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Key resources: nuclear weapons ban, plutonium pit production

August 3, 2018

Bulletin 249: Worker safety; pit fever; “Beyond Hiroshima” Aug 6; lab power grab fail

1. Nuclear worker safety at risk: Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board (DNFSB) – weak by design, understaffed and under attack; in cost-cutting measure, future underground Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) factories to have limited safety features
2. NM Reps. Lujan, Grisham, Pearce ally with Trump Pentagon to seek LANL plutonium “pit” surge with multiple labor shifts; pit workshop in DC
3. "Beyond Hiroshima" discussion in Los Alamos, 6 pm Monday, August 6
4. Lab power grab fails: Senate defense bill would have stripped most remaining Department of Energy (DOE) control from nuclear weapons contractors; NM’s Heinrich was key to failed strategy

Dear friends and colleagues –

These vignettes do not do justice to any of these topics, let alone to the wider historical context in which we find ourselves. There will be more soon from us; meanwhile if you are in central or northern New Mexico the August 6 discussion will be worthwhile and we hope you can attend. 

1. Nuclear worker safety at risk: DNFSB – weak by design, understaffed and under attack; in cost-cutting measure, future underground LANL factories to have limited safety features;

DOE Order 140.1 (“Interface with the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board”) is a problem. The ProPublica headline, “Trump Administration Neuters Nuclear Safety Board” (Rebecca Moss, Jul 22, 2018) was too strong but it’s an excellent article that captures the main problems with the Order, and that is the direction things are definitely heading if they are not stopped. (Nota bene, Bob Alvarez, quoted extensively in the article, is a Study Group director.)

The Study Group briefed members of the Board about our concerns with this Order, among other concerns, on June 21 in Washington and again on July 25 in Santa Fe.

The DNFSB is an outstanding, highly-professional, very small independent federal agency that reports to Congress. It has advisory, not regulatory, power.

Not everyone knows that there is no external regulation of worker safety at nuclear weapons facilities – no OSHA, no NRC, no licensing or permitting of facilities or operations (apart from the limited permitting needed for some facilities under some environmental laws, which does not generally address worker safety).

Even the DNFSB’s mandate does not explicitly include worker safety. It does however do so implicitly, as the Board does advise DOE on compliance with DOE’s own safety orders and regulations. Too bad that DOE Order 140.1 aims to cut off most communication between DNFSB and the people actually running US nuclear weapons plants and labs: the contractors. There’s more of course; read Ms. Moss’s article.

If only this new Order were the Board’s only problem. The Board has been under siege from without and within for more than a decade now. It’s been debilitating. As of July 25, 16 engineering positions – a significant fraction of the DNFSB workforce – were unfilled.  

Worker safety remains a huge issue in the weapons complex. As of June 17, the Department of Labor had approved 1,599 unique occupationally-related death claims from survivors of LANL workers, according to the Alliance of Nuclear Workers Advocacy Groups (ANWAG, personal communication). Considering that documentation of occupational illness and death is more difficult for the early years of Los Alamos, it may be an underestimate. One committed occupational death roughly every two weeks over most of LANL’s history is a lot of occupational mortality to absorb in northern New Mexico. It not “normal,” by any stretch of the imagination. Mortandad (“slaughter”) Canyon [a central drainage feature at LANL] indeed.

There is by the way a fine recent oral history of worker morbidity at LANL by Peter Malmgren and Kay Matthews, which documents a small fraction of the stories which could be told.

Nationwide, more than 84,000 unique claims have been approved for DOE workers made sick and or killed by their nuclear weapons work. And we know these numbers are grossly underestimate occupational illness and mortality from the nuclear weapons enterprise so far. They result from what University of Chicago sociologist Joe Masco has called “the heroic mode of production.” Right up to the present day, the “efficiency” of nuclear weapons production during the Cold War is a model and a standard in many influential governmental and advisory minds. We know this because we have talked to them, read their reports, and heard their speeches.

In the face of all this, why doesn’t DNFSB have an explicit worker safety mandate? It should. That was the first subject of our briefing.

The same forces in government who authored the power grab discussed below (at 4.) have been attacking the DNFSB for many years, first one way and then another. Being pencil-pushers themselves, they don’t seem to mind cutting industrial safety corners.

Given LANL’s safety history, “ancient” and recent, we were a bit shocked to read that the safety strategy for the proposed underground plutonium bomb core (“pit”) workshops at LANL would “rely solely on the passive confinement capability for accident mitigation and assumes that no active safety systems would be required” (“Pu Pit Production Engineering Assessment,” April 2018, p 2-43). The emergency fire water supply and electrical power for the modules “will not be designed, procured, or installed to nuclear code and standards” (op. cit., p. 2-47). Production shifts of 235 people each would be shuttled in and out of cramped underground foundries and processing rooms through locker rooms totaling just 1,306 sq. ft. There would be no “office areas, lunch/break room, restrooms, or operations and security control areas” (Ibid).

