Pit production delay ‘a vivid reminder’ of years of inaction, says former NNSA boss

• By Colin Demarest cdemarest@aikenstandard.com
• June 16, 2021

The former leader of the National Nuclear Security Administration in congressional testimony Wednesday said expected delays in plutonium pit production, namely at the Savannah River Site, evidence the damning inaction of previous administrations.

The inability to meet a 2030 deadline for the plutonium triggers – as was made evident in recent budget documents and other official remarks – “is a vivid reminder that several administrations refused to commit to constructing a modern pit manufacturing facility over the past 20 years,” Lisa Gordon-Hagerty said, “replacing a critical production capability that was shuttered more than 30 years ago at the Rocky Flats Plant.”

Thousands of plutonium pits, nuclear weapon cores, were pumped out at the Colorado plant before it was raided by the FBI and the EPA. The U.S. has since lacked the ability to make the key warhead components in great volume.

The National Nuclear Security Administration and the Department of Defense in May 2018 recommended jumpstarting pit production in South Carolina, at the Savannah River Site, and New Mexico, at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The formal suggestion was made under Gordon-Hagerty’s watch, and she was a major advocate for the tandem approach.

“U.S. policies over the past several decades have resulted in a complex whose critical operations are all, in fact, single points of failure,” she said in her written remarks Wednesday.

In a 2019 interview with the Aiken Standard, Gordon-Hagerty said she was “absolutely confident that we will make not less than 80 pits by 2030. That is our plan. That is our goal. That is our effort.” That goal, though, is no longer publicly considered satisfiable.

The proposed Savannah River Site pit factory, known as the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, could be realized as late as fiscal year 2035, and doing all the work at Los Alamos is not realistic, according to Dr. Charles Verdon, the acting boss of the National Nuclear Security Administration.

Shifting all of the weight onto Los Alamos, Gordon-Hagerty suggested Wednesday, would demand flawless execution. And that’s a challenge, itself.

“The likelihood to achieve such goals is questionable, not because of technical expertise but because, historically, pauses and work stoppages occurred on a routine basis, and we should anticipate that in the future,” Gordon-Hagerty explained in her prepared testimony. “No doubt this scenario thrills the global disarmament crowd and our adversaries, as we seem to knowingly inch closer toward unilateral and unintentional disarmament.”