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Plutonium pit production, plutonium disposition, safety oversight crisis, nuclear weapons ban, local lab-caused corruption (this page concerns just RCLC, for now)

Previously: Bulletin 254 (“Preview of problems to come with Los Alamos pit production”) 28 Jan 2019

Bulletin 255: Special Report: "Draining the Nuclear Swamp"

May 7, 2019

Dear friends and colleagues –

Although you have gotten the occasional press release from us, and some of you are on our New Mexico list serve which we use more, it has been more than 3 months since we have sent a Bulletin to those of you who are on our regular mailing list.

Please accept my apologies. We have been working steadily, in New Mexico and in Washington, DC to stop what amounts to a new nuclear arms race. I am writing from Washington now.

We have often said there is a scandal or fiasco associated with practically every major project we have seen at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). LANL has remained “special” that way, under every lab director and under two management contractors. For the third LANL contractor – Triad National Security, LLC, the current one – those initial “honeymoon” months, when long-standing problems could rightly be laid at the feet of previous management, are coming to an end, as a recent Department of Energy (DOE) audit of unresolved safety problems made very clear (see: “Report: LANL nuclear safety falls short, Albuquerque Journal, Apr 29, 2019).

We are therefore pleased to present a special report, “Draining the Nuclear Swamp,” written for us by Roger Snodgrass, distinguished former editor of the Los Alamos Monitor newspaper, on just one of those fiascos: the saga of LANL’s efforts to replace its liquid radioactive waste treatment plant over the past 15 or so years.

We hope you enjoy it.

This saga actually went back a decade further in less-well-documented form, but fifteen years seemed enough to make the point: LANL conceived (and re-conceived, twice), and managed, this particular bit of line-item construction very poorly.

Most LANL projects are like this – bad planning and/or poor execution, years late in delivery if ever, with vast cost overruns.

To a lesser extent some of the same generalizations apply to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) as a whole, which is why NNSA’s administration of major projects has remained on the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO’s) “High Risk List” for waste, fraud, and abuse for as long as NNSA has existed.

Speaking of waste, we are delighted to tell you in advance of the news, that:

• There is further documentation (but we don’t have it, yet) that the planned achievement of plutonium warhead (“pit”) production at a rate of 80 pits per year by 2030 is almost certainly not going to happen. Making this production happen has been repeatedly described by NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty as NNSA’s most important objective – a misplaced priority, in our view. NNSA’s inability to reach this goal will have cascading effects on the Trump Administration’s warhead plans, especially on the ill-advised W87-1 warhead for ground-launched missiles, which requires new pits. At the same time, official Washington is slowly beginning to realize it will be very difficult to make any significant number of pits at LANL any time soon. You will hear more on all this from us soon.

• Speaking of delays, essentially all the planned production of nuclear warheads and bombs across the 2020s is going to be delayed, as you may hear this week if you are following these matters closely. Production of the B61-12 gravity bomb is going to be significantly delayed, perhaps by two years. The planned alteration of the W88 high-yield Trident missile warhead for submarines, which replaces the high explosives and adds a “smarter” detonation system that greatly increases the accuracy of burst, is also being delayed. We are also hearing that the W80-4 warhead for the Long Range Stand Off (LRSO) cruise missile will be delayed – but so will the missile, by perhaps two years.

• All this means that the update we provided for diplomats at the recently-concluded Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Preparatory Conference (PrepCon) was premature by just a few weeks! U.S. nuclear modernization programs are not going as smoothly as they were being portrayed very recently.

So rejoice! Think about why this is, and what it means, and stay tuned.

The budget crises many have predicted are now, we believe, breaking upon us. We are going to have to fight for humane and ecological priorities.

We will provide more background on these matters later this week and after, in installments.

In the meantime we offer “Draining the Nuclear Swamp” as an illustration and microcosm of all this.

Best wishes,

Greg Mello, for the Study Group