This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. LANL and NNSA are also proposing to use one floor in a building originally built as a light, radiological laboratory as a heavier nuclear facility, even though nuclear codes and standards weren’t used during construction, and as far we know the building does not meet nuclear facility seismic codes (our comments).

Why are all these corners being cut? Why the bait-and-switch? The short answer is that the LANL site has many problems. Without cutting corners, including safety-related nuclear standards, turning LANL’s plutonium area into a factory complex is pretty well impossible. The available real estate is very limited; existing buildings – not built to modern safety standards either – are getting old. Standard solutions (like building large, multi-story structures) are difficult to stabilize in the deep, loose volcanic ash that underlies the site.

2. Lujan, Grisham, Pearce ally with Trump Pentagon to seek LANL plutonium “pit” surge using multiple labor shifts; pit workshop in DC

These developments were largely summarized in this detailed July 25 press release: “All-But-Final Defense Bill Increases Momentum for Larger Los Alamos Plutonium "Pit" Factory.” Please do read that release if you want to see the legislative language calling for what the Albuquerque Journal rightly called “round-the-clock labor shifts” to provide a near-term surge in pit production.

On August 1 the Senate passed the bill, almost certainly with the pit provisions unchanged (the final version has not been posted).

This week, STRATCOM Commander Hyten (photo at LANL) said the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) must resolve its plutonium pit (atom bomb core) production impasse by year’s end. “By about next spring, we have to be on a path to building them [pits],” he said.

Currently and for at least the next decade, LANL is the only place pits can be made.

Two billion dollars in building modifications and new equipment have been approved to prepare LANL for pit production. Extensive new facilities costing many billions more are being considered for possible subsequent expansion. 

On July 12, I (Greg) led a workshop on pit production in Washington, co-hosted by our Princeton Program on Science and Global Security colleagues. A senior Pentagon nuclear official and other government personnel attended, along with academic and NGO experts. We had an excellent and wide-ranging exchange of views. My presentation: “Why, how many, when, how, where, with what risks?.”

It is worth expanding one slide in that presentation in particular. As we said then and in more detail in Taos on July 30 (two-hour audio with Q&A; much thanks to Robin Collier of Cultural Energy), we believe it will be very difficult or impossible for LANL to establish industrial pit production at any scale for a multitude of reasons, all of which are independent of senior management actions. These factors are negatively synergistic in ways that have proven, and will prove, difficult to predict or prevent.

• The industrial, cultural, and educational isolation of the site, which increases costs and creates program risks;
• LANL's dissected topography, which dramatically increases costs and places limits on construction;
• LANL's R&D culture, which is necessary to protect in order to attract young scientists and engineers, especially given LANL's isolated location;
• LANL's institutional arrogance, a product of isolation, enormously large relative income and generous benefits, low taxes and local high government subsidies and therefore excellent local schools, etc., plus high formal educational attainment among LANL managers and technical staff in comparison to the surrounding region;
• The unconsolidated sediments that underlie TA-55 and other LANL sites, which together with the site's considerable seismicity (next bullet) increase costs and limit construction options;
• LANL's high seismicity, a problem that is amplified by known active on-site faults and hence possible ground rupture, the shallow location and high acceleration of earthquakes from them, seismic amplification from unconsolidated sediments, and the structural incompetence of all the rock at LANL;
• LANL's legacy nuclear facilities, which were built for R&D and of limited size; most of these will soon (relative to this mission) be at, or are already past, their reliable, safe, and useful lives; these include PF-4 (the main plutonium facility), the Main Shops, and Sigma, all of which are to have greater or lesser roles in pit production; tearing these facilities down will also be disruptive to a greater or lesser extent.
• The planned repurposing of a new radiological laboratory (RLUOB) as a HC3 nuclear facility; the success of this "bait-and-switch" operation is central to industrial pit production at LANL;
• The concatenation of difficulties and strain on support systems posed by multiple industrial plutonium missions at PF-4 (pit production, pit disassembly and conversion to oxide, Pu-238 heat source fabrication);
• Low work standards can be somewhat pervasive in New Mexico, especially northern New Mexico, as a long-term result of poverty and lack of opportunity; there is a high incidence of drug use and associated crime, violent and otherwise; this can reinforce LANL arrogance and racism on the job as well as contribute to mistakes at work; 
• The lack of a qualified regional workforce for LANL as a whole as well as for pit production and the low educational attainment of the surrounding population; a relative lack of post-secondary educational and vocational institutions; and
• The relative incompatibility of industrial plutonium operations and the Santa Fe cultural identity; and
• Local opposition.

We will take up the pit production issue in much more detail in coming weeks.

3. "Beyond Hiroshima" discussion in Los Alamos, 6 pm Monday, August 6

From our press release: At 6 pm on the evening of Monday, August 6, the Los Alamos Study Group will host a panel discussion at Fuller Lodge [map] in Los Alamos on the theme of "Beyond Hiroshima."

