This billboard, installed on northbound I-25 near Bernalillo, is the most recent in the Los Alamos Study Group's growing campaign to educate lawmakers, visitors, and the New Mexico public about the proposed plutonium warhead core ("pit") factory at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), a major change in LANL's mission and the largest single construction project in the history of New Mexico in constant-dollar terms. This giant project is proceeding under a cloak of government and media silence.

See our Feb 3, 2021 press release, "New billboard raises awareness of multibillion-dollar plutonium bomb factory under construction near Santa Fe; Unprecedented, major change in LANL mission looms," for more information.

Some 212,500 views per week are expected. Further billboards are planned, among other campaign elements.

Background

This is a new mission for LANL. LANL has not had a plutonium bomb manufacturing since 1949, when production of plutonium bomb cores (“pits”) was transferred to the Hanford site in Washington state. From there, it went to the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver. From 1965 to 1989 "Rocky" manufactured all the plutonium parts for the U.S. nuclear stockpile. Wherever this job went – from the early days at Los Alamos, then to Hanford, then to Rocky Flats -- pit production has always left a legacy of illnesses and early deaths, along with irremediable contamination.

Since the end of the Cold War, LANL has been entrusted with maintaining the capability to make pits. There has been (and still is) no immediate need to make new pits.

This changed on September 2, 2020 when a pair of decisions by the Trump Administration (here and here), assigned an industrial pit mission to LANL for the first time in 72 years.

Two months later, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) formalized its decision (here and here) to remodel a large, modern, relatively safe but unfinished plutonium facility at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina in order to make it the main pit production facility.

The two multibillion-dollar factories are expected to cost a combined $12 billion (B) over just the 2019-2025 period (slides 23-27). Many more billions will be needed after that (slides 23-27). 

Of the two factories, only LANL might be able to provide pits in the 2020s. The crash pit program at LANL is designed to make new pits for a new kind of warhead that is slated to begin production in 2030. There are plenty of the most modern warheads available without building this new kind, and there are also plenty of extra pits already available to build the new kind – just not enough to build extra new warheads in case a president in the 2030s decides it is “necessary” to break existing treaty limits and deploy even more warheads than the U.S. deploys today.

In any case the bigger, safer SRS facility, once built and operating, will have all the latent production capacity that could ever be needed.

LANL production is supposed to take place in an older, smaller and admittedly unsafe facility that will require round-the-clock production to make less than one pit every two weeks. The more-than-doubled staff necessary to operate 24/7 makes LANL operations very expensive, in addition to being very risky.

Construction for pit production at LANL is expected to cost at least $3.4 B (slide 23) over the 2019-2025 period, on top of the billions already spent at LANL to get ready for pit production since 1992-2018. More billions are secretly planned but not openly budgeted for the late 2020s. In addition to construction, NNSA estimates LANL startup costs at $4.2 B over the same 2019-2025 period (slide 23).

Each LANL pit will cost between $40 and $60 million (M), at least 6 times what the Congressional Budget Office expects SRS pits to cost and roughly 100 times what NNSA says pits will cost.

Twenty-five years ago, LANL said it could do this job for about 50 times less money than it says today. LANL’s pit production record since then has been one of stumbling forward with many safety violations and shutdowns. After 25 years, LANL’s capacity to make high-quality pits remains at zero today.

Use of the term “dead end” is not just a rhetorical flourish. The scale and nature of the commitment to industrial plutonium processing and pit production are already starting to have a deleterious effect on our institutions – most visibly on our elected representatives, state and local governments, colleges, and news media but also on our labor and housing markets and traffic levels. The reputation and very identity of the region and the State will be damaged. This is dangerous and polluting work, more aligned with the mistaken priorities of the last century than what is needed, and what people want, for this one.

Politically, and at every level, weapons of mass destruction – which are based on a total lack of respect for human beings and the environment -- displace and obliterate peaceful, environmentally-friendly political values and commitments, leaving only their shell.

To survive and prosper, New Mexico must respond nimbly to the combined environmental, social, and economic crises we face. If our politicians can’t get their minds and committee assignments and votes out of the nuclear weapons business and into real, down-home sustainability that supports New Mexico families, this state has no economic future. Most of the New Mexico population will end up as surplus to the needs of the nuclear labs and other large corporate entities owned and controlled from out of state.

Los Alamos Study Group • 2901 Summit Place NE • Albuquerque, NM 87106 • 505-265-1200

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