September 25, 2024

Bulletin 350: Ad with "Call for Sanity" endorsers published; upcoming New Mexico events; fresh warhead core ("pit") cost analyses

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Previously: Bulletin 349: Please help us gain organizational and business endorsements to our national call to halt plutonium pit production (08/29/2024)

Dear friends and colleagues --

First, as we mentioned last time, support is building to stop plutonium warhead core ("pit") production, first and foremost at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). As of September 10, 238 businesses, organizations, and religious groups have added their voices to the Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production.

A double-page ad with these names (all but two) was published today in the weekly, free Santa Fe Reporter (see pp. 20-21). We did not have enough room to include the individual signers, which now number 1,052.

Please join this Call! With your help we may be able to influence the incoming administration! 

Surprisingly, most arms control organizations and many "progressive" congresspersons do support not just pit production someday but pit production now, for the purpose of building multiple independently-targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs, which contain warheads) for the proposed "Sentinel" silo-based missile. Building pits for W87-1 warheads for Sentinel MIRVs is the mission of pit production at LANL, and LANL alone. (For more on this unique mission assignment and its illegality, please see Bulletin 349.) 

These organizations want, they say, to prevent production a decade or more from now (in South Carolina), while supporting production now (in New Mexico). They must know that this approach leads automatically to two factories given the inadequate capacity and lack of enduring capability at LANL. The reverse is not true: the production facilities in South Carolina could support the whole planned arsenal or any smaller one. It seems that the nuclear hawks and arms control groups are in sync: both want new pits for new warheads for a new missile, right now. Even though there is nothing wrong with current warheads and pits (apart from their existence), they can't wait for new ones.

We recently had conversations with some key staff members in Washington. It became apparent that support for MIRVing Sentinel (which would, ceteris paribus, increase the number of deployed U.S. warheads) was somewhat embarrassing to them. The fact is, some Democratic members of Congress are trying to burnish their arms control reputations without actually opposing a giant nuclear weapons project in a Democratic state.

The same inconsistency applies to arms control groups and individuals who, by their support for (or silence about) immediate pit production for the unnecessary W87-1 warhead, are also supporting MIRVing Sentinel and thereby increasing the size of the U.S. deployed arsenal.

It is ironic that the same people who are shamelessly exaggerating the known lifetime of pits are promoting pit production on an emergency basis -- and in a less-than-safe, 50-year-old facility in one of worst locations in the entire NNSA complex, to boot. 

LANL may be able to spit out its first War Reserve pit later this very year, two years later than promised, which is still a decade or two before new pits might be "needed."

For sanity's sake, and to prevent an arms race now and in the crucial decade ahead, we need to at least delay pit production, without which no entirely new warheads can be produced. We need fewer warheads, not more.

As we will shortly explain, pit production, if continued as planned, is going to cost about $63 billion (B) just through the end of the 2030s. Most of these costs would occur at LANL. These costs are unsupportable even within the defense establishment, both on a per-pit and on an absolute basis. The military will not support these costs.

What can't continue, won't. The real questions revolve around when the house of cards that is LANL pit production will come crashing down, and how many people will be hurt in the meantime. To pick just one problem, commuter traffic is already horrendous in and around Los Alamos County; accidents and fatalities are up.

Our overall assessment is that LANL pit production is in crisis. More about that next time.

*******

Second, we have some interesting local events coming up, including community briefings in Santa Fe (October 12) and Los Alamos (October 24). We will be heading to DC as well, after the election. For more details please see this letter to local activists, which some of you got. One update: the Santa Fe meeting will be at St. Bede's Episcopal Church, 550 W. San Mateo Road (map).

*******

Although the capital cost of SRPPF [the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility] is higher than at LANL, the per-pit cost at LANL (even excluding sunk costs through 2024), will be roughly 4 times as much as at SRS (the Savannah River Site) due to LANL’s much higher operating costs and lower capacity. Investing in the temporary LANL pit production capability roughly doubles NNSA’s [the National Nuclear Security Administration's] pit production start-up costs over that of the enduring, fully-adequate SRPPF alone. No NNSA study supports the present two-site strategy.

We found that LANL pits will each cost at least $77-156 million (M) (total costs) or $58-96 M (using costs after fiscal year 2024 only). 

In this report we estimated costs at LANL and SRS using different methods because the timetables, acquisition strategies, and available cost data at the two sites are different. Basically SRS production is a decade farther away and NNSA has supplied less data about it, while the key LANL production facility (Building PF-4) has a finite and unknown productiion lifetime. "Predictions are hard, especially about the future."

To provide a different kind of comparison we finally completed a "bottom up" estimate of costs ("Plutonium Modernization Spending, Actual, Proposed, and Estimated by Site and Fiscal Year," Sep 24, 2024). In this table, our estimates are in pink. We provide our principle assumptions. Data from NNSA and Congress is in green. We used the $18.5 B "bottom up" estimated cost for SRPPF, from Savannah River Nuclear Security (SRNS). (For more on the SRS pit production effort, see this page.)

Our estimated total cost for pit production acquisition and early production through 2039 is $63 B, not including some $3 B in pre-2019 costs at LANL that were tallied but not explained by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). This is twice the total Manhattan Project cost through December 1945 ($32.7 B), in constant 2024 dollars.

Total acquisition costs for pit production capacity at the two sites (roughly 36 pits per year at LANL; roughly 84-103 ppy at SRS) are about the same, $22 B for each.

Ending the Los Alamos  Pit Production Project (LAP4) after FY2024 would save $3.6 B. Cancelling 75% of LANL's Plutonium Modernization Program after FY2024 would save $18.2 B through 2039. Together these cancellations would save $21.8 B, enough to pay the forward costs of SRS startup through 2035 ($18.2 B) plus the forward costs at other sites through 2035 ($1.4 B). That is, ending the pit production mission at LANL would about pay for the pit production mission at SRS.

A majority (56%) of the pit production budget through 2039 would be spent at LANL, if all goes as NNSA wishes.

Best wishes,

Greg