EnergySec tells Fox News he wants to build ‘more than 100’ pits

April 4, 2025
By Exchange Monitor

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said rebooting plutonium pit production is key to bringing nuclear power forward for energy and defense during the Donald Trump administration, according to Fox News Sunday.

Plutonium pits, the bowling-ball shaped fissile core placed inside a thermonuclear weapon to trigger its explosion, were produced at the highest rate during the Cold War from 1952 to 1989 in the U.S. at Rocky Flats Plant near Denver, Co. The Environmental Protection Agency shut the plant down in 1992, and then-president George H. W. Bush stopped production of fissionable plutonium for nuclear weapons that year.

“We went through a period, about three decades, without making any new nuclear weapons, which meant our whole arsenal was getting older, was getting obsolete,” Wright said in a video interview with Lara Trump linked in the Fox article. He added that “we don’t need to grow our nuclear stockpile, but modernize our weapons.” Lara Trump is the president’s daughter-in-law. 

Wright said in the written Fox article that restoring plutonium pit production would be the way to modernize an aging stockpile. “We’ve built one in the last 25 years, and we’ll build more than 100 during the Trump administration,” he said.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in October produced a “diamond-stamped” first production unit of a plutonium pit for the W87-1 warhead planned to go on the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile. While “diamond-stamped” means the pit is ready to be deployed for the nuclear stockpile at war-reserve quality, NNSA has not publicized how many pits have been produced after the first production unit.

Not everyone agrees with Wright’s notion, including anti-nuclear advocate Greg Mello at the Los Alamos Study Group. 

Mello voiced his thoughts in an article Wednesday first by correcting Wright’s numbers saying NNSA built 30 pits for the stockpile from 2007-2012, but only certified one of them. He then said it was “nearly impossible” for Los Alamos to ramp up the production of pits to meet Wright’s expectations, and that it was not necessary to turn the facility “inside out.”

Section 3120 of the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act put into law that NNSA produce 30 plutonium pits by 2026 at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where plutonium pits were first produced during the Manhattan Project in 1945. Acting NNSA Administrator Teresa Robbins said at the Nuclear Deterrence Summit in January that the goal was now to have the “capability” to make 30 pits at Los Alamos “in or near 2028.”

Savannah River Site, which is building its plutonium pit factory, has a goal to make 50 pits per year by 2030 to meet NNSA’s annual goal of 80 pits per year.

Since the halt of fissionable plutonium production in 1992, the U.S. has recycled old plutonium pits to make new ones in a process starting at the Department of Energy’s Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas.