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Previously: Bulletin 299: (04/28/22) Emergency call to action: stop Biden's proposed $33 billion war escalation

Bulletin 300: NNSA: early pit production a "hedge," not strictly necessary; is there a "pit gap?"

May 3, 2022

Dear friends and colleagues --

Since we last wrote about this program ("LANL pit production is incapable of meaningfully contributing to production requirements," Apr 11, 2022) there have been a large number of fairly dramatic events and revelations of interest to the nuclear disarmament community, congressional staff, the wider public, and a few members of the news media.

Some are in the fine print of the finally-released NNSA's fiscal year 2023 congressional budget request for Weapons Activities (FY23 CBR); some occurred at the two would-be pit production sites; and some transpired in the April 27 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, which we take up below.

There is really far too much to report in a single Bulletin. We are sitting on about 10 possible press releases.

We also urgently need to provide more resources and updates in the cause of preventing escalation of, and bringing an early halt to, the war in Ukraine, but that must wait a day or two.

So our theme today is going to be simple: plans for plutonium warhead core ("pit") production are not working out well.

Why is this important? Well, pit production is the largest U.S. nuclear warhead program since the end of the Cold War. Reestablishing U.S. capability to produce new fissile cores for the primary (first-stage) nuclear explosive in nuclear weapons -- the mission of the former Rocky Flats Plant near Denver, an environmental and worker-health horror -- is critical to building wholly-new warheads and bombs. Over sufficient time, new pits are necessary if a nuclear arsenal is to be maintained.

In part for these reasons, the 2008 report of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States said a new plutonium facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) was the single highest U.S. nuclear warhead infrastructure priority (pp. 51, 63). (That facility was halted by this organization's litigation and eventually canceled.)

A decade later, under Trump, reestablishing pit production was frequently described by National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty as her "highest priority."

But now, the grandiose and foolish plan she and a small cabal of colleagues at NNSA and the Pentagon put in place in 2018 against the a) clear advice of her predecessor and b) independent expert review, and for which she and these same colleagues obtained lavish funding in 2020 and 2021 with the support of a pliable Congress, is failing.

In our overall assessment, NNSA has no viable pit production strategy at this time, a perspective we will lay out in this and subsequent bulletins.

And for the first time since the beginning of the Trump Administration, pit production may not be NNSA's highest priority, as we will shortly see.

Already in 2020, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) wrote that NNSA warhead projects (note plural) were at “very high risk” of delay due to difficulties in producing uranium (NOT plutonium) components ("Nuclear Weapons: NNSA Plans to Modernize Critical Depleted Uranium Capabilities and Improve Program Management," GAO-21-16, 15 October 2020).

In truth, new pits have become of secondary importance to other unmet needs supporting NNSA's warhead programs. 

Meanwhile the cost of reconstituting pit production with two separate production plants has turned out to be staggering, much more than was predicted in 2017 and 2018. We analyzed those predicted costs (as best we could, given limited transparency) last year ("What will NNSA's plutonium pit production cost?, Aug 24, 2021, August 2021 spreadsheet; see here and the discussion below for April 2022 update), and we have chronicled increases in costs over the past 5 years in press releases and bulletins like this one.

Money has been showered on the program but delays have nonetheless occurred and delays are going to keep occurring, for reasons that are already "baked in."

At this point, no amount of money can entirely fix NNSA's pit problems, as STRATCOM Commander Adm. Charles Richard said in Senate Armed Services testimony on March 8 of this year (video, 29:45-30:49):

“We have crossed one of those points of no return that I referred to previously, in that we now know we will not get 80 pits per year by 2030, as is statutorily required, and even unlimited money at this point will not buy that back,” Richard said.

“So there is active work underway inside the Nuclear Weapons Council to understand exactly how much of a delay we are going to have, how much of it can be addressed by funding,” he said. “We’re not mitigating this problem. We have shot all the mitigation to get us to this point, the fourth time the nation has tried to recapitalize its production infrastructure. Now the question becomes, how much damage have we done? And what are the consequences of that? And we’re working to better understand that.”

Pit production at LANL as well as the Savannah River Site (SRS) will be delayed ("Nuclear Warhead Agency Admits Los Alamos Likely to Miss Interim Warhead Core Deadlines," Feb 12, 2022; "Los Alamos warhead "pit" production preparations begin dangerous 24/7 work in struggle to meet deadlines," Mar 10, 2022; at SRS: "NNSA Can’t Make 80-Pit Production Deadline, Acting Administrator Says," Exchange Monitor, Jun 11, 2021).

