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May 22, 2025 Bulletin 359: Slides, video from recent pit webinar; LANL pits support LLNL's weapons identity and budget Permalink for this bulletin (please forward!). Bulletins like this one go to our main mailing list. If you missed our most recent emails, they come in three forms and here they are:
Dear friends and colleagues -- The issues of war and peace, diplomacy and rearmament, the horrific U.S.-supported genocide in Gaza and associated destruction of humanitarian law, the failing democracy in our government -- to pick a few issues -- are very much with us these days as no doubt they are with you. In this Bulletin, we set aside those large issues to again touch on a seemingly small one, which nonetheless has large implications -- and which, we submit, is winnable. If, we suggest, you don't want a nuclear arms race, don't endorse or enable one. Alas, many do. An alarming number of people who claim to oppose (for example) the Sentinel ICBM are happy to endorse a new W87-1 warhead for it, or the Los Alamos pits for that warhead, because (as the Office of Management and Budget in the White House once said to me) doing so buoys the nuclear weapons program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Without the W87-1, LLNL would not have a new warhead to call its own, at the same time as LLNL's oversold National Ignition Facility grows long in the tooth. ("Ignition?" So what, exactly?) We fear that a form of "California nationalism," as I heard a sociologist describe it today, is at work in tacitly blessing the budget and programs of LLNL by some NGOs and congresspersons. No LANL pits, no LLNL W87-1, so LANL pits must be supported. Besides, they are Democratic Party pits. Beyond that, we have never once in 30 years seen the arms control community attempting to cut the budgets of the nuclear labs. They are untouchable, apparently. We aren't buying it -- not at LANL, not at LLNL, and not at Sandia either. Meanwhile, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is on the cusp of a vast increase in funding. Funding is about to go "off the chart" -- this chart, anyway. But all the funding in the world won't enable the U.S. to "win" an arms race against either Russia or China, let alone both. All the whining we hear from official quarters about the "dangers" from those "adversaries" is just another way of saying the era of U.S. hegemony is over. Preparation for Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) virtual hearings on plutonium pit production NNSA has begun the process of producing a PEIS for pit production, as we outlined this month. For reference, here is the Notice of Intent (NOI). The upcoming virtual "scoping" hearings on May 27 and 28 will address the scope of the subsequent environmental analysis, including which alternatives are "reasonable" for where and when to produce pits and what production capacity should be sought. These hearings also request input on what environmental analysis should be done, and what mitigation measures might be appropriate. As noted, these hearings and this process are not going to change what NNSA does. But they are an opportunity to speak nonetheless. This is the largest program in the history of NNSA and one of the very largest "gigaprojects" in the United States today. The slides (slightly edited) we used in this past Tuesday's webinar are here: Background, talking points, and key issues as we approach the Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for Plutonium Pit Production (P3 PEIS), along with a video of the presentation. We are pretty sure some of the perspectives you see there aren't found elsewhere. Yesterday's (5/21/25) double-page ad may also be useful. You can find further information and related pit news on our pit page, including a recent excellent retrospective on the perennial fire dangers in Los Alamos, and glimpses of the intractable local housing problem and commuter woes, neither of which problems are going away anytime soon. I (Greg) spoke with a local housing developer last night, and it is no exaggeration to say that it is now too expensive to build housing in Los Alamos County. Why? In part, because LANL has hired most of the skilled workers. Background and developments regarding pit production at the Savannah River Site are available here. For its part, LANL is already far too big for its location. Environmental problems caused by LANL are reaching and surpassing a number of thresholds, above which impacts compound in a greater-than-linear fashion. Traffic congestion and accidents are among those non-linear growth problems for which NNSA apparently has no solutions. A sense of proportion has been lost. NNSA apparently doesn't understand this. At LANL, NNSA is proposing not just pit production up to a "surge" level of at least 80 pits per year, but also and in addition, constructing 219 all-new facilities with a total floor area of 5.83 million sq. ft (or 2.98 million sq. ft. net of facilities to be decommissioned, dismantled, and disposed somewhere). In addition there are to be more than 100 facility upgrades, and utility and infrastructure projects totaling 1,190 acres (1.86 sq. miles), as well as 13,935 acres (21.8 sq. miles) of forest thinning to (try and) protect LANL from the megafires which have periodically swept the area since the 1970s. If you haven't done so already, and want to know more about these topics and work with others on them, the first step is to join with us and many others in endorsing the Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production. Thank you for your attention and best wishes, Greg Mello, for the Study Group |
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