Nuclear disarmament group criticizes proposal to produce more plutonium ‘pits’

By Steve Terrell | sterrell@sfnewmexican.com
Sep 17, 2019

Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group, speaks at a town hall Tuesday at the State Capitol. Mello opposes Los Alamos National Laboratory’s effort to increase production of plutonium ‘pits.’ Luis Sánchez Saturno/The New Mexican

The head of an Albuquerque-based group that advocates for nuclear disarmament on Tuesday attacked a multi-billion dollar construction proposal for Los Alamos National Laboratory related to the lab’s new mission to ramp up production of plutonium “pits,” the grapefruit-size triggers for nuclear warheads.

Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group, said the project would benefit few people in New Mexico, lead to more plutonium being transported on state highways and could help turn New Mexico into a “plutonium colony.”

Mello made the remarks during a town hall gathering in the state Capitol rotunda attended by dozens of people.

“Los Alamos National Laboratory is an engine of inequality for New Mexico,” Mello said. “It’s an opportunity for the few, not a place of opportunity if you don’t have the right credentials. This is not how you lift New Mexico. … People have this colonial mindset. This would be only for the benefit of LANL, the Pentagon and the Trump administration.”

In early August, lab officials held a conference at the Buffalo Thunder resort in Pojoaque for hundreds of representatives of construction companies from around the U.S. to talk about its expansion plan, much of which would help facilitate the increased production of plutonium pits. LANL Director Thom Mason said last week the work would cost $5 billion over the next five years and more than $10 billion over the next decade.

In addition to new and renovated buildings called for in the plan, LANL officials say there is a need for new infrastructure in the community, such as housing projects and a new highway more directly linking Los Alamos and Santa Fe.

“We believe a new route off the mesa heading south would facilitate much needed economic development and new housing throughout the region and provide New Mexicans with better access to good-paying lab jobs,” a LANL spokesman said Tuesday.

LANL has been on a hiring spree in recent years and expects to hire hundreds more employees. By the end of 2020, the lab will have added at least 1,500 new positions to its workforce — and possibly 2,000 — in a three-year period. According to its website, LANL now has 12,752 workers.

Mello said the Study Group’s “paramount request” is for LANL officials to have more transparency. “We’d like to know what are the numbers,” he said. “We’d like for [LANL] to show us their plan and have it be in writing.”

He noted that neither state government officials, Los Alamos local government nor the state’s Congressional delegation have been briefed by lab officials on the construction plan. Mason said last week that LANL expects to address the Los Alamos County Council sometime in the near future.

Mello said his group also would like for LANL to go through an environmental impact process for its building projects, which he believes is required by law.

“These are just policy-neutral, good-government requests,” he said.

Lab spokesman Matt Nerzig said Tuesday that the proposed $10 billion [sic - LANL told contractors on August 8, 2019 the figure was $13 billion] projects “are urgently needed to modernize or replace the hundreds of old, and often failing office buildings and laboratory facilities dating back to the 1970s where most of the lab’s employees are still expected to work.”

Nearly half of the 740 buildings on the LANL site were built before 1970 and 474 were built before 1990.

Mello said when U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, a Democrat, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2003, he had opposed the manufacture of plutonium pits in Los Alamos, but Udall told him last week that he now supports the idea.

Udall has made no secret of his support for the mission. At a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing in April, Udall urged Energy Secretary Rick Perry to rethink a plan calling for producing 50 pits a year at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and 30 at LANL. Udall, citing a National Nuclear Security Administration engineering report, said that plan would cost twice as much as keeping all the pit production work in Los Alamos.

Mello said producing 30 plutonium pits a year at LANL would mean much of the waste would never leave the Hill.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad was designed for low-level nuclear waste. There is no permanent repository for high-level nuclear waste in the U.S.

A spokeswoman for New Mexico’s other U.S. senator, Democrat Martin Heinrich, said he supports “full funding to secure LANL’s role as the nation’s center of excellence for plutonium research.”

Both Udall and Heinrich support an independent review of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s facilities in New Mexico.