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February 2, 2025 Urgent planning and background sessions this WEDNESDAY EVENING IN SANTA FE and this THURSDAY EVENING IN ALBUQUERQUE pertaining to NNSA hearings Feb. 11-13 about LANL's future. Help spread the word! Permalink for this letter. Prior letters to this New-Mexico-oriented list. This is a letter to our New Mexico-oriented activist mailing list, a subset of our whole mailing list. If you missed our most recent emails, here they are:
Dear friends: It is an important moment in New Mexico nuclear history. We are being challenged as to whether we will, or will not, oppose a large new nuclear weapons factory in the state and all that will come from it, from more nuclear waste to even more nuclear weapons and related missions. What's at stake is nothing less than the overall direction of the state. To discuss our response, we are hosting two urgent community planning and background sessions this week: We urge everyone interested in nuclear issues, or in the economic and social future of the state, to come to one of these meetings. These meetings are preparatory to the upcoming National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) hearings regarding the future of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), to be held the following week at these locations and times:
The Draft Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) for LANL is ostensibly the vehicle by which the future of LANL will be discussed at these hearings, as we explained in our previous letter. NNSA wants our buy-in to the process, not just the product. If they get the former, they've got the latter too. We could comment about the SWEIS in detail in this letter -- and there will be time for that -- but that would miss the main point. We'd be falling into a trap. We come to bury the SWEIS, not to praise it. As we said last time, the SWEIS comes after far too many decisions, and the hearings this month are designed to strip democratic agency from civil society -- from you and me -- not to provide it. NNSA is not there to listen to you. It's providing a sophisticated way to take your voice away from you. But we can't just stay away. In many other states, people can. Not here. This cancer is being thrust on us, and it will grow further if we don't kill it. We're "all in," whether we want to be or not. New Mexico is in many ways a failing state. We are told we are dependent on the labs all the time. Just this morning, a Santa Fe New Mexican editorial began,"[i]t’s hardly a secret that New Mexico depends on federal largesse to function, from funding for its national laboratories and military bases to dollars that support social welfare programs or pay for necessary infrastructure repairs and construction." There you have it. What a lazy point of view, from such an exalted pulpit! Peggy Pond Church thought differently, as she told me: "Los Alamos lab is the worst thing that ever happened to this state." Peggy's is the wiser vision. LANL (and its offshoot Sandia National Laboratories) have brought nothing of net value to this state. I am just coming from a week in Washington, half of which was spent with 670 fellow registrants at the so-called "Nuclear Deterrence Summit," mostly nuclear weapons managers and senior employees of one kind or another. It's not pleasant, but we do learn a lot from such meetings. From conferences like this and several hundred meetings on Capital Hill with congressional and executive staff over the past decade and a half, and from 20 years of lobbying and policy work before that, I can tell you an open secret: the nuclear-military state has by now all but conquered the constitutional institutions of the U.S. government. There is very little congressional oversight going on. The nuclear weapons lobby is in charge. There are however powerful limits within the system itself -- in its labor supply, in the consciences of the human beings working in it, in its material supply chains, in what the President decides to do (that may in fact differ what the bureaucracies and contractors want) -- and in its degree of public acceptance, which conditions everything. While mere opinion doesn't matter in itself, opposition expressed in the public domain DOES matter, especially if it is factual and expresses commonly-held values and widely-felt human needs. The nuclear-military state needs our silent concurrence to maintain its facade of legitimacy and its social acceptance, which are necessary for it to operate. It needs our tacit permission to continue using and abusing New Mexico, as continues to milk the federal government as a whole. We're a nuclear "company state" here, as our former board president Zia Mian recently put it. Now, to help maintain the facade and help the nuclear arms race, all we have to do is to either
The third option is to make these hearings serve our cause, using them as rallying opportunities against plutonium pit production, LANL expansion, and against the political leadership class that has brought these insults to our communities. (It was not originally NNSA's idea to make LANL a pit factory -- not without a big new building anyway, which some of us helped bring to an end.) That is, we need to use the hearings creatively, not just line up like sheep to the slaughter. We need to meet with each other to plan, strategically and tactically. Hundreds of organizations and business and thousands of individuals are with us, but that latent political power only manifests when people come together. If LANL is allowed as much as they have put into their "No Action Alternative," which includes a legal requirement to do as much plutonium pit production as is physically possible, as fast as possible, NNSA will a) add even more nuclear missions and facilities, b) also capture more control over the state's political and economic future. Affordable housing in Santa Fe or anywhere nearby? Forget about it. More about pit production in particular First and foremost, pit production at LANL is not a "done deal," as so many will tell you. There are many arms control and "antinuclear" organizations, and many politicians, who want all U.S. pit production to occur at LANL and worked to make that happen when NNSA did not want it to happen in LANL's old plutonium facility at all. All of us who endorsed the Call for Sanity, not Nuclear Production oppose all