Mason: LANL gearing up to produce nuclear triggers

• By Scott Wyland swyland@sfnewmexican.com
• December 2, 2021

(Comment by Greg Mello here.)

Los Alamos National Laboratory is making headway in its goal to produce 30 nuclear bomb cores by 2026 by hiring workers, modernizing the plutonium facility and looking at how to upgrade the area's transportation system, lab Director Thom Mason said in an online forum Thursday evening. 

In the past year, the lab hired 1,277 people — the largest annual addition in at least 30 years — with more than half for newly created jobs, Mason said. It's part of the push to ramp up production of nuclear warhead triggers — also known as pits — by the target date, he said. 

Mason said he expects to hire even more in the coming year, expanding well beyond the current 13,500 employees. 

The 43-year-old plutonium facility is being renovated, though much of the work would've been required to bring it up to modern safety and fire codes even if no pits were made there, Mason said. 

The facility upgrades and hiring boost will continue to prepare the lab for its mission to help modernize the nuclear stockpile, Mason said. The efforts are being funded by the $4 billion that Congress budgeted the lab this year, a hefty increase from the prior year's $3.2 billion, he said. 

Savannah River Site in South Carolina will produce an additional 50 plutonium pits in the 2030s, but for now the lab is the only site capable of making the pits needed to replace aging ones in the arsenal, he said, adding that the work should not be put off. 

"We've held off on making new pits pretty much as long as we can," Mason said. "If we delay further, the annual production rate required will go up, and we'll need an even larger capability. It's important to start now so we can now produce at that kind of right level and not have to overbuild." 

This year the lab fashioned six prototypical pits to help fine-tune the manufacturing, he said.

It's not making the actual war reserve pits that go into bombs, Mason said. For that to happen, the lab must work with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to develop criteria to formally qualify the pits, a process scheduled for 2023, he said. 

Thirty pits would be almost triple what the lab has ever produced in a year. The lab made 11 pits for Navy missiles more than a decade ago. 

Mason also discussed the impacts of COVID-19 on the lab. 

The faster-spreading delta variant escalating daily case counts in the region prompted to him require employees to be vaccinated by Oct. 15. Thirty-eight employees who refused to get the shots by the deadline were fired, and others quit, Mason said. 

Workers who claimed a religious exemption were put on indefinite unpaid leave, he said. 

About three dozen of the employees who were fired or put on unpaid leave sought to block the vaccine order, claiming it violated their constitutional rights. 

A state district judge denied their request for an injunction. 

Mason said he didn't like firing employees who refused vaccinations, but he had to think about the safety of the entire workforce amid a pandemic. 

"We never like to lose anyone," Mason said. "We lose their experience, we lose their contributions to the mission." 

The lab won't require workers to get boosters because at the moment the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn't said the third shot is necessary to be fully vaccinated, Mason said. 

Boosters will be made available on-site and workers will be encouraged to get them to stem the coronavirus' spread, he said. 

Mason noted that during last year's forum, he and the interviewer didn't have to wear masks because case numbers were declining after the vaccine rollouts. 

But the more infectious delta variant emerged during the summer, causing a surge that has yet to abate, he said.  

Some employees continue to telecommute, although it's a smaller number than before vaccines were available, Mason said. He added that those who quit are welcome to return as long as they get inoculated, and unvaccinated workers with religious exemptions will have to stay away.   

"We're looking to when it will be safe to have everyone back at work," he said. "I don't quite know when that will be."

Greg Mello comment:

Scott wrote another article yesterday as well, so this issue got short shrift. Mason's statement, "We've held off on making new pits pretty much as long as we can" isn't true. New pits are not needed in the 2020s for any stockpile warhead or weapon system. And it would not be necessary to build more than one production plant, if that plant were at the Savannah River Site, starting production circa 2034, with capacity as planned and budgeted already. LANL's production is "needed" only for the W87-1 warhead, which is not needed to arm ALL the proposed new ICBMs with one modern warhead (the W87-0) apiece. As if that were a good idea to begin with. On the other topic, "Mason said he didn't like firing employees who refused vaccinations, but he had to think about the safety of the entire workforce amid a pandemic." Letting those people go had nothing to do with safety or science. The vaccinated (like me) acquire covid (as I did) and transmit it (as I did, to my fully vaccinated wife) just as readily as do the unvaccinated, as numerous studies now show. The policy of firing those people arises from other, less savory reasons. "Indefinite unpaid leave" equals getting fired unless you change your religious convictions. That's a fascinating constitutional interpretation, but I guess that was never LANL's strong suite.