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May 9, 2024 Bulletin 344: Pit production, the largest nuclear warhead infrastructure project in 7 decades / interesting news Permalink for this bulletin (please forward!). Previously: Bulletin 343 (04/27/2024): "Russophobia" panel discussion video; upcoming presentation in SC, "Overview of Pit Production Challenges at LANL" Dear friends and colleagues -- On April 18, National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Jill Hruby said that "[t]he reestablishment of pit production capabilities is the largest and most complex infrastructure undertaking at NNSA since shortly after the Manhattan Project...Our current total estimated acquisition cost range for pit production is $28-37 [billion], although this still needs to be reviewed inside the Department of Energy." Our own estimates, as previewed in the last Bulletin, are higher. Using NNSA's project and program estimates, we believe full startup of pit production at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL, for at least 30 pits per year) and the Savannah River Site (SRS, for at least 50 pits per year) will cost $40-47 billion (B), $22 B at LANL and the remainder ($18-25 B) at SRS. However estimated, acquisition of pit production capability is one of the very largest infrastructure projects in the U.S., counting only those projects that are approved and funded. (A cursory review, which may have missed some, puts it in the top five projects in the U.S. -- of which three are nuclear weapons-related: cleanups at Hanford and SRS, and the civil works portion of the Sentinel ICBM). Starting up pit production is almost as big, in constant dollars, as the entire Manhattan Project ($51.5 B through 1947, in 2024 dollars; see p. 63 in Stephen Schwartz et. al., Atomic Audit, or $43.6 B, through 1945, p. 60). We doubt the massive boondoggle that is the "two-site" plan for pit production will long survive the coming fiscal storms. Indeed it is not designed to do so. 1. Our South Carolina presentation ("Overview of Pit Production Challenges at LANL"); video, press As also sent in the last Bulletin, here is the slide deck from Greg's recent presentation at the South Carolina Nuclear Advisory Council. The video of that talk and others given the same day is here (at the 4/29/24 archive entry, from 1:22:48, to 2:06:10). Of interest, the portion of the Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) CEO Dennis Carr's talk (slides) that pertains to the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF) runs from 31:22 to 55:00 in the same video. Exchange Monitor wrote a valuable article about Greg's talk ("At S.C. meeting, some head-nodding over anti's stance that SRS should make all pits," Apr 30, 2024). That article brought many nuclear decisionmakers in DC "into the loop" on this talk. We also provided the talk (slides and video) and a short summary of its most salient parts to congressional committees and others in government, which we repeat here. 2. Pit costs at LANL and SRS We estimate that with the NNSA-announced new possible upper end of capital costs for the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF), $18-25 billion (B) (p. 5), the average cost of SRS pits over 50 years will be about $16-20 M each (slide 41). (To estimate life-cycle costs at SRPPF, we scaled up the 2018 estimate of operational costs at SRPPF in proportion to the growth in estimated staffing since 2018; see slides 41-42). We guesstimate SRS marginal pit cost at ~$6 million (M), the same as the Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2020 (Ibid). This is much less than the estimated cost of LANL pits ($77-156 M each, using total costs) (slide 38). Using forward costs only (i.e. omitting sunk costs), LANL pits will cost $58-96 M each, assuming all goes well for NNSA at LANL. We estimate the marginal cost of pits at LANL as about $49 M, but since LANL production is a) relatively inexpansible and b) temporary (on an unknown and unpredictable timeframe), both average and marginal costs are hard to predict -- or for marginal costs, even to define. LANL says (and NNSA repeats) that LANL needs 4,105 full-time equivalent staff (full-time equivalents, FTEs) for ≥30 pits per year (ppy) (p. 3). SRNS says (including in its 4/29/24 presentation) that it needs 1,800 to 2,000 FTEs to support production at some level greater than the original ≥50 ppy mandate, per NNSA (we use ≥80 ppy). Bearing in mind that ≥30 ppy translates to about 40 ppy at 90% confidence and ≥80 ppy translates to about 100 ppy (NNSA, p. 13), our predicted cost ratio per pit between the two sites (5-7x) is roughly comparable to the ratio of FTEs per average ppy capacity (5x) between the sites. The above per-pit costs, and the staffing levels needed per unit capacity, are measures of the difficulty of production at the two sites -- or at least of that portion of the difficulty which is reflected in official cost estimates. These comparisons are telling us that in general terms, assuming all goes according to plan, it is likely to be about five times as hard to produce pits at LANL as at SRS. We do not think production will go according to plan at LANL. LANL is beset with multiple challenges, including:
At present, LANL is the only site at which pits for the W87-1 warhead are to be made. As Dr. Hruby testified as recently as April 17 (p. 3), SRPPF will be making W93 pits, not W87-1 pits. Postponing the W87-1 indefinitely and terminating the effort to build LANL pit production capacity (while retaining pit R&D, demonstration, and training functions at LANL) would save roughly $43 billion -- $16 B for the W87-1 warhead (p. 201) and $27 B (using forward costs only, slide 38) for the LANL W87-1 pits. This is really a lot of money, even in the national security (050 account) space. If this much money were made available to domestic programs, it would go much farther and accomplish much more -- in educational grants to schools, for example, where it could employ some 40,000 new teachers for 15 years -- or double that many if funds were supplied as matching grants as they should be. In renewable energy, at a 20% subsidy rate (i.e. a 4:1 state, utility, or co-op match), those funds would buy roughly 100 gigawatts of installed photovoltaic capacity. Is the administration serious about climate protection, or not? We think not. Then there is the looming crisis of debt service. Every dollar we are spending on things we don't actually need is a borrowed dollar. Opinions differ on what is actually needed, but in our opinion there can be little doubt that the U.S. is already in a fiscal cul-de-sac, with no politically-acceptable solutions at hand. Even if the Sentinel ICBM system were eventually built out to all of its proposed 450 silos and 400 deployed missiles, not one of these missiles would actually need a LANL-produced pit, ever. Existing W87-0/Mark 21 warheads are adequate in every way, both qualitatively and quantitatively, for this missile. (Less-accurate W78/Mark 12A warheads, made in the 1979-1982 period, are also available, if provisions were made.) By the time the pits in the more-modern W87-0 warheads (built in the 1986-1988 period) begin to "age out," LANL pit production capability will have already itself aged out; NNSA pegs the lifetime of PF-4 as ending at roughly 2045 (see "Risks for Sustainment of PF-4 at LANL, Report to Congress," Nov 2020). 3. In other news...
Thank you for your attention and best wishes, Greg |
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