Delayed how much? That is an open question at both sites, but...a LOT. Despite the huge economies of scale that would accrue from building only one factory complex instead of two (especially given that one site has a partially-finished modern building easily capable of housing the entire mission), NNSA is trying to build two extremely complicated factories to do the same job. This decision was made primarily to soothe political feathers, especially in New Mexico.

Congress is not yet aware of what this program will cost. Congress hasn't asked hard enough, and NNSA isn't saying (see below). The "resource-loaded master schedule" for pit production required by Congress two years ago has never been produced.

Our current cost estimates for plutonium modernization, closely based on NNSA's latest projections, are shocking ("Warhead plutonium modernization spending: actual, proposed, and estimated by site, May 3, 2022). These costs do not include more than a billion dollars worth of planned capital projects supporting pit production at LANL, nor do they include any share of site-wide infrastructure and utility costs, or the increased security capital and operating costs, which are significant. They do include waste management and analytical facilities primarily (but not exclusively) serving pit production. SRS costs are by contrast much simpler to tally.

NNSA is now trying to pass off billions of dollars of LANL plutonium upgrades and expansion costs as "overhead." This is like a guy coming home with a brand-new Ferrari, claiming to his horrified spouse that he had to buy it to replace his old Honda Civic, which was outdated and lacked modern safety features. Now he wants a new garage, time off for racing, and a full-time mechanic. Safety? Not so much.

The bottom line is that it will likely cost about $35 B in capital and operating costs for pit production through 2033 using NNSA's current estimates, of which $7.4 B has already been spent or appropriated. More than $19 B (55%) is to be spent at LANL (with $5.1 B already spent or appropriated), on and around a production facility that a) will exceed its planned lifetime of 50 years in two years (p. iii), and b) is 1/5th the size of the new SRS pit building.

Assuming all goes well (it won't), LANL pits will cost $60-75 million apiece through 2033, including the costs shown. The unit cost of SRS pits would be roughly 1/3 as much as this, again assuming all went well, with SRS taking over the entire mission.

We explained some of what is going wrong at LANL as concisely as we could in a March 10 press backgrounder. More issues have cropped up since.

A large part of the problem is, simply, the Trump/Lisa Gordon-Hagerty/Ellen Lord two-site pit plan. Other factors are also at work, as we indicated last year in "US nuclear weapons since 2020: continuity & change:"

The second dramatic change [in the nuclear weapons context since 2020] is a rapidly-rising, linked set of economic issues that directly and indirectly affect every aspect of US nuclear weapon policies and programs. Interrelated problems of energy supply, inflation, labor, debt, supply chains, public health, and governance have catapulted into prominence since the covid-19 pandemic and will continue to evolve and intensify.

Despite their privileged position in the US polity, nuclear weapons programs cannot fully evade the triple dangers of a) inflation, b) local and industry-specific insufficiencies of trained, skilled and motivated labor, and c) instabilities in often narrow and therefore fragile supply chains.

These issues are not ordinary, or encompassed in any "lessons learned" exercise to date. They are severe and unprecedented. They may not be manageable -- for example, the linked problems in recruitment, retention, transportation, and housing inherent in LANL's relatively isolated location.

Affecting all NNSA's long-term projects, we believe that inflation has been, is now, and will remain much higher than the headline Consumer Price Index - Urban (CPI-U), which is plenty high. Inflation this high can double or triple costs in a decade.

Supply-chain contagions could have potentially unlimited impacts on these projects.

Meanwhile NNSA's fully-privatized structure, with its extremely thin federal presence and its multiple layers of contractors and bureaucracies public and private, has its own "special" degree of inefficiency and instability. The management of large NNSA projects remains on GAO's "high-risk list" for a reason.

To these issues (and more could be added) we must now add a hot proxy war with Russia, likely to escalate with no apparent limit short of nuclear war, thanks to actions our current benighted leadership is taking. Add in climate collapse -- the most severe drought in the Southwest in 1,200 years, with more to come -- and other increasing natural disasters. There are also other crises at hand, as you know.

"Are we facing a pit gap?"

This finally brings us to last week's unprecedented testimony concerning pit production by Dr. Jill Hruby, NNSA Administrator, at the April 27, 2022 Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces (SASC/SF) Subcommittee hearing (we have excerpted and posted key portions of this hearing in case the SASC takes down its video).

