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Amid current upgrades, commission foresees replacing LANL plutonium facility
By Scott Wyland swyland@sfnewmexican.com
Oct 20, 2023
A congressional commission foresees eventually replacing Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium facility — despite the billions of dollars being spent to refurbish it — as part of its recommended strategy to bolster the U.S. nuclear arsenal to keep pace with Russia and China.
The Congressional Strategic Posture Commission has released a 160-page report that pushes for the U.S. to boost its nuclear capabilities and conventional military to deter what it describes as increasingly aggressive and well-equipped adversaries, namely Russia and China.
One section calls for improving and expanding infrastructure to research, develop and make better weaponry at a higher volume — and buried in a footnote is a statement of how the upgrades would include replacing the lab’s plutonium facility, known as PF-4, for production and science.
No timeline is given for when PF-4 might be phased out, but the document confirms anti-nuclear critics’ longtime contention the federal government is spending billions of dollars on a facility with a finite life.
At the moment, this is the only facility in the country that can produce the bowling-ball-sized plutonium cores, or “pits,” to detonate warheads. Nuclear security officials want the lab to make 30 pits a year by 2030, saying they’re needed to modernize the arsenal and equip two new warheads being developed.
An anti-nuclear watchdog group contends the pits’ main purpose is to be fitted into the new warheads — not to upgrade existing weapons — and expanding the arsenal requires more pits than the lab can make.
“The commission ill-advisedly wants a replacement for LANL’s plutonium pit production facility to help fuel the new nuclear arms race with new-design nuclear weapons,” Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, wrote in an email. “This is so tragic and unnecessary when no future pit production is scheduled to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing, extensively tested stockpile.”
Wasting money has never bothered the federal agencies, whether it was cost overruns on projects or boondoggles that never panned out, he said.
The budget for modernizing this facility and funding plutonium operations has grown to almost $1.8 billion, more than five times the $308 million of several years ago. The total amount to be spent ramping up pit production also is growing as the finish line gets extended.
The original target date for rolling out 30 pits per year was 2026. But recently, lab Director Thom Mason acknowledged it will be at least 2028 before the lab reaches that goal.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the arsenal, didn’t address the report’s statement about eventually replacing the plutonium facility.
But in an email, she wrote the agency will review the panel’s findings and look to build on its conclusions.
“We share the commission’s sense of urgency and are committed to doing what is necessary to sustain and strengthen deterrence now and in the future,” spokeswoman Millicent Mike wrote. “NNSA agrees that the United States must be prepared to deter two major nuclear-armed competitors. We are moving ... to implement our strategy and respond to this challenge.”
The commission’s chairwoman, Madelyn Creedon, is a former deputy director for the nuclear security agency. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, another member, headed the agency under the Trump administration.
Former U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, is the vice chairman. In all, the body has a dozen members with expertise in national security and defense.
Coghlan believes the report will carry a lot of weight because of the members’ collective credentials. So the statement about eventually scrapping the plutonium facility could affect long-term funding, he added.
Some lawmakers on both the House and Senate armed services committees have expressed support for the panel’s recommendations to amp up deterrence in response to Russia’s increasing aggressiveness — including with its full-scale invasion of Ukraine — and China investing heavily in its military.
An anti-nuclear activist noted a 2020 Energy Department report presented to Congress pegged the lab’s upgraded plutonium facility running until 2045.
However, it’s far from certain the facility will last that long, said Greg Mello, executive director of Los Alamos Study Group, because the lab will be “running PF-4 into the ground.”
“When PF-4 ages out, all the pit production will go to Savannah River,” Mello said, referring to a South Carolina facility planned to produce 50 additional pits per year by the mid-2030s. “We think pit production at Los Alamos is a temporary project.”
In the past, China and Russia were described as near-peer adversaries. This report refers to them as peers whose growing nuclear strength requires the U.S. to step up its defenses in this “power competition.”
“We will face a world where two nations possess nuclear arsenals on par with our own,” the report said. “It is an existential challenge for which the United States is ill-prepared, unless its leaders make decisions now to adjust the U.S. strategic posture.”
Coghlan said he finds the report’s specific recommendations a disturbing throwback to the first nuclear arms race.
They include putting multiple warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles, possibly mounting these missiles on road vehicles, building more heavy bombers and submarines that launch cruise missiles and deploying battlefield nuclear weapons with a smaller blast range.
