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1 Jan 2019

Bulletin 252: Fundraising reminder; why LANL cannot be any kind of plutonium factory, in a nutshell

Dear friends and colleagues –

To all who have so generously contributed to making our work in the coming year possible – thank you.

Please note the corrected PayPal Giving Fund link above! They charge no fee.

As the new year begins, I would like to reiterate that we very much welcome your support, and that of your friends as well. To succeed, we will need that help and solidarity more than ever. As you know there are many ways to support our work financially.

We sent a brief outline of our 2019 programs in Bulletin 250 (7 Dec); for a few more details see also the 4 Dec letter (its other topic: greenwashing in New Mexico) and 25 Dec letter (its other topic: Would a “Green New Deal” be green, or any kind of new deal?) to our “short list” of more active New Mexico members. (If you want to be on that list please ask.)

We are looking for dedicated new staff and the means to support them, which will be very challenging fiscally.

Thank you.

I have promised to send more frequent, shorter bulletins. With so much happening, and so much of it so tightly interwoven, separating the dots (instead of connecting them) does some violence to the issues, but it is necessary.

Here then is one “dot.”

Why LANL cannot be any kind of plutonium factory

In November we summarized the current state of play in plutonium warhead core (“pit”) production for the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM) blog (“US plutonium pit production plans fail to satisfy Congress; further studies underway,” 30 Nov 2018). The main bottom line of that post is that multiple studies are now underway which closely bear on the pit production mission, including not just its location(s) but also its schedule, and scale.

Regarding the role of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in this mission, we noted in part:

[I]n June 2017…the NNSA [National Nuclear Security Administration] Program Secretarial Officer - in this case, the Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs - formally determined (p. 76) that continuing to rely on PF-4 [LANL’s main plutonium building] for enduring pit production capability presented "unacceptably high mission risk" for two reasons: a) efforts to install equipment in PF-4 beyond what is already planned under the Plutonium Sustainment program present unacceptably high risks to achieving 30 ppy production by 2026; and b) PF-4 is much smaller than is required for stockpile pit production, even if missions such as plutonium dioxide production and plutonium-238 manufacturing were somehow relocated. Both the AoA [Pit Production Analysis of Alternatives, NNSA, 2017] (p. 36, footnote 13; pp. 47-48) and EA [Pit Production Engineering Assessment, Parsons Engineering for NNSA, 2018] (p. 2-54) emphasize the age and operational fragility of PF-4….

In line with the results of the AoA and EA analyses, NNSA's May 10 recommendation was that the bulk of post-2029 pit production should occur at a repurposed MFFF [the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in SC]…

For all their differences, both the AoA (p. 9) and the EA (p. 8) found that refurbishing MFFF was NNSA's least capital-cost, fastest, and in the EA, least-risk option for stockpile pit production by 2030 and thereafter. Neither recommended building underground production "modules" at LANL, the strategy endorsed by the NWC [Nuclear Weapons Council] 2014 and retained for special study in the new NDAA despite these two analyses, as noted above. Neither study recommended building any new facilities at LANL that would be dependent on PF-4. Both acknowledged in different ways that PF-4 was fragile, with a limited life. The EA recommendation did not include any LANL construction (p. 12)….

In the AoA, attempts to achieve multi-shift production at LANL were deemed too risky to retain for further analysis (text above; p. 76). The EA (p. 8, summary; pp. 4-22, 23, details) gave the alternative requiring multi-shift operations in PF-4 the highest risk, in part for that reason [the fragility of existing programs and facilities].

Taking these results [and others omitted here] on board, it seems NNSA has no viable options for significant stockpile pit production in the 2020s, and almost certainly cannot meet its 2030 deadline for an operational 80 ppy capability.

The above concerns about LANL as a pit factory only scratch the surface of what NNSA and its contractors wrote in the AoA and EA – and what the situation actually is.

In objective terms, NNSA’s only decent option for a reliable pit factory for the coming decades lies with the brand-new, largely-built, unused, uncontaminated and therefore easily reconfigured, heavily-constructed, “plus-sized” Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina, built to process tens of tons of plutonium for another (now defunct) program.