pit production, first and foremost at LANL. Many people think pit production is already underway. It is not. At the moment, it's virtually non-existent. LANL has made exactly one (1) pit for the stockpile since 2012 and only 31 stockpile pits across the 76 years since 1949. Between 1945 and 1949, LANL made 50 simple pits before the Atomic Energy Commission complied with the wishes of LANL management and open production plants elsewhere (at first, in Hanford, WA, and then at the Rocky Flats Plant in CO). It's a mission LANL never wanted and never had, until Heinrich and Udall told them to "go for it" and organized the senatorial muscle to make it happen in and "for" New Mexico, with then-congresscritters Ben Ray Lujan and his cousin Michelle Lujan Grisham playing important supporting roles. Steve Pearce jumped on the porkwagon as well, providing the "bipartisanship" necessary to get a successful House floor vote on making LANL the "plutonium science and production center of excellence for the U.S.", enforced by statutory deadlines (that are now in the rear-view mirror, unmet). Shortly afterward, the then-new Trump appointee at NNSA, Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, overturned prior staff decisions and split the plutonium baby, giving more or less half the money to each of two states and accelerating pit production via the Los Alamos program to satisfy the neocons. At present the start date for actual production (as opposed to the first "trophy pit," as LANL called it last week) is uncertain, as is
None of this is known because NNSA has not produced even a draft schedule or cost for pit production at LANL. Nor has NNSA published a so-called "baseline" schedule and cost estimate for the construction needed, or for that matter, even a list of construction projects, or even a prospective campus plan. Nothing is known as yet as to what other large plutonium missions LANL may have in the future, or what additional plutonium facilities NNSA may want to build at LANL. People who think they know these things don't. NNSA itself doesn't know them. Neither does the Government Accountability Office (GAO), or the White House. The future of LANL's plutonium missions is therefore much less constrained than many people realize. They assume (wrongly) that NNSA must have clear plans for what they are doing, given that the cost of acquiring pit production is going to be at least as great in constant dollars as the entire Manhattan Project (with about half of that sum going to LANL). NNSA does have plans, but they are somewhat fluid. As for LANL pit production construction, plans are (remarkably) still in an early stage (despite being in progress since 2020). Completion is expected no sooner than 2032. Costs could easily increase 50% over today's estimates by then. But where will the money come from? It's not as easy as just asking for, and getting, more. The whole budget agreement in Congress would have to be re-jiggered, according to senior congressional budget auditors in a meeting we held with them last week. NNSA is in denial about what the arms race it is embarking upon will really cost. The real kickers are scale, risks, and duration. Will LANL make 5, 10, or 40 pits per year? "We the people" in New Mexico got NNSA to commit to keeping pit production below 20 ppy on four or five prior occasions. In practice it never went above 11 ppy (and it did that for only one year.) That level was enough to maintain knowledge and train new technicians, and still is. It's not great, but it doesn't require two shifts and it doesn't provide enough pits for a new warhead. Pit production at some low, de minimus level is not a new mission for LANL. All the science, all the stockpile surveillance, all the pit aging studies, all the heat source plutonium work, and all the surplus plutonium disposition work now underway could still be done. LANL would not need 4,105 staff members in its pit program as it does now, plus hundreds more subcontractors building up the site and facilities. The cost of that small program was minimal. Today's cost is vast, uncapped. That's the scale problem. The risks, whatever they are, increase with the number of people involved and throughput of products. PF-4 was designed to house about 100 workers; by 2020 it was housing a thousand. Most of them are relatively inexperienced. What could go wrong? Plenty, of course. So if LANL makes pits, for how long will it do so? Again, no one knows. The highest possible source privately told me this week that the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF) can, when complete, "do the full [pit] mission." That is precisely the plan, as the top Senate committee staff member on this issue told me two years ago. "What," I asked, "is the plan when PF-4 can no longer make pits? Do you have a plan to replace PF-4?" "The replacement," he said, "is Savannah River." NNSA loosely estimates the PF-4 end of life to lie in the 2045 range, up from the previous 2039. It really depends on what safety standards are applied. At present, PF-4 does not operate with complete, modern safety standards. Allowances are made, so NNSA can have one operating plutonium processing facility. There is no other one. As PF-4 and its subsystems age, some of these systems will be replaced, but at some point the safety allowances that have to be made will shut down production -- hopefully before, not after, too many accidents. NNSA's goal is to have SRPPF up and running before that decision has to be made. This begs the question everybody should be asking: why do pit production in PF-4 at all? Why not wait for the new, safer, larger facility that can handle the whole mission, and work like hell to re-start arms control with Russia and China in the meantime? Why not save billions of dollars, tons of transuranic waste, dozens of future highway accidents, and so much more by simply waiting a few years? Pits aren't aging fast enough to make LANL pits important as replacements for anything. So again, why LANL? The answer is all too simple: RussiaRussiaRussia, ChinaChinaChina, and porkporkpork for New Mexico and the whole nuclear warhead complex, which is already starting to feed off the new Livermore warhead for which LANL would supply the pits. Please come on Wednesday or Thursday, if you can. Sincerely, Greg Mello, for the Study Group |
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