Three perhaps overlooked, or new, issues regarding pit production

November 25, 2019

Dear colleagues --

I am sure you are weary of me writing to you about pit production, but a couple of stray facts have broken loose from NNSA's tight grip. Perhaps they can collectively be, in Wallace Steven's phrase, a "chorister whose C preceded the choir."

Three things:

    First, we note that Triad expects "'...hiring to continue at that pace [in the same article: "1,000 people a year and some 500 are retiring annually"] for the next five years and with the pit production mission we expect 1,400 additional staff....' Bierschmitt said" (emphasis added).

Reliable sources tell us that Kelly Cummins, NNSA's Program Executive Officer for Strategic Materials, has recently confirmed that LANL will need 1,000 to 1,500 additional staff for the 30 pit per year (ppy) mission.

Cummins also confirmed that LANL will need multiple shifts to reach the 30 ppy goal. With maintenance, that will be around-the-clock work.

Although details remain vague, around-the-clock work really does require a lot of staff.

The contrast with the 2018 Parsons pit production Engineering Assessment briefing is striking. At slide 11,

    LMI [ the workforce consultant] studied the demand for pit production personnel

• Manufacturing an additional 50 ppy at LANL requires between 350-500 additional production staff
• Manufacturing 50 ppy at SRS requires 722 production staff

(emphasis added)

It is this big difference in personnel which drives the supposedly "double" life cycle costs at SRS, vs. LANL.

So LANL will need 1,000 to 1,500 new people to go from 10-20 ppy to 30 ppy only, twice what SRS was said to require to go from zero to 80 ppy.

Basically LANL's massive planned pre-2026 pit production hiring has been taken "off the books" for comparative purposes. For those concerned with risk of program failure, the need to work around the clock to meet even a modest 30 ppy, after some billions in capital investment and repairs, suggests an inadequate infrastructure. Actually, we do not yet even know if PF-4 can withstand a design basis earthquake -- or even if so, whether PF-4 can operate within DOE's 25-rem public exposure standard.

LANL has been continually slipping its PF-4 safety deadlines. Seismic answers, upon which all others depend, are still years away.

The idea of driving PF-4, with an unknown level of fitness-for-mission, around the clock with three growing plutonium processing and manufacturing missions is a recipe for failure -- or worse.

As we have said before in many ways, we do not believe LANL can successfully conduct an enduring 30 ppy mission, with or without a new greenfield nuclear facility. TA-55 is too narrow and soft to carry an adequate nuclear facility.

   Second, reliable sources tell us that the Navy is not currently interested in any follow-on warheads (with or without new pits). Such a warhead is shown as next in line after the proposed W87-1 on e-page 73 in NNSA's FY2020 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan (SSMP).

This in effect opens up NNSA schedule space behind the W87-1.

Meanwhile there are rumors that GBSD is already behind schedule and over budget. You have already heard, from me and others, layers of what I think are overwhelmingly persuasive arguments as to why the W87-1 is unnecessary, not cost-effective, risky, and imprudent.

The twin IDA reports (for DoD and NNSA) have emphasized how difficult it will be for NNSA to meet its "80+ ppy by 2030" pit production goal -- and how dangerous to the program it would be to try to "rush" industrial pit production. (That is exactly what NNSA is doing, with Congress' help.)

Why can't NNSA slow down?

One reason, we know, is that NNSA fears that its lack of systems engineering will come to light, as well as contradictions between pit production and Environmental Management goals and commitments at LANL, now a serious crisis, toward which this note now turns.

   Third, as of this past Friday we learned that LANL has "several hundred other aboveground containers [in addition to those mentioned in this report] that have reactive or ignitable waste characteristics and are prohibited for safety reasons from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant."

These several hundred drums are part of a LANL TRU inventory of very roughly 20,000 drums and drum-equivalents (I am adding a ballpark 2,000 drums to account for the TRU drums in PF-4, on pads outside, and at the Transuranic Waste Facility, already overwhelmed).

LANL expects to produce about 1,000 drums per year of new TRU over the 2015-2021 period or 7,000 drums over these years. Once production of pits and Pu oxide ramp up, this figure is likely to increase.

Quite apart from environmental cleanup, we do not yet see any way by which this inventory of legacy TRU can leave LANL in the foreseeable future.

What is more, the safety standards for storage of TRU appear to us less stringent -- perhaps 100 to 1,000 times less, though we have yet to fully understand this issue -- for Native Americans (i.e. persons on San Ildefonso Pueblo's Sacred Area, which directly abuts LANL's legacy TRU storage area) than persons roughly 5 miles west and north, on private land in Los Alamos town.

For reasons such as these we believe we need a Site-Wide EIS for pit production at LANL, as well as a programmatic EIS for pit production as a whole, as we have often written.

The bottom line is that we believe there are no management or even political reasons to rush into expanded pit production either at LANL or at SRS.

It is however at LANL where the greatest and most unseemly rush is occurring, with the greatest environmental and cultural ignorance, and with the least engineering justification.

Thank you for your attention at this busy time,

Greg