For immediate release March 15, 2018

Study Group files FOIA lawsuit to obtain plutonium warhead manufacturing study
Key background analysis advancing plans for new warhead factory available to many interested parties but not to citizens

Contact: Greg Mello, Los Alamos Study Group, 505-577-8563 cell (this week), 505-265-1200 office (usually)

Permanent link * Previous press releases

Albuquerque, NM – Yesterday the Los Alamos Study Group filed a lawsuit against the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). On December 1 of last year, the Study Group filed a FOIA request for a redacted version of NNSA's plutonium warhead core ("pit") production analysis of alternatives (AoA), which was completed in November and briefed to congressional committees at the end of that month.

No substantive reply has been received despite repeated followup attempts. Several other parties, including the Albuquerque Journal and the Santa Fe New Mexican, have also requested the document.

The Study Group is being represented in this matter by Jeremy Farris of the Freedman, Boyd, Hollander, Goldberg, Urias, and Ward firm in Albuquerque.

Plutonium pits are the fissile component in compact atomic bombs. They comprise the cores of the first explosive stage of all thermonuclear explosives ("H-bombs").

Pits are difficult and dangerous to manufacture. Until 1992, this was the mission of the former Rocky Flats Plant near Denver. At Rocky Flats, these activities resulted in extensive worker illnesses and widespread environmental contamination. Production ceased with a joint FBI-EPA raid on the plant in June, 1989.

Resuming continuous pit production, assuming it is possible, would require billions of dollars in new construction and in operating and waste management costs, many of which are not usually considered.

NNSA's fiscal year 2019 budget request shows pit production expenses (not including waste management and other supporting costs) ramping up from less than $200 million today to $1.2 billion per year by 2023.

Yesterday NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, who was confirmed in her position by the Senate last month, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that she would be recommending a new pit production strategy in May of this year.

NNSA's recommendation will be made in concert with Ellen Lord, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment and Undersecretary of Energy Dan Brouillete. Key members of Congress as well as interested NNSA contractors have been and no doubt will continue to be extensively involved.

NNSA has been continuously engaged in re-strategizing its pit production plans since early 2012, when its plan to build a new $6 billion industrial plutonium facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) collapsed after [pending] construction contracts were halted by Study Group litigation under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). 

For the past 29 years, all Department of Energy (DOE) and NNSA plans to acquire larger-scale pit production have failed, in part because no new pits are needed.

The US possesses roughly usable 12,000 pits, including those already in warheads and bombs as well as other pits which could be used to make more of today's nuclear weapons. Approximately 11,000 additional pits have been declared surplus and are being stored pending final disposition. Today's deployed and stockpiled pits were made no earlier than 1978. They will last until at least 2063 and possibly much longer, according to a joint report by DOE and the Department of Defense (DoD). (For more, see here, here, and extensively here.) 

The AoA selected and examined 41 options for industrial-scale pit production -- smaller than Rocky Flats but larger than the R&D facilities sporadically used for production at LANL can handle, in NNSA's judgment.

The AoA rejects 39 options and retains just two: a) re-purposing a large plutonium-handling building currently under construction at DOE's Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina (the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility or MFFF, still under construction for a mission that both the Obama and Trump administrations have attempted to end), and b) augmenting LANL's existing plutonium facilities with (so far undisclosed) new production facilities. These two options are being studied further.

Each option would cost billions of dollars and take a decade or more to bring into operation. The AoA, a summary of which has been leaked, says the LANL option costs more and takes significantly longer than the SRS option.

NNSA seeks a reliable, long-term production capacity that can average at least 80 pits per year, even though no warhead modernization program requires new pits (the one program, an "interoperable" warhead, that did so has been changed so that it no longer does). Existing pits will last for at least another 45 years. NNSA also has other options for maintaining pits, including (but not limited to) rebuilding the non-nuclear components of pits, a much simpler and cheaper option than building wholly new pits.

The 400-page document is not classified. It does reportedly contain "controlled" information (example: floor plans) which is usually (but not always) blacked out in public versions of documents.

With the exception of Los Alamos County, pit production has not been welcomed by local governments in New Mexico. In South Carolina, the situation is opposite. Previous senators and congresspersons from New Mexico have not been in favor of LANL as a site for industrial-scale pit production, though New Mexico's current representatives in Congress are very much so.

Study Group director Greg Mello: "In its failure to release this widely-sought document to the public, NNSA thwarts the intent of FOIA. You would think that after so many failures in this program, and with the agency's perennial position on the Government Accountability Office's "high risk list" for waste, fraud, and abuse," NNSA would want to put a few windows in its tightly-sealed echo chamber, where the contractors who absorb 95% of NNSA appropriations hold sway.

"The US, demonstrably and admittedly, does not need new pits. Given the lack of aging observed in pits and the tens of billions already spent to confirm this, this is nothing but a plan to produce pits for the 22nd century. We believe it is proceeding 'under cover of darkness' on purely ideological grounds,  and not on any defensible managerial basis. We believe it is a vast waste of resources, though lucrative for a few contractors. This is the Trump Administration committing the US to a path of 'assured mutual destruction,' essentially forever.

"As it happens we have filed this litigation during 'Sunshine Week.' There is very little 'sunshine' at NNSA, except for contractors and competing pork-barrel politicians who are able to make any number of wild and often self-serving claims without the affected and taxpaying citizens and governments being able to independently judge the veracity of these statements. What precisely is NNSA afraid of? Democracy, perhaps. As Thomas Jefferson famously said, informed citizens are 'the safest depository of the ultimate powers of government.'"

***ENDS***