In an email, an anti-nuclear advocate echoed those concerns.
“This report is calling for a full-fledged return to a Cold War nuclear warfighting strategy, not a deterrence strategy,” wrote Geoff Wilson, director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight. “If we learned anything from the Cold War, it should have been that simply possessing more nuclear weapons ... did not make us any safer.”
Wilson also noted the report strongly advocates Los Alamos lab and Savannah River Site making at least 80 nuclear bomb cores combined per year, even though there are thousands of existing pits already stockpiled.
“I think if you need one measure of the new global nuclear arms race, that fact alone is telling,” Wilson wrote.
Greg Mello published comments:
Those working in the field will wonder why Coghlan says its not necessary to make pits, while at the same time he promotes LANL as a pit factory, which leads toward the outcome he says he opposes, including the new warheads to be made with those pits. Tell us Jay, do you oppose pit production at LANL or not? Without that opposition, your words contradict your actions, don't they? Please. Your voice in opposition would be helpful. That said, it's a terrible report to be sure, but it is also "thin," in the sense that has no detail and comes across as a full-throated industry funding pitch, along with some real panic, because the authors suspect -- rightly -- that the U.S. can't do what they ask for. I don't find it too scary, because it is so out of touch with reality. Reality always wins in the long run. The 2008 predecessor of this report also advocated, as its #1 national nuclear infrastructure priority, a big new plutonium facility at LANL, a proposal which we defeated after more than a decade of NNSA work and hundreds of millions of dollars had been poured into it. Now that same priority is relegated to a vague and obscure footnote -- which is contradicted, by the way, by senior committee staff in conversations with us. The reason the authors of this report are reluctant to go into details this time around is ideological, having to do with the psychology of leading members of Congress and -- they hope -- the next President. It is this: they avoid messy details because are afraid to signal weakness, to themselves, to their audiences, and to Russia and China (which know anyway). They just don't go into too many gory details about just what poor shape the nuclear industrial base is in, as we see in Los Alamos. They imagine all these problems can be fixed by more money and national "will." The problems are much deeper than that however, yet so obvious anyone can see them. They will not be able to gin up more than a failed effort at a nuclear arms race, however profitable it would be. The era in which a nuclear weapons surge was possible has already passed. They are, in other words, whistling in the dark, urging the U.S. to puff itself up without many of the key ingredients -- legitimacy and enthusiasm, "nuclear weapons patriotism," and the willingness (for example) to spend a career handling plutonium ("the heroic mode of production"). Are there enough skilled workers available to be drawn out of urgent, productive work to build weapons that everyone hopes will never be used -- and if they are, it will be the worst day in the history of the world? How long can the present deficit spending, which is adding almost $1 billion in debt EVERY HOUR be sustained, in the face of rising domestic crises? The interest that must be paid on this rising debt is now more than the entire Pentagon budget and those payments are, as they say, real money. Perhaps the worst part of this report has to do with its proposal to achieve total government commitment, without question. That's a key recommendation, using slightly different words (they say nuclear weapons need to be "an all-of-government" effort). They want to completely overturn the constitutional system, in other words, removing the present slender reed of accountability. It is a recipe for nuclear fascism, in other words, the unity of corporate and government power. (Corporations do more than 95% of NNSA's work, in long-term, cost-plus contracts that require no private investment, with executives at places like LANL secretly drawing salaries vastly greater than federal ones). The bottom line, I would say, is this: the monster will take whatever it can, until it is stopped. Join us in opposing this monster -- you too, Jay. Go to lasg.org, get active. Sign the Call for Sanity at https://lasg.org/wordpress/we-call-for-sanity-no-nuclear-production/. Absent opposition, this gigantic expansion at LANL will swallow our future. We have a precious opportunity here in New Mexico. Let's use it!
