Plutonium pit production expansion is essential, STRATCOM boss tells Congress

• By Colin Demarest cdemarest@aikenstandard.com
• April 22, 2021

The head of U.S. Strategic Command in rounds of congressional testimony this week described renewed plutonium pit production efforts as vital to the nation’s nuclear arsenal and, as a result, the country’s footing on the international slope.

Adm. Charles Richard on Tuesday told the Senate Armed Services Committee that pit production – the crafting of nuclear weapon cores, possibly split between South Carolina and New Mexico – “is the biggest stockpile modernization issue” currently faced.

Failing to make enough of the warhead components soon, the commander continued in written remarks, risks “catastrophic failures” and a retreat to decades-old facilities.

Richard struck a similar – cautionary – chord in response to questions asked Wednesday by U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican and senior member of the House Armed Services Committee.

“This is an example where if we don’t recapitalize the infrastructure,” the STRATCOM boss said, “we will lose a key piece of what it means, what you have to have to be a nuclear weapons state.”

The U.S. has for years lacked the ability to produce plutonium pits in great volumes. To satisfy the demand for them, which some loudly question, the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Defense Department in 2018 recommend expanding production at Los Alamos National Laboratory as well as establishing production at the Savannah River Site.

By 2030, they jointly counseled, 50 pits per year would be produced south of Aiken, utilizing the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility footprint, and 30 pits per year would be produced near Santa Fe, New Mexico, using an upgraded PF-4, a plutonium facility. Wilson has gone to bat for the tandem approach time and time again.

“The two sites are just critical for the efficacy of this program,” the congressman said in an interview last summer. His district, South Carolina’s 2nd, includes the Savannah River Site and all of Aiken County.

Not satisfying the 80-pits-per-year demand on time – almost certainly the outcome, according to an independent review conducted by Institute for Defense Analyses – means increased need for pits and a bigger price tag, according to the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review published under the Trump administration. 

“If we are unable to meet 80 pits per year, the only alternative is to now start to accept pits that have aged past the point that we have a good analytical basis to have confidence in their operation,” Richard told Wilson on Wednesday. “We don’t have data that says they will work. We don’t have data that says they won’t work. But if we don’t reach 80 pits per year, we’re going to, kind of, find out the hard way how that works out.”

Richard’s comments this week are not necessarily a surprise; the admiral is in charge of the U.S. nuclear outfit. Lawmakers including Wilson are keeping a wary eye on Chinese and Russian arsenals, and other officials have offered like assessments. During his tenure as STRATCOM commander, Gen. John Hyten described the planned buildout of plutonium pit production as the National Nuclear Security Administration’s “highest … infrastructure priority.”

“Our national requirement, supported by numerous studies and analyses, requires no fewer than 80 war-reserve pits per year by 2030,” Hyten testified in February 2019. “I support the NNSA plan to achieve this.”

Achieving it, Richard said this week, necessitates stable funding, and lots of it. Billions upon billions of dollars are expected to be spent at both the Savannah River Site and Los Alamos National Lab in the years to come.

“I think it is useful for us to remember that this effort at pit production, I think, is the fourth or fifth attempt in our nation’s history to reestablish it after we terminated pit production, back in 1992, at Rocky Flats,” Richard said.

The Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado, which pumped out thousands of nuclear weapon cores, was scuttled after a clandestine investigation and raid.