Nothing at LANL or at any other NNSA or DOE site comes close to MFFF’s relatively high feasibility, low cost and risk, and relatively “rapid” schedule for starting up pit production.

That said, nothing about making a pit factory is easy, cheap, low-risk, or quick – or necessary any time soon to maintain any US nuclear weapon system for decades to come. As we endlessly repeat, the US has more than 10,000 long-lived pits usable in the stockpile.

We also do not believe a pit factory – now, later, or ever – is desirable from a national security perspective. In the long run, after 2070 or so, having no new pits means having no nuclear weapons. Good.

At the end of the Cold War, it made internal sense for the Department of Energy (DOE) to consolidate and temporarily preserve pit production technology at LANL. Given NNSA’s mandate, it still does.

However, hopes for a reliable, small, pit production capacity at LANL – let alone an enduring one that could substantially contribute to maintaining the nuclear stockpile over time – didn’t pan out.  

In 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and the Rocky Flats Plant made its last pit, PF-4 was only 11 years old. The extent of LANL’s seismic hazard was then unknown, officially at least.

The poor geotechnical properties of the unconsolidated volcanic sediments at LANL’s TA-55 were also unknown then. They were certainly plain to see in the surrounding terrain and in records of TA-55 borings in LANL files. When LANL was chosen for the pilot pit production mission in late 1997, no further construction at TA-55 or elsewhere at LANL was thought necessary. (Or at least that was the story.) So the presence of an 80 or so foot thick layer of what is essentially dust – poorly consolidated or unconsolidated volcanic ash – beneath the site seemed of no particular relevance. So it was forgotten – out of sight, out of mind – until 2010 when engineers discovered that this problematic stratum would have to be entirely removed to build a (and by implication any) large facility with a basement on the south side of the mesa at TA-55.

Likewise and related, the implications of LANL's dissected, steep topography, which dramatically increases costs and places firm limits on construction at TA-55 and elsewhere at LANL, was not a factor in 1997, when PF-4 was in mid-life and no new construction was envisioned.

The situation is much different now, 20 years later. Originally designed for a 50-year operational life, PF-4 is now 40 years old. By the time pit production is supposed to start in earnest in the late 2020s it will be 50. Unlike MFFF, PF-4 was not built to modern nuclear facility standards. It was and is a research and development facility, not a factory. Its structural strength and the adequacy of its safety systems, in routine operation and more so in a design basis accident, have been under constant review, critique, negotiation, upgrade, and repair for the past decade and more. The safety of PF-4 is a perennial “work in progress.”

In addition to its questionable structural integrity in the event of a design basis earthquake, PF-4 does not have a safety-class ventilation system or a safety-class fire suppression system. PF-4’s aging safety systems have been “grandfathered in.”

NNSA has said it expects PF-4 to last until 2039 (p. WA-211; see also p. 3 in this LASG memo to NNSA), but with what confidence or operational reliability? With what safety risks? At present, no one really knows.

Other legacy facilities slated for roles in LANL pit production include the Main Shops and the Sigma complex. Tearing down and replacing these TA-3 facilities in whole or in part will also be disruptive to a greater or lesser extent, as will demolition of the adjacent Chemistry and Metallurgy Research building.

There may yet be problems in the conversion of the Radiological Laboratory, Utility, and Office Building (RLUOB) into a Hazard Category III Nuclear Facility (“NLUOB”), a mission for which the building was not originally designed.

LANL as an industrial plutonium site has other problems as well, problems which are not in the realm of hard science but serious nonetheless. These include:

• The site’s industrial, cultural, and educational isolation, which increases costs and creates program risks in multiple ways;
• LANL's R&D culture and identity, necessary to protect (and project) in order to attract young scientists and engineers to the “weapons of mass destruction business,” especially given LANL's isolated location; LANL’s basic identity is not and cannot be one of a safe, high-hazard, high-reliability industrial facility;
• LANL's culture is grandiose; its leaders typically arrogant; its scientific staff typically exhibit a sense of entitlement; these are products of: LANL’s nuclear weapons mission and its lack of accountability; its secrecy; its isolation; its relatively high formal educational attainment in comparison to the surrounding counties; its large salaries and generous benefits; its relatively low taxes, splendid local government finances and excellent schools, and much else of genuine community accomplishment and value relative to its New Mexico surround; in short LANL is a very big dog in a very small park; the point being that LANL’s culture is one where “delusional optimism” (Flyvbjerg) and “normal accidents” (Perrow) have thrived, again for fundamental reasons;
• A political environment conducive to corruption (see here and here, to pick examples from the press almost at random) partly of LANL’s own making as we see in the case of the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities (RCLC), again contributing to a lack of accountability; 
• A very high incidence of drug use and associated crime linked to systemic poverty and inequality (“the aura of apartheid”) in the region: Rio Arriba County, 89.9 deaths per 100,000 per year (age-adjusted, 2012-2016), 5.5x the US average of 16.4; Santa Fe County, 32.3 per 100,000 per year, double the national average; Los Alamos County, 16 per 100,000 per year, the national average; Taos County, 32.1 per 100,000 per year; New Mexico overall, 24.6 deaths per 100,000 per year.
• The relative lack of a qualified regional workforce and relative lack of post-secondary educational and vocational institutions in the region;
• The reality of prior and current living Pueblo traditions and religious claims to so-called “LANL” lands and waters; and
• The incompatibility of industrial plutonium operations with powerful local cultural aspirations and values.

See also this congressional letter of 11 months ago.

Notice that these problems are largely independent of management decisions, legislation, and funding.  They are negatively synergistic in ways that have proven difficult to predict or prevent (exhibit A: the $2 billion WIPP deflagration on Valentine’s Day 2014).

The upshot of all this (and more, to keep this brief) is that it will be more than just “very difficult,” or “risky,” for LANL to establish reliable, enduring industrial plutonium missions, including industrial pit production at any scale. It will be impossible.

Meanwhile, many people are taking the NNSA/DoD May 10, 2018 pit production recommendation at face value, namely: produce 30+ pits per year at LANL starting in 2026 or so, and 50+ ppy per year at MFFF, starting in 2030. It is after all a law (for what that’s worth given that none of the most relevant and constraining facts can be changed by legislation, as noted).

Instead, given that –  

1. Most or all of the active people with hands-on experience making pits are at LANL, and LANL has the only pit production equipment and capability in the US, a situation that will last for another decade at least during which time these individuals will continue to age;
2. PF-4 is a fragile and ephemeral resource essential to maintaining a nuclear deterrent, as NNSA and DoD both well know;
3. Construction of another plutonium facility is very time-consuming, risky, and expensive anywhere; at TA-55 it may not even be possible;
4. The pit production mission has large economies of scale if the facilities involved have adequate space;
5. MFFF, which is already built, has more than enough space; PF-4 does not, and cannot be reconfigured so that it does;

as well as the other realities listed above, NNSA and DoD have little choice but to use LANL for “technology transfer” of the pit production mission to the Savannah River Site as fast as possible.

What NNSA’s AoA and EA, and the facts on the ground, have made clear is that there is no real decision to make. For industrial pit production LANL can only be, at best, a training site.

Even this role will be fraught with problems.

A lot of people haven’t figured this out yet. When I was in Washington in November, I heard that one liberal NGO was making the rounds on Capitol Hill saying that LANL could and should be a 30 pit-per-year factory. It is a constant refrain that we have heard off and on for the past 15 years.

From the NGO perspective, the driving idea behind this proposed policy is a political one, which is to avoid investing in a pit factory in South Carolina. Of course, this policy conveniently caters to New Mexico Democrats and to LANL, a posture favored by many large funders. If only it made even rudimentary engineering, cultural, or scientific sense. If only it did not ignore so many intractable facts. But it does ignore them.

Even if one invested several billion dollars in construction at LANL, no reliable or enduring pit production capability would emerge. That is the objective reality of the situation – and that is just, in his exact words, how one thoughtful senior government official summed up the central message of NNSA’s AoA.

By the end of 2019, hopefully all parties can finally accept that reality.

The way to prevent a new pit factory in South Carolina is to make sure there is no demand for pits. The long period in which LANL could be the “arms control choice” is over.

For the Study Group,

Greg Mello