lasg.org/budget/FY2026/doe-fy-2026-vol-1.pdf) and the total cost will be several multiples higher than originally thought, so high that NNSA is reevaluating its options (Gigantic Department of Energy program to make plutonium warhead cores ("pits") has overshot its budget and is being re-evaluated; NNSA has no analysis of alternatives supportive of its present pit plans.)

This month, the Department of Energy began freaking out about the the runaway budgets and schedules at both production sites (LANL and the Savannah River Site) and has ordered a review, somewhat as we have been requesting (Special Study of the NNSA's Leadership and Management of the Plutonium Pit Production Mission, and Energy Department asks its Office of Enterprise Assessments* for "special study" of pit production "leadership and management").

At LANL, pit production has been roughly 7 years from fruition since 1996. The costs have been increasing steadily -- both the total costs and the forward costs from the date of each estimate. (Estimated costs of acquiring reliable 30 ppy at LANL, $ billions, Aug 27, 2025. The labels on the x axis are currently missing and we will fix that today.) In other words, the more money that has been invested in LANL pit production, the more money has still needed to be invested to get to the ever-receding promised land of 30 pits per year. It is a self-licking plutonium ice cream cone. So far, LANL has produced one (1) pit, for its $13 billion investment so far.

And no, we don't need the pits. There is nothing wrong with the pits we have (except their very existence). The whole program is to enable a new warhead that will allow the vastly over-budget Sentinel missile, if it is ever built, to be deployed with multiple warheads, or more prosaically, to pump up the NNSA warhead complex, Livermore lab especially, with new work, to the delight of interest-conflicted congresspersons.

The Senate Armed Services Committee, in its wisdom, reported a bill last month that would require 24/7 production at PF-4, and increase the production requirement at LANL to at least 80 pits each year, i.e. to an average of roughly 100 pits per year (Senate bill would relax near-term production deadlines for nuclear warhead cores at Los Alamos, double outyear production requirements). They did that because LANL, NNSA, and the Pentagon told them they could and should do that.

Underneath the headline in this story, LANL's plutonium facility has a problem with competence, training, and experience. Pushing new workers or any workers into overnight plutonium shift-work is a bad idea. LANL will do superficial studies of what went wrong, but LANL will not examine the basic premise involved, which speaks to errors made for political reasons at the very top of the lab. Thom Mason should have told NNSA right from the start that the IDA had a good point -- that it would be unwise and unsafe to make 24/7 production a baseline condition for LANL.

I could have added that NNSA itself did not want PF-4 to be a permanent pit production facility in 2017. In that year, NNSA was looking forward to the end of pit production there: "[A]fter a new 80 WR [War Reserve] ppy [pits per year] capability is established, PF-4 can return to the research and development mission for which it was built." 

I also could have talked about just what these objects are, and what they do. They're the cores of city-killers, if so directed. Here's a 5:43 video of an Minuteman III being launched showing the full "stockpile to target sequence." As noted above, LANL's pits are for the successor to the MMIII, the Sentinel, assuming it is built. 

You can virtually detonate a W87 (or any other) warhead over Santa Fe or Los Alamos using Nukemap. The 300 kiloton W87-0 yield is roughly the (classified) yield of the W87-1 warheads that LANL's pits -- if any are ever made -- will be built for.  

If the wind is right, the Santa Fe population would be pretty much all killed by the fallout from a large ground burst at LANL. Or Taos, if the wind blew that way. 

In case it's not fresh in your memory -- and how could it be? -- here's the launch portion of "The Day After" (14:28). 

Making these weapons is not a good use of anyone's precious life. 

Greg, for the Study Group