Billions of dollars expected to be spent on pit production at Savannah River, Los Alamos

• By Colin Demarest cdemarest@aikenstandard.com
• September 25, 2020

Establishing a robust means to forge plutonium pits – nuclear weapon cores – in both South Carolina and New Mexico could be a nearly $8 billion affair, according to a recently published watchdog analysis that, also, casts additional doubt on the government’s ability to make enough of them by 2030.

Converting the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility skeleton at the Savannah River Site into a fleshed-out pit factory, the proposed Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, could cost about $4.6 billion, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported this month.

Millions have already been poured into the effort. Construction of the pit complex at SRS would likely take six years, with work peaking a few years from now.

In conjunction, updating PF-4, a plutonium facility at the storied Los Alamos National Laboratory, could cost up to $3 billion over the next five years, the office said, citing preliminary figures from the National Nuclear Security Administration, the U.S. Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons and nonproliferation arm.

The outside-the-fence Los Alamos Study Group, though, believes it would cost much more.

The NNSA and the U.S. Department of Defense in May 2018 recommended crafting 50 pits per year at the Savannah River Site and 30 pits per year at Los Alamos, near Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico, to satisfy an 80-pits-per-year demand.

The fissile cores are due sooner from the Los Alamos lab than from the Savannah River Site.

Achieving the overarching production goal, according to an Institute for Defense Analyses assessment, will be quite difficult, if not impossible. The institute in 2019 found that reaching 80 pits per year is possible but “extremely challenging”; that no available option will likely satisfy the demand by the 2030 deadline; and that further risk assessment is needed.

The Government Accountability Office’s September review acknowledged the IDA study and piled on: “NNSA’s past performance, agency documents, and an independent study suggest that achieving and sustaining production of sufficient pits per year may be challenging.” The National Nuclear Security Administration’s track record on large, one-of-a-kind facilities is sketchy, as well, the office noted.

In an interview with the Aiken Standard last summer, NNSA chief Lisa Gordon-Hagerty argued her agency has “turned a corner” when it comes to major infrastructure investments.

The MOX project – what is being repurposed for local plutonium pit production – chewed through billions of dollars and was more than a decade in the making when it was axed. The nuclear fuel project predates Gordon-Hagerty and President Donald Trump; it was a favorite of South Carolina lawmakers and elected officials.

Kingston Reif, the director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, said the Government Accountability Office’s evaluation, which focused on the W87-1 warhead, reinforces just how fantastic the NNSA’s nuclear modernization plans are.

“Read this and tell me with a straight face that the NNSA’s plan to produce at least 80 plutonium pits per year by 2030 is any way, shape, or form realistically executable,” Reif wrote on Twitter, sharing damning excerpts from the study.

Questions persist, the Government Accountability Office noted in an announcement, about NNSA’s pit production plans.

The Congressional Budget Office earlier this year concluded the marginal cost of making a plutonium pit is approximately $6 million. The nonpartisan CBO, which studies monetary issues in support of the budget process, came to the conclusion after reviewing Energy Department information.

“The cost of producing pits at LANL is so high relative to SRS,” Los Alamos Study Group’s Greg Mello said Friday, “that it will roughly triple the unit cost of W87-1 warheads.”

Officials have repeatedly stressed that a two-pronged pit production approach – a cross-country calculus – is the most resilient and flexible approach.

“The two sites are just critical for the efficacy of this program,” U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., said in August.

Advocates argue having two home bases, each capable of boosting production if needed, will prevent a single failure from crippling grander efforts.