At eight sites across the United States, the National Nuclear Security Administration designs, tests and manufactures nuclear warheads and bombs. The U.S. retains a vast arsenal of about 5,044 such warheads, of which about 1,770 are deployed and another 1,938 are held in reserve. About 1,336 are retired.

Albuquerque’s Kirtland Air Force Base stores many in the latter two categories.

Each warhead has a plutonium core, the “pit.” The U.S. has not made more than a handful of pits since the Rocky Flats Plant stopped making them in 1989. Since then, maintaining and modernizing the vast U.S. arsenal has not required new pits, nor has the U.S. had any place to make them.

Pits slowly age, however, and the stewards of the stockpile believe they must “keep up with the Joneses” with new designs. They point out that if the U.S. wants to keep a nuclear arsenal, there will need to be a pit factory, sooner or later.

“Why stop at one factory?” said NNSA. “Why not two?”

So that’s the plan. First, “expedited delivery” for the first few pits, to be achieved by re-tooling a 50-year-old R&D facility in Los Alamos and then running it 24/7 with more than 4,100 full-time staff supporting the mission. Then, the regular “Amazon Prime” schedule for all the rest of the pits, to be made in a larger facility at the Savannah River Site, using half as many staff. NNSA must build that project anyway given the advanced age, inadequate size, safety problems, and enormous operating costs at Los Alamos.

Construction in both places is expected to be done in 2032. Los Alamos expects to complete its first new pit late this year. Then next year, maybe five will be built. By 2032 NNSA expects LANL to be reliably making at least 30 pits each year.

We’ll see.

At the Savannah River Site, NNSA won’t make pits until 2035. But that plant will be able to make all the pits needed. When it opens, LANL can scale back — or may have to scale back, as problems accumulate. NNSA does not expect the LANL facility to last beyond about 2045 — sooner than existing pits are expected to last.

What will this cost? At LANL, NNSA will spend at least $22 billion on this project through 2032. The total cost will be more because some parts of the project haven’t been costed or submitted to Congress for approval.

At the Savannah River Site the latest project estimates lie between $18 billion to $25 billion. However, that bigger, more-optimized factory will be able to make a great many more pits, with only half as many people as LANL. Per-pit costs at SRS will be about one-fifth as much as at LANL, where pits will cost a cool $100 million each, assuming total success. For pits as for packages, expedited delivery can cost a fortune.

All the LANL pits are for a new warhead (the “W87-1”) that is only “necessary” if the number of warheads on each U.S. silo-based missile is increased from one to three. Right now, the U.S. already has enough safe-to-handle, long-lasting, highly-accurate warheads for the new “Sentinel” silo-based missile system, if that system were deployed with just one warhead per missile, as today’s silo-based missiles are. In that case, LANL pit production would not be needed.

But where’s the fun in that? The additional nuclear waste and accidents? What’s $22-plus billion among friends? Surely plenty of tax dollars will be left over for rebuilding infrastructure and educating our children. If not, we can raise taxes and parents can hold bake sales. If we survive that long.