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For immediate release December 2, 2022 Do New Mexico news outlets care about LANL's plan to re-open nuclear waste disposal on-site? Or to produce still more warhead components?
Contact: Greg Mello, 505-265-1200 office, 505-577-8563 cell Albuquerque, NM -- Dear NM media colleagues -- Good afternoon! As a second reminder, please refer to this press release: Los Alamos lab "agenda:" novel nuclear weapons and new ways to use them, hypersonic nuclear weapons, new nuclear waste disposal facility, additional production missions, biosecurity "leadership," "proactive" counterintelligence, Nov 23, 2022. The references are linked. So far we haven't noticed any followup from any of you to these shocking revelations. I would like to contrast this with the media coverage of a generally-comparable document almost three decades ago. In February 1993, as a result of a courageous LANL staff member who put the document in a "dead drop" to which we returned it later that day, we obtained the (Official Use Only) LANL "Strategic Plan." Five newspaper articles and an editorial resulted (see: Traces 1993, pp. 9-15):
By contrast, our 11/23/22 press release, highlighting two years of LANL's secret "agenda," obtained by FOIA, included these major points (and others we didn't have time to highlight):
These revelations have resulted in zero coverage thus far. What's up? These are not small issues. LANL should be asked to explain itself, at a minimum. Shouldn't the public know about some of this? By the way, getting documents such as these is not easy. We raised and spent about $20,000 to do so this year, for FOIA litigation in the DC courts and related in-house paralegal and other FOIA work. Nearly all this money comes from smaller donations from your subscribers, viewers, listeners, and our own, from around the country. In a way, we did all this for you -- so you could write and produce important, even blockbuster, stories like the ones above. If you don't think LANL's desire -- indeed their need -- to open a nuclear waste dump on site isn't news you don't know your own business. With your predecessors' help, we blocked previous efforts to do this in the 1990s, at TA-49 and in the form of the proposed Mixed Waste Landfill. Some of these ideas are evidently back. Before getting these documents, I warned the legislature about this last month -- the question of whether to resume nuclear waste disposal at LANL is not settled. There are big waste-generating projects coming. LANL even wants to talk about nuclear explosive testing again. It's in their "agenda" documents. Back in 2016-2017 LANL's head of weapons, Bob Webster, told various people in Washington that Donald Trump would be just the guy to do it. That's another story, at least in part now in print from LANL itself. Previous to the 11/23/22 press release (and related) there was this:
What's this about? The Plan would add the equivalent of a whole additional national laboratory to LANL, for the new mission of "reliably" producing plutonium warhead cores ("pits"). The cost, in constant dollars, would be 6 times what the Manhattan Project spent in New Mexico. It is by far the most expensive single project in New Mexico history. The media result? Just one LANL-supportive editorial: LANL's astounding growth also creates added pressure on safety, accountability, Santa Fe New Mexican, Aug 29, 2022. Why do you think this is? Any theories you would like to offer? This level of turning away from important truths is destructive to our society. PS: Don't think this project will bring economic and social development. After $130 billion so far at LANL alone the hollowness of that hope is surely apparent. All we have gotten overall is inequality and social decline. Excerpt from Bulletin 307: The LANL "Campus Master Plan" As a result of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has provided some highlights of its grand plan for rebuilding and expanding Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the so-called "Campus Master Plan" ("Plan"). We described these highlights previously here and here. Triad LLC, NNSA's management and operating contractor at LANL, submitted the Plan on September 29, 2021 (p. 5) and was credited with completion of the plan in NNSA's fiscal year (FY) 2021 contract evaluation (p. 2). In other words, this Plan is not a "draft." There will be subsequent plans of course, but this one was took at least four years to produce and was extensively vetted within NNSA and Triad. The Plan would add the equivalent of a whole additional national laboratory to LANL, for the new mission of "reliably" producing plutonium warhead cores ("pits"). Implementation of the Plan would have profound impacts locally, regionally, and nationally. It would facilitate evolution of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, albeit at a cost of more than $50 million per pit, roughly tripling the cost of warheads using LANL pits.* (*See the discussion from 2020 at slide 30, which could be updated with more current but still too low cost figures for pits from here and updated warhead costs estimated by GAO here. Further cost information will be available this fall.) NNSA's pit production endeavor is by far the largest project in the agency's history, with LANL expected to require the majority of funding. (See: "Warhead plutonium modernization spending, actual & proposed by site," May 6, 2022). Given the revelations of this Plan and other documents we have obtained via FOIA, LANL costs have increased significantly beyond those shown so far in NNSA's budget documents. There will be efforts to make the entire cost of expanding and rebuilding LANL on a vast scale, while adding and executing a huge new production mission -- $20 billion or more over the coming decade -- DISAPPEAR FROM DISCUSSION, on grounds that "it has to be done, so the cost doesn't matter." In other word, these costs may disappear into NNSA's ever-rising "baseline" spending "requirement." Unless citizens mobilize, there may be no objection in Congress or elsewhere in government. While do not yet have the Plan itself, the highlights indicate that much more than $10 billion in additional costs, beyond those currently budgeted, will be required to sustain pit production at LANL, assuming it can be safely started at all, a major assumption. Why? More than 4 million square feet of new construction is needed in the main LANL technical area (TA-03) and the western end of Pajarito Canyon alone, the latter being where LANL's plutonium operations are located. "Several thousand" additional new staff members will be needed in Pajarito Canyon beyond those working there a year ago, raising operational costs by $10 billion or more over the following decade. LANL's main plutonium facility ("PF-4") will need to be replaced or