SASC/SF Chairman Angus King (I-ME) asked a well-prepared question at 37:20:

Are we facing a pit gap? In other words, is it likely that we are going to be able to meet the needs, or are we going to be, in five years, talking about some emergency program to fill in the gap to meet the needs for the newly-deployed weapons?

NNSA Administrator Dr. Jill Hruby replied, first with a reminder to all concerned:

...Look, we are not going to be able to make 80 pits per year [ppy] by 2030.

As noted above, this was not new information. In May of 2021 Hruby broke the news to Congress that NNSA could not meet the 80 ppy deadline by 2030, with "2032-2035" the new estimated date ("SRS Pit Plant Might be Five Years Later Than Hoped, NNSA Administrator-Designate Tells Senators," Nuclear Security and Deterrence Monitor, Dan Leone, May 28, 2021, paywall). NNSA's 2017 schedule estimate had been much the same: 2033 at the very earliest [p. 2].)

Then King asked: "Is 80 a magic number? Is 80 the number we project we'll need?

Hruby:

That's a good question. So we're working really closely right now with the Department of Defense...to look at the out-year requirements and to see how we can satisfy the program of record in ways that we're all comfortable with that mean a safe, secure, reliable and effective weapon program...We believe there will be a path through that but we are still working closely together to define the details of that. (emphasis added)

King: "I'd rather you say 'we know' there is a path that rather than 'we believe...'

Hruby:

I would rather say that as well, but I am being honest with you that we are still in the process of sorting that all out in the Nuclear Weapons Council....

And then Dr. Hruby said this:

Let me just say another word about this. We are establishing pit production as a hedge against plutonium aging and pit aging. Our pits are not today at any kind of an aging cliff. So we can reuse pits. We just don't like that plan because we may have to take them out before the end of the life of the weapon system. Right now we are not at the cliff of aging program. We just would like to put new pits in because we want the weapons to stay in the stockpile for 30 years and we don't have the 30-year confidence we'd like to have.

Reporter Dan Leone did a good job summarizing this important dialog ("NNSA, Pentagon ‘sorting out’ pit needs; new pits are ‘a hedge,’ NNSA administrator says," Exchange Monitor, Apr 29, 2022).

This is the first time in 6 years that NNSA has admitted that its early pit production requirements are a "hedge," rather than an actual "need."

As someone put it yesterday, currently-deployed pits will last a lot longer than the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.

It is also the first time NNSA has admitted that its pit production plan may be unable to support the planned U.S. arsenal with warheads that will last the preferred 30 years.

After King's questioning, Ranking Member Fischer (R-NE) also asked Hruby further questions about pit production. In reply, Hruby told the Subcommittee that providing some additional FY23 resources for SRS pit production for selected long-lead procurement and construction of a training center would increase the likelihood of reaching 80 ppy by 2032 (39:49 to 43:04).

Gloveboxes are one of those long-lead items. There are very few suppliers. LANL plans to install more than 100 new gloveboxes (140, I seem to recall) in its plutonium facility over the coming few years.

A little later in the hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) pressed Hruby on what pit production was going to cost (57:45) given the cost escalation observed so far. Hruby's answer was, in effect, that until the "Critical Decision Two" (CD-2) milestones are reached for the pit production projects at both LANL and SRS it would be "premature" to provide an answer. Those are slated to occur about two years from now.

In other words, after six years of study, design, and implementation costing several billion dollars so far (dating from the beginning of 2017 Pit Production Analysis of Alternatives in June 2016, which included early cost estimates), NNSA is still unable to provide a cost estimate for pit production beyond saying it will be "more than $10 billion." It will be a lot more than $10 billion and likely more than $30 billion, depending on what is included and how long it takes.

The Cold War practice of making decisions costing tens of billions of dollars prior to understanding costs, risks, and schedule has returned.

Senator Warren went on to read from NNSA's own May 2021 evaluation of NNSA's pit production plans for LANL. She read the following sentence into the record (mysteriously redacted in NNSA's Freedom of Information Act first response to us but finally supplied on 4/12/22 after our appeal and litigation).

CEPE’s assessment concludes that there are significant risks [in LANL's pit production plan] in staffing, program management, production activities, supporting infrastructure, waste management, and other program requirements.

In other words, there are "significant risks" in about every aspect of LANL's pit production program.

Dr. Hruby will return to the same committee tomorrow afternoon, with several of her nuclear weapons peers.

Stay tuned. We will try to summarize the rest of the current and new issues as soon as we can.

Have a good evening,

Greg and Trish