Lawmakers, seek help for plutonium addiction

By Greg Mello

April 8, 2018

Sens. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., and Tom Udall, D-N.M., and Congressman Ben Ray Luján would like Los Alamos to become the nation’s factory for plutonium warhead cores — “pits” in Strangelove jargon.

Is a factory needed? No, but that apparently doesn’t matter to them. What’s good for Bechtel (or whichever contractor gets the job next) is good for New Mexico, right?

It doesn’t matter to them that the Department of Energy and Department of Defense have determined that the 3,800 pits in the U.S. nuclear arsenal will last at least 85 years, or that there are at least another 7,000 modern pits in retired warheads and monitored storage. It doesn’t matter to them that pits can be rebuilt without making new ones. They want more pits, underground factories in Los Alamos, and more money for their fat-cat contractor friends, some of whom would come back to them as campaign contributions.

Our lawmakers seem quite happy that the U.S. is planning to spend at least $1.2 trillion over 30 years, $10,525 per U.S. household, to maintain, deploy and upgrade or replace every single warhead, submarine, bomber and missile. Nuclear weapons already cost taxpayers $30 billion annually, more than the total military expenditures of all but 10 countries.

Doesn’t this seem … broken? As in, predictive of doom? Not to our elected senators and our representative from Northern New Mexico. They fight for every million. They are the giants upon whose shoulders the Trump administration stands. The enablers.

Don’t worry, say the contractors. That $30 billion (soon more) is only a small fraction of our glorious patriotic defense budget. Defense Secretary James Mattis and Donald Trump have requested a staggering $886 billion for defense next year — $7,508 per household, $2,717 per person, more than the total income of almost half the people in the world.

U.S. defense spending — $1.7 million a minute — exceeds the combined military spending of the next eight biggest military spenders, most of which are U.S. allies anyway. Not counting these eight, U.S. military spending exceeds that of the combined rest of the world.

Have Udall, Heinrich and Luján thought about the opportunity costs of this — costs to the people of the United States, to the children? If so they keep their thoughts to themselves. Do they think the U.S. can actually be sustained with such inverted priorities? Apparently they do.

Or maybe they just don’t think.

Looking now at LANL itself, why do they think that LANL, a remote research facility underlain by active earthquake faults, with an aging plutonium lab built on a narrow mesa, is a good place for a pit factory?

Then-Sens. Jeff Bingaman and Pete Domenici, then-Congressman Udall, and LANL itself until recently, thought LANL was “not the right fit” for this mission. Can Udall tune in to his inner congressman?

Does it matter to them that 19 government resolutions have passed in Northern New Mexico questioning LANL’s mission, environmental impact and/or pit production? Does that level of opposition really augur for success in a big new high-hazard nuclear operation — especially one with no defensible mission? Or does success even matter?

Does it matter to them that Los Alamos National Laboratory has failed again and again to safely manage its plutonium facility, or even to keep it running, or to manage big projects competently, or that LANL sent a radioactive “dirty” bomb down to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, shutting the whole place down and incurring what will be about $2 billion in extra costs nationwide? That the incumbent LANL contractor has not met, twice in the past 13 years, even the lax standards required by the Department of Energy to keep the LANL contract?

Nuclear weapons and the military are not paths to prosperity, here or anywhere. Can anyone help these gentlemen see the light?

Greg Mello is director of the Los Alamos Study Group, based in Albuquerque.