augmented with one or more additional high-hazard plutonium facilities. Assuming a place could be found to put it, PF-4 replacement would cost at least $10 billion; smaller plutonium production "modules," which do not appear feasible and entail high risks (slide 8), would also cost billions. According to the Plan and other documents, the Sigma nuclear facility in TA-03 must also be replaced, another "billion-plus" project. Numerous smaller projects necessary for pit production (but funded outside the pit production budget) are required. Since 2018, NNSA has never presented a total startup cost, let alone a life-cycle cost, for pit production at any site. In fact, despite congressional direction NNSA does not have a resourced plan and schedule for pit production past the very first pit to be produced, i.e. past FY2023, which ends in 13 months (House Report 117-394, p. 166). NNSA and the Department of Defense (DoD) hope that LANL's pit production will speed up production of new-pit MIRVable warheads (W87-1s), for the new "Sentinel" ICBM system (video overview) by about a decade. We believe it is unwise to provide a multiple independent warhead (MIRV) option for the new ICBM, or to do so ASAP, or for that matter to provide new warheads for it at all (W87-0s being adequate in all respects, if you like ICBMs or nuclear weapons generally and do not require MIRVing), or for that matter to retain so many ICBMs, or for that matter to retain ICBMs at all. There are so many other options it begins to appear that spending $20 billion or so extra is considered a benefit, not a cost. The costs implied by this Plan are not all shown in current NNSA budgeting. For example, if NNSA expects to have any new plutonium facility operating at LANL by the early 2040s, design for that facility or facilities should be in NNSA's 5-year budget plan, since no NNSA project costing more than $700 million has taken less than 16 years to build, and ramping up to full usage may take another 5 years (slide 9). This early production is not necessary. There is no "pit gap." NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby: Let me just say another word about this. We are establishing pit production as a hedge against plutonium aging and pit aging. Our pits are not today at any kind of an aging cliff. So we can reuse pits. We just don't like that plan because we may have to take them out before the end of the life of the weapon system. Right now we are not at the cliff of aging program. We just would like to put new pits in because we want the weapons to stay in the stockpile for 30 years and we don't have the 30-year confidence we'd like to have. (Emphasis added. April 27, 2022 Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces (SASC/SF) Subcommittee hearing (excerpted and posted here.). (It's a longer discussion than we can afford here, but for the relatively young W87-0 pits, we believe the public record shows that NNSA does have that confidence.) The jurisdiction most impacted by LANL's plans is Los Alamos County. As of last week, Los Alamos County Council (LACC) had never received this plan, according to LACC Chairman Randy Ryti (email of 8/24/22). As far as we can tell, no New Mexico government, state or local -- and as is likely based on our inquiries thus far, no external federal agency or congressional committee, and no tribe -- has seen this Plan, let alone been apprised of its cost and impacts. The LACC has been asking to see LANL's evolving site plans since late 2019, when an early version of LANL's Plan was briefed to hundreds of construction contractors and shortly thereafter to the County Council ("LANL officials detail potential building boom, Albuquerque Journal, Aug 9, 2019; "LANL Deputy Director Of Operations Discusses Infrastructure Plans And Challenges At Council Work Session," Los Alamos Reporter, Oct 18, 2019). Triad's planners do understand the importance of communicating with outside parties: Collaborative planning with external stakeholders adjacent to the LANL site is critical to ensuring regional context...Appropriate interface with external stakeholders is also important to maintaining a positive image for LANL as a transparent and proactive partner with surrounding communities....Future outreach activities involving the general public and other external stakeholders will be coordinated through/with NNSA... ("Los Alamos National Laboratory Campus Master Plan Communication Strategy," Nov. 2, 2020, pp. 5-6, 8). The Plan also includes the "National Energetic and Engineering Weapons Campus" (NEEWC, pronounced "nuke"), a 17-square-mile campus for engineering and environmental testing site for nuclear weapons and high explosives (for location, see the map at slide 9). As noted in NNSA's announcement of its new Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) process, it is "[b]ecause of comprehensive site planning activities that are under consideration, as well as other reasons, NNSA determined that it was appropriate to revisit the 2008 SWEIS analysis." As of September 2, 2020 -- by which date NNSA had already begun its pit production capital improvement process and knew it would need to increase its pit production workforce by up to 2,000 people and work 24/7 at PF-4, had determined just the opposite -- that it was NOT necessary to revisit the 2008 SWEIS analysis. In other words, as a result of "comprehensive site planning activities" undertaken since September 2020, i.e. this Plan, NNSA now knows its mission will outstrip previous plans. More facilities and activities, with more impacts, will be required. It is impossible to knowledgeably comment on the proper scope of NNSA's proposed SWEIS without knowing what NNSA's plans are. We will seek an extension of NNSA's deadline for scoping comments (currently October 3, 2022) until the public and affected parties have had a chance to receive and analyze these secret plans. Further light is shed by other plutonium planning and management reports we have obtained in heavily redacted form, in partial response to our ongoing FOIA litigation. From these documents and other sources, discussion of which would make this Bulletin very long, we know that LANL has fallen behind in its pit mission and incurred large unbudgeted costs, in part due to the covid pandemic. The probability of meeting statutory deadlines has fallen and risks have risen. Pending that discussion and further litigation developments we will not post those other documents on-line. By the way, NNSA's two-site pit production plan, or any plan involving 24/7 operations at LANL, is not supported by any of its own studies, or those of its consultants. This is not an impregnable juggernaut. It will fail -- that much is certain. The questions are when and how, and with what impacts and harms. ***ENDS*** |
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