Bulletin 263: Unfolding fiasco: Los Alamos doubles down on plutonium and growth overall, 27 Sep 2019
LASG header
Follow TrishABQ on Twitter Follow us
 
"Remember Your Humanity" blog

 

Bulletin 263: Unfolding fiasco: Los Alamos doubles down on plutonium and growth overall

In Memory of John Otter

We were very sad to learn to that our friend John Otter passed away on Sunday, September 15. John was a mighty force for good in many channels in Santa Fe -- always there at meetings, always contributing good ideas and actions, not just for the Study Group but for many organizations, over several decades. John was a wonderful example of selfless service for all who knew him, right up to the end. His passing leaves a gigantic void where personal virtue and magnanimous action had been. Paul and Roxanne at Retake Our Democracy have posted a lovely tribute to John. John is survived by his wife Suzi.

There will be a memorial for John at The Commons (2300 West Alameda, map) on Sunday, September 29, from 2-4 pm.

September 27, 2019

This Bulletin:

  1. Unfolding fiasco: Los Alamos doubles down on plutonium and growth overall
  2. Fall fundraising campaign begins with matching grant

Next time:

  1. Two pit factories, one pit factory, or zero pit factories?
  2. "How dare you!" Can citizens seize the initiative?

Dear friends and colleagues –

1. Los Alamos doubles down on plutonium and growth overall

Two months ago we sent you an localized update on the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA's) recrudescent plutonium warhead core ("pit") production program ("New Mexico Democrats push Trump nuclear weapons agenda regardless of environmental costs").

Much has happened since then. As of this writing negotiators in the House and Senate armed services committees have not (publicly) resolved their dispute over the direction of and funding for pit production in the coming fiscal year.

Overall, the situation is complex and developing rapidly. This Bulletin will only touch upon a few highlights. We will take up more aspects in the next one.

By way of review, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) unveiled the magnitude, but few details, of its $13 billion (B) construction plan on Aug. 8. A month later we scheduled a town hall to discuss what we had by then learned ("Los Alamos Study Group to host town hall meeting on Los Alamos lab expansion, reinvestment...").

Quite rightly, there was a stir in the local press:

On August 23 (slides) and again on September 17 at the Capitol (slides with brief notes, photos) we had public discussions about these developments. At the Capitol we invited state and local officials. None came. Citizens and the press did come, because the plans LANL partially unveiled are far and away the most expensive construction plans New Mexico has ever seen (slide 27). They will have tremendous acute and long-term environmental impacts, as the public is beginning to learn.

But what, precisely, are the plans at LANL?

  • The plan for making plutonium pits,
  • The plan for processing 26 metric tons of surplus pits into oxide, 
  • The plan for nearly doubling the entire replacement value of LANL as a whole,
  • The plan for housing the thousands of workers LANL is hiring,
  • The plan for the Pajarito Plateau and for the region as a whole, for which LANL has its own evolving vision, as it is not shy to say?

We don't know. We do know LANL and NNSA have some kind of plans, because we've seen and heard and posted bits of them (here and here).

Why are LANL and NNSA hiding these plans from everyone -- from Congress, from local officials, from citizens, from tribes -- and why are New Mexico Democrats helping them, by standing by so passively?

And why are all these parties hiding from the thorough environmental impact analysis that would need to be done for plans of much smaller magnitude and scope, let alone these?

You know the answer: these plans are poorly put-together, highly-impactful, embarrassingly huge, and contradict other narratives NNSA and LANL have been spreading. They are shameful, in other words, difficult to defend, and that's why LANL and NNSA are afraid to tell us what they are. As one of our members recently wrote in a public letter, not yet published, "How dare you!"

NNSA's plan for producing pits at the Savannah River Site (SRS) is by contrast utterly transparent: convert the former Mixed-Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) into the "Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility" (SRPPF) and make pits in it. We litigated successfully for those plans last year. We know what they are, in fairly great detail. NNSA is now writing an environmental impact statement (EIS) for the project, and soon we will all know more.

Why not at LANL also, then? The scale of construction and nuclear materials processing at LANL are both far greater than are planned for SRS. The environmental impacts are far greater.

NNSA says it needs at least 80 new pits per year (ppy) from the combined LANL and SRS production lines by 2030 for its proposed new W87-1 warhead for the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) missiles, which the Air Force wants to start deploying in that year. It will be nearly impossible to build the new warhead without a steady, reliable supply of new pits.

This entire folly deluxe is driven by these Air Force requirements.

As we revealed in May of this year, Pentagon and NNSA consultants said the 2030 schedule was probably impossible. This past spring, NNSA warhead-meister Dr. Charles Verdon told Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor (paywall) that NNSA had found a "solution" or "workaround" to the predicted delays, but would not say what it was. Last year's National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) required just such a plan -- a plan to produce at least 80 ppy without SRPPF -- at LANL using multiple labor shifts. LANL is required, per that NDAA, not just to plan but to "implement surge efforts to exceed 30 pits per year."

So LANL's plans for accommodating round-the-clock labor shifts at its plutonium facility, so evident in these plans (slide 36, slide 10), are not exactly a surprise.

Of related interest:

  • We believe LANL is now for the first time a $3 B/year operation, with nearly 13,000 employees and contractors on site (slides 3, 4). Growth has been rapid and continues; growth in the number of commuters has been faster still. Given what is now a tremendous and growing housing shortage, with 61% of workers commuting, we have concluded that LANL has outgrown its location.
  • The planned surplus plutonium oxidation mission at LANL is expected to require some $2.4 B in facility investments (slides 35-37). This mission also involves a great deal of material transport -- on an annual mass basis more than one hundred times as much as LANL shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in its first decade of operation. We thought the plutonium oxidation mission, which takes place in the same 41-year-old facility (PF-4) as the nascent pit production and all other high-mass plutonium missions at LANL, had been nixed earlier this year. Now, NNSA has apparently doubled down on the aging, unsafe PF-4. Expect more on this topic soon. At the same time NNSA is considering contingency plans in case its plutonium dilute and dispose program fails.

We have redoubled our outreach to the New Mexico congressional delegation both here and in Washington, as well as to Governor Grisham. We have met with most members of our delegation and with the Governor's staff, but no help has been forthcoming. Our primary requests at this time, locally, are for transparency and environmental analyses.

In case you are interested, right now we are urging our local members to get informed and organize among friends to write letters to editors (LTEs) demanding:

  • A Site-wide environmental impact statement (SWEIS) as well as a nationwide ("programmatic") environmental study of pit production;
  • Transparency from the federal government -- not just LANL, a contractor -- about just what its plans really are.

Such letters are easy and surprisingly important, as we keep saying.

We really want much more, but these bulletins are not the place to explain that.

2. Fall fundraising campaign begins with $5,000 matching grant
First, to our donors, thank you. Everything we've done and are doing has been enabled by you. We are approaching our 30-year anniversary next month! 

We haven't asked for financial support in quite a while. Now we are! A generous donor has put up $5,000 in 1:1 matching funds, in the hopes of attracting more support for the Study Group. There are many ways to give.

Can you help? You will hear much more from us in this campaign, but this little notice is the start of it. If you want to contribute while we have this matching fund, or start a second match, now is the time!

Thank you, and much more soon,

Greg and Trish, for the Study Group
^ back to top

2901 Summit Place NE Albuquerque, NM 87106, Phone: 505-265-1200
home page contact contribute