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Los Alamos' plutonium facility safety systems need improvement, oversight board says November 7, 2025 An independent oversight agency wants to see improved safety systems at the facility at the heart of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium pit mission: PF-4. The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board reported what it believes to be gaps in a safety analysis drafted for PF-4 and delays in upgrades to safety systems in a letter last month to Energy Secretary Chris Wright. “Maintaining momentum for these safety infrastructure projects is more important in light of the issues with the safety analysis,” the board wrote in the letter dated Oct. 10. It was signed by former acting chairman Thomas Summers. Greg Mello published comments:
Meanwhile, we await the serious reporting on these issues that we know the New Mexican is capable of. Pit production involves more than a little problem with safety. This is the largest capital project in the history of New Mexico by far. If allowed to proceed to completion and then continue from there, two things will happen: it will reduce the non-nuclear, non-welfare-oriented aspects of the state's identity to impotent gestures, and then the mission itself will be taken away as soon as the brand-new, better facility in South Carolina begins operation, or Los Alamos encounters too many obstacles to continue, whichever comes first. NNSA and DoD "need" LANL pit production only temporarily, and that's the best PF-4 can manage even in the "best" case. Already, LANL has succeeded in exporting much of its disproportionate housing demand and traffic congestion to Santa Fe and the regional transportation network. Affordable housing in Santa Fe is being pushed farther out of reach for many, and the cityscape is being transformed into something "different" than what it was, and not in a good way. A transient population of new LANL workers comes and goes every year -- 800-900 of them leaving each year, NNSA says. The State, and our delegation, support this because they don't really believe in New Mexico. They believe in federal welfare first and foremost, and the largest form of this welfare involves designing and building nuclear weapons. This has badly damaged our social character. The dangers of embracing world-ending threats as a way of life ought to be clear. The dots are not that hard to connect. The state is at the very bottom of every social metric that matters. To quote George Kennan, the author of the famous "X telegram" promoting containment of the Soviets at the end of World War II, our approach to these genocidal weapons should be to "thrust them from us." |
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