Los Alamos Study Group files FOIA suit for pit study

By Mark Oswald / Journal Staff Writer
Friday, March 16th, 2018 at 4:05pm

SANTA FE – A New Mexico advocacy and research group has filed suit against the National Nuclear Security Administration seeking release of a study of alternatives for production of plutonium “pits,” the cores of nuclear weapons.

A summary of the analysis of alternatives for making pits has leaked out. Controversially, the summary indicates that making 80 pits per year by roughly 2030, as mandated by Congress, would be cheaper and faster at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina rather than at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The Albuquerque-based Los Alamos Study Group filed a federal court lawsuit this week alleging that NNSA has violated the federal Freedom of Information Act by failing to provide the study since the group requested it on Dec. 1. The suit says that while the 400-page document has been released to other federal agencies, congressional offices and possibly government contractors, the Study Group has not received a “substantive response” to its FOIA request.

The suit says the document is not a classified or confidential document and that sensitive “controlled” information such facility floor plans are usually redacted in public versions of similar documents. The Study Group is asking for a redacted version.

“In its failure to release this widely-sought document to the public, NNSA thwarts the intent of FOIA,” said the Study Group’s Greg Mello. “You would think that after so many failures in this program, and with the agency’s perennial position on the Government Accountability Office’s ‘high risk list’ for waste, fraud, and abuse, NNSA would want to put a few windows in its tightly-sealed echo chamber, where the contractors who absorb 95 percent of NNSA appropriations hold sway.”

New Mexico’s congressional delegation has objected to the study’s findings and also questioned why a production goal of 110 pits a year — much higher than current mandate of 80 pits annually — was used in the analysis. New Mexico U.S. Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich, both Democrats, inserted an amendment in the latest defense appropriations bill that makes it harder to move pit production away from Los Alamos.

While pits were produced in large numbers at the Rocky Flats facility in Colorado during the Cold War, no new ones have been made since 2011, when LANL completed the last of 29 for Navy submarine missiles. Congress and the Defense Department want new ones for a massive modernization program for the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Critics like the Study Group say there are thousands of pits in storage and no new ones are needed.