Speakers will include: Santa Fe filmmaker Godfrey Reggio; San Ildefonso Pueblo leader Gilbert Sanchez; public health expert and activist Carol Miller; writer, educator and mother Marita Prandoni; and Greg Mello of the Study Group.

Monday will be the 73rd anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the first use of nuclear weapons in war. The rallying cry of "Never again!" from the surviving victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks has troubling historical relevance in New Mexico even now, given the continuing mission of New Mexico's nuclear labs.

Also this week, a new Defense Authorization Act was sent to the President's desk. For the first time it permits the manufacture of low-yield submarine-launched ballistic missile warheads (“W76-2”) sought (and opposed) for their greater perceived threat and potential usability against Russia.

The new warheads might be produced as early as late next year. Two or possibly three additional new nuclear weapons are under development for deployment in the 2020s.

Study Group director Greg Mello: "These priorities, part of a more than one trillion dollar plan to upgrade and replace the whole US nuclear arsenal, impoverish our state and our country. Apart from their direct danger, they draw our political system backwards. They capture skills and resources we need elsewhere. They draw our leaders' attention toward instruments of death, not the nurturing of life.

"Possessing nuclear weapons, developing them, threatening with them -- all these are now banned under a new international treaty. This news has apparently not reached Los Alamos. We must pay attention to what the world is saying about nuclear weapons, like a person standing on a railway track with a train coming, oblivious to their danger.

"LANL's mission casts a dark pall of nihilism and despair over northern New Mexico, especially affecting our youth. The moral license to create such weapons, if it ever existed at all, has long expired. Nuclear weapons certainly are 'incompatible with the peace we seek for the 21st century,' as the Vatican said 20 years ago.

"LANL is not about a shining future. It has doubled down on a dark past. LANL may never move on, but New Mexico has to.

"We urgently need to begin a public conversation about our security priorities in New Mexico. What is 'national security,' in this historical moment? What is it to us -- to real people, not defense contractors? What kind of security, or opportunity, are we offering families and children? Far too little."

4. Lab power grab fails: Senate defense bill would have stripped most remaining DOE control from nuclear weapons contractors; NM’s Heinrich was key to failed strategy

If you haven’t seen it, please see the timely and important “Defense bill would curb Cabinet control of nuclear agency, Matt Daly, AP, Jul 22, 2018.” In particular (emphasis added):

A Senate aide familiar with the reorganization plan contended it was “a straight-up power grab” by staffers at the nuclear agency and the Senate Armed Services Committee [SASC].…A committee spokeswoman declined to comment, as did representatives for Inhofe and Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, the committee’s top Democrat. Spokesmen for the chairman of House Armed Services, Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, and the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, also declined comment.

That is, the legislators necessary to pass the plan were running away from it.

Our sources say that in addition to SASC staff members, House Armed Services Strategic Forces Republican staff were also involved, as well as the ubiquitous nuclear weapons laboratories, which control much of what happens at NNSA and elsewhere in Washington as far as nuclear weapons are concerned. Interestingly the measure was opposed, other sources tell us, by NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty.

Sources tell us that in the SASC this measure was advanced by Democratic staff on Strategic Forces. Which Democratic senator(s), you might ask, gave the go-ahead?

There is only one Democratic senator on that subcommittee with a NNSA facility or lab in his state. That senator is Martin Heinrich, with two. On the SASC, he is the most important Democrat promoting the three nuclear labs and their missions, especially the two New Mexico labs. (His senior colleague Tom Udall does the same thing in the Appropriations Committee.) This is the same role Heinrich played on the House Armed Services Committee when he was a congressman there.

No one should think that either of these men, Mr. Heinrich especially, is any kind of “progressive.”

An attempted power grab by the nuclear military-industrial complex and their agents in Congress should frighten you, as it did me.

Fortunately, this measure – Section 3111 of the Senate version of the FY19 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – failed in conference negotiations (“Energy Department to maintain nuclear oversight, Matt Daly, AP, Jul 24, 2018).

This proposed legislation was just the latest attempt by the warhead labs (see also 2. and 4. below) to free themselves from most DOE control, weak though it be. 

Contractors do 97% of NNSA’s work (see p. 5 in NNSA’s latest budget request; do the math) under unique "accountability-free" management structures dating from World War II. NNSA lab contracts are worth tens of billions. NNSA’s project management (lately, just for large projects) has been on GAO's "High Risk List" for waste, fraud, and abuse since the agency began.

Not to put too fine a point on the matter, the labs use a portion of their cost-plus dollars to corrupt local and national politics in their own interests, often to the detriment of political configurations and loyalties more responsive to human needs, as we see in New Mexico.

Freeing NNSA from Cabinet-level control means would have meant freeing the weapons labs from almost any control.

What was at stake in this gambit, and still is at stake, is competent, engaged civilian oversight over the nuclear weapons enterprise in any branch of government. The US does not have that right now. Of all the relevant committees, the SASC especially functions as a rubber stamp for nuclear laboratory interests. The single biggest reason for that is Martin Heinrich.

That’s it for now, best wishes,

Greg Mello, for the Study Group