Bulletin 284: How deep a ‘pit’ will the new administration dig at Los Alamos before stopping?

September 17, 2021

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Previously: Bulletin #283 (07/23/21): Interesting new aerial photos of LANLand a followup (07/25/21): Working links to photos; outreach orientation Thursday pm in Santa Fe

Dear friends and colleagues --

We hope you are all thriving, and enjoying these last days of summer. We are fine.

(Despite being fully vaccinated, we had covid for a week or so last month after going to a conference of nuclear weapons managers and contractors in Washington, DC. We recovered quickly and fully, possibly due in part to these protocols.)

There's a lot to share but I am going to be brief. This Bulletin is divided into less-nerdy and more-nerdy parts. First, the less-nerdy.

A. How deep a ‘pit’ will the new administration dig at Los Alamos before stopping? (Greg Mello, Aiken Standard, 9/16/21)

The above op-ed ran today; it will run later this month in New Mexico as well (and possibly elsewhere in the meantime). It's a short read and important enough to be the trigger for this Bulletin. We urge you to read it!

B. Full-page ad/fact sheet/event invite

When we sent this ad copy to the somewhat-drowsy Santa Fe New Mexican, they apparently spilled their coffee. "How can we publish this when we don't know if it is all true," they said.

"First," we said, "it is all true, right up to the recordings we made last month of NNSA and lab officials discussing plans. More to the point, do you fact-check all your advertising, especially your "political" advertising -- which you claim this is, thus allowing you to charge us more?"

You get the idea.

The issue is not really this or that fact. The issues are really, firstly, whether citizen experts are allowed to inform other citizens in any impactful way in this paid venue, as opposed to "expressing an opinion" in a usual dilettantish, impotent, and postmodern way, with actual facts being the sole property of the "authorities," and secondly, whether the goal is for people to stay asleep -- to buy something, vote for somebody, be entertained -- or to WAKE UP.

We urge you who are reading this to take careful note that "waking up" cuts across issues, tribes, and political parties. Your allies tomorrow may not be your allies yesterday. We are in a time of great cultural transformation. We all need to pay closer attention than usual.

Our dialog with the New Mexican will continue. Meanwhile we are publishing that ad elsewhere. Trish is hard at work on that now.

C. There will be an information and planning meeting in Santa Fe on Thursday Sept. 30, from 6:00 – 8:00 pm (map.

This will be at St. John’s United Methodist Church, 1200 Old Pecos Trail, in the "Gathering Room." This is a large hall with superior cross-ventilation. Wear a mask as usual. (As always, N95 & KN95 are best; the others are almost useless.)

This will be an action-planning meeting, with background for those new to nuclear disarmament. We will have other experts present, via Zoom as required.

As we said here and here (are you on the list that gets these activist letters? If not send a blank email here), nothing will change for the better if we keep pretending we live in a liberal democracy. In those letters we suggest that --

we all have some family meetings about how our families are going to face the end of the world as we know it, and what we personally are going to do with the remainder of our lives. Kick back, watch the world burn, the species disappear and hope flicker and die out in our young people? If you think that please get off this list.

Expectations of the younger generation about their standard of living [and careers] need to change, lest disappointment and despair be overwhelming. We of the older generation need to help them and protect them as best we can.

There are no solutions to our environmental problems that do not involve, in the U.S., a huge decline in overall consumption of resources, particularly energy. "100% renewable energy" at present levels is an utter fraud. Shame on those nonprofits who promote it.

Most importantly, nothing whatsoever is going to change for the better by the methods most beloved by liberals. In many ways, liberal progressivism is the biggest obstacle we have. As Caitlin Johnstone says, trying to reform the Democratic Party is like trying to walk through an exit door painted on the wall.

We think the time is propitious for making this and subsequent public actions embrace the need for a whole-of-government, whole-of-society response to climate change and the grotesque, crushing inequality that is destroying our society. [And, let us now add, fast-rising Orwellian social control.] We need to broaden our thinking and our base for action to matter...[W]e need to start throwing sand in the gears.

The U.S. government is not going to decide to do anything real about climate change under the present political conditions, just as the U.S. government is not going to decide to give up its global empire or accept nuclear disarmament. Political conditions have to change first.

D. Slides from our background briefing for new volunteers, July 29

These are geared toward current northern New Mexico nuclear weapons issues. Some slides are new, many not. Contemporary cultural themes are emphasized in the beginning, which might be of general interest.

E. New billboard on I-40 for travelers entering state from TX

This is not an additional billboard but rather a new "skin," replacing the one below it on this page that was installed in January 2020 facing the westbound traffic just outside of San Jon, NM. About 64,000 westbound vehicles/week pass it.

The previous billboard asked if NM was a failed state because of our perennially low or last place standing in child welfare indices. The new billboard bluntly states New Mexico's leadership has failed.

The workers who installed the vinyl skin took the picture when their work was done, against the setting sun. We'll take a better picture in due time.

We have a total of 4 billboards on NM interstate highways at present.

