N.M. lawmakers fight decision to split plutonium pit production

New Mexico lawmakers are pushing back against the Trump administration’s decision to split the responsibility for manufacturing plutonium pits between Los Alamos National Laboratory and a facility in South Carolina.

Under the plan, LANL, which for the past 20 years has been the sole site capable of producing the softball-sized nuclear bomb cores, will take on about 38 percent of future production needs, while the Savannah River Site near Augusta, Ga., will handle the balance in a proposed new facility.

On Thursday, Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., successfully introduced an amendment to the Senate energy and water appropriations bill, calling for an independent review of the decision, announced earlier this month by the National Nuclear Security Administration.

The amendment passed unanimously in the bipartisan Appropriations Committee.

In an emailed statement Saturday afternoon, Udall characterized the track record of the Department of Energy, which oversees the NNSA, as

“highly questionable.”

“I believe the DOE’s decision-making on such an important issue should be driven by safety and security — not by political considerations,” he said, adding “Independent analysis is needed to ensure that DOE is fully considering all the implications, costs and risks of its plan.”

Udall said there is “bipartisan skepticism” of the federal department’s plan to spend billions constructing a new facility at Savannah River that “will likely never be completed.”

“This proposal risks time, money and national security goals,” he added.

New Mexico’s three members of the House of Representatives, Democrats Ben Ray Lujan and Michelle Luján Grisham, and Republican Steve Pearce, also supported a similar amendment in a House bill.

When the NNSA’s decision was announced, Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, undersecretary of the NNSA, and Ellen Lord, undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Defense, said in a joint statement that splitting the responsibilities between two facilities fosters “resiliency, flexibility and redundancy” and “is the best way to manage the cost, schedule and risk.”

The congressional delegation had lobbied intensely to keep all of the proposed pit-production work at Los Alamos before the NNSA decision was handed down.

It’s been six years since the lab has created a war-ready pit. Large-scale pit production halted with the end of the Cold War.

The proposed uptick in production is part of the Trump administration’s move to modernize the nation’s nuclear weapons stock.

Under the new program, Savannah River would produce 50 pits annually while LANL would produce 30, a steep increase from the number of pits the facility created in its most productive year.

Leaked documents from the NNSA’s assessment of the two sites estimated it would cost between $1.9 billion and $7.5 billion to construct a facility at LANL capable of producing all 80 of the proposed pits.

Nuclear watchdogs have decried Trump’s proposal — and specifically LANL’s involvement, citing a bevy of safety issues at the aging facility.