Jay, how can you endorse the present crash program for pit production at LANL (as you do here), and at the same time say pits are not needed now? There is nothing "redundant" about possible pit production in SC in the late 2030s. You are pretending that time and history just don't exist, and that LANL's old, small facility can pull enough pits out of a hat, basically. Possible production in the late 2030s, which you you OPPOSE, is very different than production here and now, which you finally do openly say you ENDORSE. Why do you endorse it? Because, as you rightly note, pit production is so difficult at LANL. LANL is indeed a terrible place for this mission. Do you think DoD and NNSA and Congress don't see that? Oh they do, they do. You are not outsmarting them. It is absolutely true that pits are not needed now for U.S. weapons, a point on which we agree, except for new warheads (W87-1s). But W87-1 pits -- pits for new weapons -- are the pits LANL wants to make now, as quickly as possible, in order to enable the program you say you oppose! Without LANL production, that program would have to be markedly delayed. There could be no arms race. The arms race you SAY you oppose (but actually endorse, in your support of LANL pit production, which gives the green light to others), would not be possible. In all this, you are laying a thick smokescreen to obscure your very active support for billions of dollars in investments in pit production at LANL. To top it off, you say you oppose replacing PF-4 as a pit facility in the future, while your preferred policy would make a new, large pit facility at LANL absolutely necessary. Meanwhile, all that blather about international negotiations is just that -- a distraction and cover story. That is not a field in which you have any experience. We do. The war in Ukraine (which you openly support) is just the latest blow to such negotiations, not just for the moment but for a long time. Moving on, what Geoff Wilson says in the article, that thousands of pits being stored at Pantex are suitable for use in weapons, has to be bracketed. You also say this often. These pits could be temporarily used, in an emergency, with a long lead time and at great expense, in some weapons but not all, with a lot of caveats, but only for the coming couple of decades. This makes them extremely unattractive to DoD, NNSA, and Congress. They too are aging, and if the deployed pits age out it is likely these emergency backups will as well, just when needed. So there's a logical fallacy there, which much of the NGO community seems unable to grasp. Since it takes at least a decade and a half to build a pit facility, and since nobody is going to put an old pit in a new warhead if there are any doubts whatsoever about its longevity, DoD, NNSA, and Congress are going to finish that adequate, new factory in South Carolina. I have to remind you and everyone that DoD, NNSA, and Congress do not agree with your characterization of the facts about pit aging, and won't be swayed by such statements as pretending it is known that pits will last at least 100 years. You are misrepresenting the Livermore study, the JASONs, and the literature overall. The JASONs now say otherwise, Jay. NNSA, with all the classified data at hand, also says otherwise. You have no technical background and you have no clearance or need to know. How can you rebut those who do know, except by hearsay? Ridiculous. In any case, by about the time new pits may actually be needed (if nuclear weapons are to be kept), and assuming all of its present difficulties can be surmounted, LANL's facility will be aging out, as all these federal parties very well know. Again, that is why they are going to build an adequate, new facility in South Carolina, superior in every way to the little old unsafe one at LANL, which on top of all its other problems cannot be defended from terrorist attack -- from Starbucks, to make it plain. Don't enable nuclear weapons, please.
I did not say that international negotiations were "blather." I have a whole drawer full of UN badges from negotiations I have attended and taken part in, in one way or another. We have led large delegations to the UN and a brilliant former intern has made a wonderful career helping some of them behind the scenes. I am deeply deeply committed to them. What I did say, and have said in more detail elsewhere, is that a) calling for international negotiations in this (pit production) context, while supporting construction of a nuclear weapons factory in one's back yard, is a smokescreen. I also said or meant to say was that the U.S. has been assiduously demolishing the basis for negotiations, especially in the Ukraine War (and could have said, Taiwan), to the point where the Russian and Chinese leadership classes, as well as most of the public in Russia does not believe the U.S. is capable of keeping agreements, for deep structural reasons. The preconditions for successful negotiations are absent, in other words, so substituting the *hope* of successful negotiations for opposing the arms buildup in one's own backyard is in my view, intellectually dishonest. It's beyond naive. Finally, I don't mean to insult anybody, and I don't see that here. But I do mean to be very firm and clear, and I do want to tear down, in public here as well as elsewhere, the arguments being used to support building a pit production facility at LANL. I encounter these same arguments in Washington, and it really does matter than the self-interested contractors and nuclear weapons advocates who want to invest no less than $20 billion in starting up the LANL pit factory, and operating it, with all the nuclear waste and other impacts it will create, can turn to an "anti-nuclear" activist for political and moral support. Reflecting a bit more, I would like to add that the substitution of this *hope* for successful international negotiations, for actual local opposition, is about the worst thing that could happen to genuine concern about nuclear weapons, from the practical as well as the political science perspectives. Public opinion will not affect negotiations, and does not particularly affect foreign policy. Whereas grassroots activism can and does often cancel damaging projects, the world over, while bringing communities together, which is of value in itself. Not everyone will be on the same side, as is the case here. It is important to know what side we are on.
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