Our present Governor and her Party have made extensive promises to improve child well-being and education which they have not fulfilled -- or even, as far as we can see, even attempted. The scale of effort and investment that would be needed is far more than we see. It would take real money, aka higher taxes. New Mexico is held back by pervasive low expectations and a tacit acceptance of inferior outcomes in education, social outcomes, and child well-being.

F. Community outreach underway

At first, wonderful volunteers and a talented contractor and now, (paid) disabled veterans and the USPS are helping with a campaign to reach out to Santa Fe residents and businesses, most of whom have no idea that their town is becoming a bedroom community for a new "right-sized" Rocky Flats Plant, one that in effect adds an operation "the size of Argonne National Laboratory" to LANL (as NNSA put it last month). (For reference, ANL has about 3,500 staff and an annual budget of $1.2 billion.)

Volunteers distributed about 2,000 door hangers last month. Another 8,000 are being mailed with this cover letter. Ten thousand post cards have been printed and will go out very soon.

Nerdy stuff

G. What will NNSA's plutonium pit production cost?

Answer: a lot. This is a fresh analysis from late last month, with high and low estimates and all assumptions explicit, and here is the pdf version of the spreadsheets. Cost per pit is calculated.

For policymakers, cost and risk rank high in importance, especially when one site's pits are going to at least triple expected warhead costs, assuming those pits are actually made. Is the combined political power of the three warhead labs so great that LANL's pit costs can be made to almost disappear in accounting, thus enabling a combined Los Alamos/Livermore/Sandia gravy train worth tens of billions?

Will the arms control and "antinuclear" community keep supporting the kind of madness that requires two, not just one, new Rocky Flats-like plants? (Twice the pollution, at twice the price!)

H. For some House Dems and would-be arms controllers: whether any of us like it or not, investment in the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPFF) is going to continue, for fundamental reasons.

These reasons are (from a recent letter to key professional staff):

• LANL alone cannot handle any of the versions of pit production requirements articulated since the end of the Cold War. LANL can't produce more than 30 ppy, with some ambiguity as to whether "30" really means an average of about 41 ppy. And LANL has no resilience.
• The baseline SRPPF design is by contrast adequate for the entire 80 ppy (average: 103 ppy) mission. SRPPF will have considerable internal resilience and redundancy.
• LANL production cannot be assumed to be stable. We don't see how LANL production could be quantitatively adequate for any warhead program’s pits, including the W87-1s -- the numbers just do not work out unless a) LANL production is assumed fully reliable and no other pits are required during the 2030s and half of the planned GBSD deployment is equipped with existing W87-0s, or else b) NNSA will not be providing enough warheads to make GBSD MIRV-capable -- in which case no new pits are required at all, as W87-0s are perfectly adequate in all respects!
• We are quite sure that the LANL capability, whatever it is, is also not enduring.
• The new LANL facilities required to sustain production into and beyond the 2030s would come late, at high cost, with high risk.
• LANL would need much larger capacity (NNSA: 140 ppy, vs. 30 ppy required today) to compensate for expected production instability, and very large new investments would be needed to provide that. We do not believe LANL has any decent location for a pit new facility, given the geotechnical problems and lack of space at TA-55, and other serious considerations at more remote locations (proximity to faults, public roads, national monument, Indian lands, housing; whole new support and access infrastructure including security, roads, bridges, radioactive sewerage).
  

• [Fellow idealists, pay attention here:] The U.S. will continue investing each and every year in what pit production capacity is deemed adequate and enduring by the Nuclear Weapons Council. Providing for only a few new pits to be produced in unstable, non-enduring facilities in the 2030s and 2040s without surge capacity or resilience is not just going to happen.
• Planning and construction of any new pit facility takes at least 14 years. We are almost 3 years into SRS design. No other facility could be brought on line in 11-14 years (NNSA: “by 2032-2035”).
• Political considerations will prevent pit production at LLNL. It couldn't be done without considerable investment, which isn't happening and won't happen.

Thus the only policy decision available is whether investments in LANL stockpile pit production, to the tune of $1+ billion/year, will continue, or rather how long and at what scale and for what purposes they will continue. At the moment, Congress is building a short-term, emergency capability at LANL at very high cost as well as a longer-term capability at SRS. Why is this even remotely a good thing?

LANL pits, if any are made, will cost 200 times their weight in gold -- more than $50 million each. That is going to blow up the W87-1 program, but unless this is known now it will be too late to stop it.

At the moment, LANL doesn't even know how to find the people it needs, how to house them (either at work or in homes), or how get them to work. Trailer parks ("man camps" would be another term for them) on Pueblo land are being discussed with the tribes. A fleet of buses to bring 2,000-3,000 people on site every day is now the chosen path to alleviate the "LA-style" traffic (their phrase) that chokes local roads, or so LANL said at last month's Nuclear Deterrence Summit. The precision "ballet" necessary to work in that old facility has never been achieved at any site. I don't need to tell you that night shift work is more dangerous.

Pit production in the late 2020s and early 2030s enables Livermore's W87-1 warhead program. It has no other purpose. LANL pit production is a very expensive way to keep Livermore lab in high clover while providing a multiple-warhead option for the Air Force's new missile. It's a gravy train for contractors, especially the weapons labs.

That's it for today. Look for more very soon.

Best wishes,

Greg and Trish