Proposed budget would almost triple plutonium spending

By Scott Wyland swyland@sfnewmexican

Feb 24, 2020

Funding to upgrade Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium operations would almost triple to $845 million next year under the U.S. Department of Energy’s preliminary budget request, which reveals the growing costs of producing nuclear cores for new warheads.

The Energy Department released a budget outline over the weekend that shows how President Donald Trump’s proposed 25 percent increase in nuclear weapons spending would trickle down to the Los Alamos lab and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina — the two sites slated to make a combined 80 plutonium pits a year by 2030.

LANL’s budget would jump to $3.4 billion from this year’s $2.6 billion. More than half the additional money would be used to increase spending on “plutonium modernization,” raising the amount to $845 million from this year’s $309 million.

The preliminary budget offered no explanation of how the money would be spent, although past plans have indicated pit production will require renovation, new construction, hiring and training of personnel, and infrastructure improvements.

Officials at the National Nuclear Security Administration, an Energy Department branch, did not respond to questions about the budget Monday.

Anti-nuclear watchdog groups decried what they called out-of-control spending on weapons production.

“The decisions in Washington can seem very remote and unreal, but this brings Trump’s proposed nuclear weapons spending surge home in a very aggressive and alarming way,” said Greg Mello, executive director of the nonprofit Los Alamos Study Group.

Mello and other activists have questioned the necessity of making new pits — the explosive cores that detonate warheads — when thousands of usable pits are left over from the Cold War.

Defense officials have said a different type of pit is required to arm two new warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles. One would be land-based, while the other would be housed in submarines.

One critic called the military’s “re-nuclearization” disturbing.

“The notion that we need a huge nuclear arsenal is a Cold War relic,” said Mark Thompson, national defense analyst with the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog. “There is only one real truth when it comes to nuclear weapons: The more there are, the more likely they are to be used — deliberately, accidentally or by bad guys who have stolen them.”

The U.S. could defend itself easily with submarines and bombers, and eliminate the third leg of the nuclear triad — land-based missiles — with no harm to national security, Thompson said.

Meanwhile, as the Energy Department seeks to spend more on pit production, it has proposed a $100 million cut in the program to clean up legacy waste generated before 1999, including during the Manhattan Project and Cold War. Almost half of the cleanup program’s current funding would be slashed.

Activists say it’s irresponsible of federal agencies to produce more pits while reducing cleanup of the vast radioactive waste the lab created and disposed of poorly in past decades.

U.S. Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich, New Mexico Democrats, have denounced the proposed cut in the lab’s environmental cleanup but have given guarded support of beefed-up nuclear weapons spending that puts money in the lab’s coffers.

“Funding for Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories is critical as their employees play an essential role in America’s national security ... as well as in the community, and in New Mexico’s economy,” the senators said in a joint statement when Trump released his proposed budget earlier this month. “We will carefully review the White House’s budget request as details become available.”

The preliminary budget also calls for increasing Savannah River Site’s budget by $200 million. It’s unclear how much money would go toward turning the facility into a pit factory.

Los Alamos lab’s budget includes $618 million to help modernize Savannah River Site for pit production. Mello said some of the contracting was likely assigned to the lab because it has experience with pit production.

Tom Clements, executive director of the nonprofit Savannah River Site Watch, said the Energy Department is preparing to throw a huge sum toward pit production at the South Carolina facility, even though it may be incapable of production.

Some congressional leaders are likely to challenge the proposed spending, Clements said, calling the budget outline murky and confusing.

Both Clements and Mello have said the Energy Department has requested money without showing any tangible plan for producing pits.

“There’s no clear path forward on how they’re going to pull off expanded pit production,” Clements said. “It doesn’t exist.”