Feds: LANL to share plutonium work

South Carolina site also expected to produce pits, cores that trigger nuclear weapons

Los Alamos National Laboratory is still on track to ramp up its nuclear weapons work, but on a smaller scale than outlined by the Obama administration. Officials for the National Nuclear Security Administration announced Thursday that the agency will set up a larger plutonium-pit production center in South Carolina, and the mission will be split between the two sites.

As part of an overhaul of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the National Nuclear Security Administration wants to sharply increase its production of pits, the softball-sized fission cores that trigger nuclear weapons. Under the new plan, as many as 30 pits per year will be produced at Los Alamos, while the Savannah River Site in South Carolina will be tasked with producing at least 50 pits per year.

In a joint statement, Lisa Gordon Hagerty, undersecretary of the NNSA, and Ellen Lord, undersecretary of the

U.S. Department of Defense, said carrying out the plutonium mission at two facilities creates “resiliency, flexibility and redundancy” and “is the best way to manage the cost, schedule and risk.”

Critics of the project say the government has failed to truly weigh the costs or environmental impacts of the endeavor — at Los Alamos or elsewhere.

Initially, the federal government planned to locate the entire operation at Los Alamos, which for more than two decades has been the only site capable of producing plutonium pits.

But Los Alamos’ plutonium facility has been marred with setbacks and serious safety concerns in recent years, and it never has produced such a high quantity of pits in a single year as the mission would require.

New Mexico’s Democratic congressional delegates reacted with chagrin at the news that New Mexico was losing a large part of the project.

In a statement, U.S. Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich and U.S. Reps. Ben Ray Luján and Michelle Lujan Grisham said the Trump administration should reconsider its decision.

“Instead of wasting billions of dollars exploring the construction of a new facility that will likely never be completed somewhere else, the Department of Energy should immediately move forward with the new, modular plutonium facilities at Los Alamos — as originally endorsed by both Congress and the Nuclear Weapons Council,” they said in a statement.

For at least a year, the NNSA has been reviewing alternative sites for the high-risk project.

Los Alamos’ current plutonium facility dates back to the Cold War and has had a number of serious infrastructure challenges, including prolonged problems with the building’s seismic standards.

One recommendation, strongly supported by the New Mexico delegation, was to build underground “modules,” or rooms, at Los Alamos for assembling the bomb triggers, which would compensate for the shortcoming of the existing plutonium facility.

But the NNSA has settled on another path: repurposing the mixed oxide fuel facility at the Savannah River Site.

The center was designed to turn the government’s excess plutonium into nuclear reactor fuel, but the project faced high costs and delays. Still unfinished, it was defunded by President Barack Obama.

While the NNSA’s assessments of the two sites have been kept largely under wraps, leaked pages released in December show the cost of keeping the project at Los Alamos would be higher and the project would take longer there than at another site.

Construction of a facility able to produce 80 pits per year at Los Alamos would cost between $1.9 billion and $7.5 billion, the document said, and the production facility might not be fully up and running until 2038.

The plan released Thursday says Los Alamos will use its existing plutonium facility and a radioactive laboratory constructed in 2010.

The NNSA us seeking to raise the limit for the amount of nuclear materials that can be held at the radiation lab.

Safety issues remain serious concerns at both Los Alamos and Savannah River as they embark on increased plutonium pit production.

Los Alamos has failed for several years to meet federal safety standards used to prevent a runaway nuclear chain reaction. And in March, mistakes related to pit production caused Los Alamos officials to temporarily halt dozens of plutoniumrelated jobs.

The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit news organization, also recently reported that the Savannah River Site came close to a lethal nuclear accident in 2015, and as of March, key problems hadn’t been fixed.

The last time the nation embarked on large-scale pit production was during the Cold War, at the Rocky Flats Plant outside Denver.

The project left devastating environmental damage and led to widespread safety and health problems — with plutonium wafting from the facility into nearby homes.

An FBI raid shuttered the plant, which also faced several costly lawsuits.

An environmental review of the impact of this larger pitproduction mission has not been conducted.

Jay Coghlan, director of Santa Fe-based Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said the lack of such a review “is of questionable legality.”

The NNSA also has failed to justify the need to fund such an expensive weapons project, he said.

Coghlan called the decision to split the work between the two sites largely a political one, “designed to keep the congressional delegations of both New Mexico and South Carolina happy.”

Greg Mello, director of another organization critical of the lab, the Albuquerque-based Los Alamos Study Group, doesn’t believe the decision was political. Los Alamos is simply not up to the task to take on the full project, he said, and it will be challenging for the lab to reach its goal of 30 pits per year.

“This is a superpower vanity project,” he said, “about not wanting to feel second-class relative to other countries that have a pit factory.”

The lab has not created a warready pit in six years.