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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 257: Pentagon pit study: The Trump plutonium pit schedule is impossible. NNSA: 2 warheads are delayed, May 10, 2019

Bulletin 258: Administration announces plan to conduct environmental analysis of plutonium warhead core (“pit”) production in SC, no comparable commitment in NM

June 11, 2019

Dear friends and colleagues –

Yesterday’s press release (“Administration announces plan to conduct environmental analysis of plutonium warhead core (“pit”) production in SC, No comparable commitment in NM”) provides links to, and comments on, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA’s) announcement of its intent to conduct an environmental impact statement (EIS) process for pit production in South Carolina – but not (yet) in New Mexico.

We seek to upgrade NNSA’s intent, and we want your help to do so. See below.  

The Albuquerque Journal wrote a fine article on this – which is always hard to do on short notice.

Somebody commented to us that NNSA’s approach so far is “quarter-ass:” “a half-assed promise to do a half-assed job.”

Environmental analysis of NNSA’s pit alternatives is important and legally required, nationally as well as at both planned sites. The “hard look” required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is needed before leaping (as the proverb goes), not after.

For that to occur, NNSA’s pell-mell pace must be slowed, the opacity of its plans pierced, and the full extent of those plans revealed. Only in this way can Congress and even the executive branch become fully conscious of what they are proposing to do. Both branches of government generally understand policy as diktat. Realities on the ground –  including matters of real science and engineering – and in communities typically do not matter until they are made to matter.

This is not a boutique issue. Pit production lies in the center of a nexus of national folly that includes:

• a new warhead (the W87-1, the only real use for the new pits; see Bulletin 257 as well as The Great Transformation: Nuclear Weapons Policy Considerations for the 116th Congress);
• the bloated budget of the lab designing it (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, LLNL);
• the even more bloated budget of the Laurel-and-Hardy-esque lab that’s supposed to start pit production for the new warhead (Los Alamos National Laboratory, LANL);
• the proposed second and larger pit production site, necessary if pit production is to succeed or endure for any significant time (Savannah River Site, SRS);
• the brand-new, untested, reentry vehicle for the warhead (the Mark 21a RV);
• the proposed new land-based missiles to carry it (the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, GBSD);
• the continuing policy of being able to double the warheads loading on US land-based missiles on short notice, using multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs) on half the force; the Air Force already has enough newer (W87) warheads with the supposedly-safer insensitive high explosive to populate all the current and proposed missiles; and
• the bloated DoD and NNSA budgets supporting a belligerent US military posture in the world, and an aggressive nuclear posture.

The Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) recently said, rightly:

A key milestone will be achieving the PSP [Plutonium Sustainment Program] goal of 30 ppy [pits per year] at LANL. Successfully demonstrating a pit production capability at this scale would greatly increase confidence in the eventual ability to produce 80 ppy. Careful and skilled management and consistent, focused leadership will be required for this effort to reconstitute plutonium pit production capabilities to succeed where many previous efforts have failed.

But why should citizens, or anyone, consider success in setting up industrial pit production to lie in the national interest? We argue that pit production is exactly opposite US national security interests.

Even within the current national security paradigm – itself an existential problem for the world, rather than an acceptable context – pit production in not necessary for decades.

Were it necessary, an ephemeral 30 ppy in LANL’s old, cramped facility would provide too few pits to matter.

NNSA, under Trump, is very much hurtling along without the “careful…leadership” described by IDA. Unreasonable authority is being granted by many people to largely well-intentioned, but also largely ignorant, people. The Trump Administration is no more enlightened on the topic of national security than you and I are. They need to slow down. We need to slow them down, if we can.  

If you live in New Mexico, we want you to help us convince New Mexico political and civic leaders to ask for a full EIS for pit production alternatives at LANL, a “Site-Wide EIS.”

Here is the contact information for the New Mexico delegation. For starters, we suggest you write open letters to them, in newspapers – not private letters that can be privately ignored. You might check out this helpful advice and this useful article. Well-organized friends writing letters to editors is a much-neglected vehicle for education and outreach.  

At present, as NNSA now concedes, pit production at LANL is limited to a maximum of 20 ppy (see DOE’s Records of Decision of Sept. 20, 1999, Sept. 26, 2008, Dec. 19, 2008, and July 10, 2009).

That’s a two-decade commitment to New Mexico and its communities and tribes. The enormous, repeated upwelling of opposition to pit production in New Mexico (see for example here, here, here, here, here, and here – by no means an exhaustive list) was placated each time by a formal legal promise, now two decades old, to not conduct pit production above a nominal 20 ppy level.

NNSA’s announcement yesterday characterizes its proposed pit production rate at LANL as “a minimum of 30 pits per year.” That has a precise meaning in NNSA’s Program Requirements Document for pit production, as explained in its 2017 Pit Production Analysis of Alternatives (p. 13). In short, a minimum of 30 ppy means an average of about 41 ppy, of sufficient quality to deploy or place in the reserve stockpile.

LANL got the pit production mission in 1996, 23 years ago. It has produced a total of 30 pits over those years, i.e. about 1 pit per year. The most LANL produced in any one year was 11 pits, in 2007. Thus NNSA proposes to roughly quadruple LANL’s best output to date, and to double the present legal production limit at LANL, which up to now has provided plenty of headroom for R&D and pilot production.

We could tell you more about the more than 20,000 55-gallon drum-equivalents of transuranic waste still in storage at LANL with nowhere to go any time soon. Or about how more than 1,000 of these are squirreled away in the basement of building PF-4, where pit production is supposed to occur. Or about the unfinished transuranic liquid waste facility. Or about NNSA’s struggles to administratively change a light radiological laboratory that was not built to nuclear safety standards into – presto! – a nuclear facility for plutonium.  

All these things and more will need to be discussed in an EIS that deals with real things, not wishful thinking. But that would be getting ahead of ourselves for today.

Thank you for your attention.

Greg Mello, for the Study Group