Permalink for this bulletin. Please forward to your lists!
Subscribe or unsubscribe to these bulletins.
Contribute!  Contact us.  Volunteer!
Facebook: Los Alamos Study Group; Twitter: @TrishABQ; Blog: Forget the Rest
Local letters to members (ask if you want to receive these); bulletins; home page
Key resources: nuclear weapons ban, plutonium pit production

April 16, 2018

Bulletin 247: Update on US nuclear weapons; pit memorandum to NNSA

Dear friends and colleagues –

Despite the burning questions of war and peace raised by our country’s illegal bombardment of Syria, we need to provide an update on NNSA’s “top priority” quest to build a new factory to produce nuclear weapon cores (“pits”). We do that here.

The next Bulletin will be about propaganda, and will provide a short list of alternative news and analysis on a few topics (Syria especially) you may find useful given the stew of propaganda in which we find ourselves. We have had multiple requests for such a list.

1. Update on US nuclear weapons and modernization for the international disarmament community

You may find this resource useful for high school and college classes, or community study groups. A slightly shorter version is being published this week in Geneva by the Reaching Critical Will campaign of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, for distribution at next week’s Preparatory Committee meeting of states parties to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).

2. “Rocky Flats South” – or wherever: memo to NNSA

In an April 11 letter to local members, we noted how consistently the Department of Energy (DOE), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and the New Mexico congressional delegation have been telling New Mexico communities and tribes for almost 30 years now that LANL would never have, and should not be, an industrial pit facility. For their part, cities and counties (with the exception of Los Alamos) have expressed great reservations about hosting anything like such a facility.

Small, "interim," only the capacity inherent in any capability at all – that’s what we heard all those years. Along the way, legal commitments were made – twice, over a decade and more – to not exceed 20 pits per year. From 1999 to 2014 the proposed new “scaled down” “not a Taj Mahal” (see p. 42 here) (but eventually $6+ billion) plutonium facility was “just an analytical lab.” From 2003 on it wasn’t true but that was the line, from LANL, NNSA, and our congressional delegation.

Now LANL and the New Mexico congressional delegation want a sort of "Rocky Flats South." (Rep. Lujan Grisham’s strategic silence on this matter is another form of assent.)

What a difference a decade has made. Now the LANL corporate profiteers and our Democrats want to break that 29-year promise.

This point and others can be found in a recent New Mexican op-ed (“Lawmakers, seek help for plutonium addiction”) from this desk.

On April 6th we sent a short pit production memo to NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty and others (“Pit production recommendations & considerations”). It wasn’t (and isn’t) finished but we had to send it as-is given the early deadline (May 11) for the decision to be made by her, DOE, and the Nuclear Weapons Council as to where to site the bigger factory the law now conveniently requires.

We will be filling in some of the holes in that memo over the course of this week and next, and discussing its contents with individuals in government. In May Trish and I will travel to South Carolina to meet with officials and activists, and then to DC to convene a workshop where the issues can be discussed in more detail.

As you will see in that memo we do not think any further investment in pit production capacity at LANL is prudent. We do not think it will result in any higher capacity, if that’s the goal (for NNSA, it is). LANL currently has zero pit production capacity and when PF-4 “ages out,” that’s what it will have again. Zero. The currently-programmed $2 billion in capital investment is just a down payment on what would turn out to be something like a $20 billion investment over two decades – if a feasible building site could be found on the narrow, friable mesa where the supporting facilities are. Good luck with that.

Then, as you will see in that memo, we believe the expansion of plutonium handling in what was formally and informally described (for a decade!) as a mere radiological laboratory – something like a hospital laboratory in terms of radiological hazards – by a factor of between 100 and 1,000 is illegal without an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).

We will more formally, and in more detail, say as much to NNSA next week, in the context of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), namely EA-2052: Proposed Changes for Analytical Chemistry and Materials Characterization at the Radiological Laboratory/Utility/Office Building, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico.

3. What to do? Start with LTEs

Regarding the above NEPA process, it is unwise to imagine that such a process can be an effective vehicle for popular opinion or opposition, unless that opposition takes physical (bodily) form in a way that disrupts business as usual. NEPA failures can however be effective legal causes of action, as they were for us in 2010-2014 vis-vis the most recent pit plan, now in history’s round file.

Letters to editors (LTEs) are very valuable and important. Here are some resources and links. An outstanding new article on LTEs ("Thousands of Hearts and Minds") by Ed Kinane of Voices for Creative Nonviolence is highly recommended.

If you live in New Mexico, or if your representatives or senators serve on the appropriations committees or arms services committees, LTEs are especially important.

For more background, see this recent op-ed, read the memo to NNSA, follow the links in our April 11 letter, read this blog post and short background paper, or look over past Bulletins. Check out the short summary of NNSA’s recent analysis of alternatives, or this fact sheet.

There are many other avenues for effective action besides LTEs, some of which may have already occurred to you. Organizational actions can be stronger than individual actions.

If you live in New Mexico and want to be more involved, please call us at 505-265-1200.

Does Congress understand that, according to DOE and DoD, no new pits are needed until at least 85 years after manufacture – i.e. until the 2060s – and that therefore the purpose of the huge investment planned is to retain a large arsenal until (and beyond) the end of this century. I wonder how the world will reconcile that with the promises made by the US and the other 190 signatories of the NPT in 1970:

Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament…”

This is all we have time for today. Thank you for your attention.

Greg Mello, for the Study Group