The federal fiscal year ends today -- has Los Alamos met the statutory requirement to make at least 20 brand-new nuclear warhead cores ("pits")?, press release, Sep 30, 2025

For immediate release: September 30, 2025

The federal fiscal year ends today -- has Los Alamos met the statutory requirement to make at least 20 brand-new nuclear warhead cores ("pits")?

Legal requirement was based on DOE and Los Alamos representations; DOE and Los Alamos have been breaking pit promises since the 1990s

Contact: Greg Mello: 505-577-8563 cell
Permalink * Prior press releases and backgrounders

Albuquerque, NM -- Today is the last day of the 2025 federal fiscal year. Statutory requirements first set in 2014 and reaffirmed since then have required the Department of Energy (DOE) to produce at least 10 "war reserve" plutonium pits during fiscal year (FY) 2024, at least 20 during FY2025, at least 30 during FY2026, and at least 80 during FY2030.*

(*The years specified in defense authorization acts refer to fiscal years, not calendar years, in harmony with their associated appropriations acts. Hence this press release.)

DOE and its nuclear warhead subsidiary the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) have only one place to make these pits by any of these dates, which is Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), operated since 2018 by under a contract held by Triad, LLC.

A larger and more permanent pit factory called the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF) is being built at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina. That facility is currently expected to be completed some time between the first quarter of FY2032 and the last quarter of FY2035, after which at least 3 years of start-up activities are expected prior to full rate production.

LANL (i.e. Triad) produced one war reserve pit in FY2024, which was "diamond-stamped" as such on October 1, 2024. Since that time, no announcements have been made of any further war reserve pit production.

In testimony this past spring to support NNSA's FY2026 budget request, then-Acting NNSA Administrator Teresa Robbins declined to mention any actual pit production as a goal for FY2026.

On August 11, Deputy Secretary of Energy James Danley wrote John Dupuy, director of DOE's Office of Enterprise Assessments, an internal DOE oversight group, and NNSA's then-Acting Administrator Teresa Robbins asking for a "special study" of NNSA's "leadership and management" of the plutonium pit production mission. Reliable production at a rate of at least 30 pits per year (ppy) at LANL appears to be (according to the most recent NNSA budget request) running 6-8 years behind schedule (i.e. not until 2032-2034), although strong efforts are being made through NNSA's "30 Diamonds" strategy to reach 30 ppy by 2028 or 2029. NNSA hopes to be able to produce 30 ppy with 50% probability of success each year by 2030 or 2031.

We have been told that in order to meet production deadlines despite delays, NNSA may use some recertified pits for its W87-1 program, which had been touted as the first warhead NNSA would make since the Cold War with all-new parts. When built (starting in the early 2030s), the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) -designed W87-1 warhead is to be deployed atop the proposed Sentinel silo-based missile. Pit re-use is also planned for half the production run of the proposed W93 warhead. Pits for this Navy warhead are to be the first production task of SRPPF when completed.

Recertified pits have been used and are being used in every NNSA warhead life extension and upgrade project through the end of this decade. In the early 2030s, the proposed Sea-Launched Cruise Missile Nuclear (SLCM-N) will also use recycled pits. Several thousand pits are available for reuse, both within weapon type and, where supported by prior nuclear testing or even potentially without that testing pedigree, across weapon types (for the pits available in currently-deployed types see U.S. plutonium pit population estimates, Mar 2, 2010; this table does not include some older but still potentially reusable pits such as the numerous W68 pits; subtract 1 pit per year of each type shown from the totals available for a current population estimate).

NNSA ruled out the use of recycled W87 pits in what became the W87-1 despite the vastly lower cost (99% less, NNSA estimated) because doing so would not provide a reason to immediately build a pit factory.

Study Group director Greg Mello:

"It will be very interesting to see if NNSA and LANL have met their pit production quota for FY2025. There have been no indications that they did, but we'll see. Much depends on the standards used by the inter-lab certification process, and of course on how many good candidates LANL puts forward.

"Will pit production failure affect Triad's bottom line, or contract duration? We certainly hope so.

"There needs to be more accountability in this program, which has been underway for more than 25 years at a cost of more than $13 billion at LANL alone, apparently without creating the capability, so far, of actually producing pits in any meaningful way. Whatever temporary, small-scale capability that existed at LANL over the years 2007-2011 was lost after the entire program was subsequently shut down for egregious safety violations.

"Making new pits right now adds nothing to the U.S. so-called "nuclear deterrent." It is part of a larger quest for superpower credibility, and of course it's a jobs program. Apart from maintaining and demonstrating basic know-how, every dollar spent on pit production at LANL is a dollar wasted -- and a dollar that creates unpleasant economic, social, and environmental impacts in New Mexico."

For more detailed information please see, with supporting linked analyses:

***ENDS***

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