Possible to get 30 pits at Los Alamos before 2030, lab director says

February 17, 2023

By Dan Leone

ALEXANDRIA, VA. — The Los Alamos National Laboratory might still be able to make 30 nuclear-weapon cores before 2030, even though the equipment needed to do it is not supposed to be ready until then, the lab’s director said here Tuesday.

In January, the lab’s owner, the Department of Energy, approved a formal cost and schedule estimate that had the lab’s Los Alamos Plutonium Pit Production Project 30 Base Equipment Installation subproject wrapping up in August 2030. The project will install “the minimum equipment necessary to provide 30 war reserve PPY [pits per year],” according to a memo signed by Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk.

Asked here at the Exchange Monitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit whether, and how, the lab could beat that date, Los Alamos Director Thomas Mason said “oh yeah!”

Mason would not hazard a guess about how much sooner than 2030 the lab could produce the 30 pits, suitable for use in W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile warheads, but he did say that the equipment needed to do it might be installed by 2026: the date by which the military wanted Los Alamos to begin casting at least 30 pits a year.

“In terms of the minimum equipment necessary to produce 30 pits per yer, which would not have any redundancy or anything if there’s equipment breakdown, I think there’s a good chance that we can get that installed in 2026,” Mason told the Monitor. “Now that doesn’t mean that we’ll make 30 pits in 2026.”

To make up for lost time, Mason said, DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) around Christmas told Los Alamos to start reserving large chunks of time to install pit-making equipment at the lab’s PF-4 plutonium facility.

Until the agency ordered the change of tack, PF-4’s day-to-day operations were split between making practice pits — the lab cranked out five in the first fiscal quarter of 2023, Mason said — and installing the equipment necessary to turn the aged facility into a modern weapons manufacturing plant.

Now, Mason said, manufacture of development pits will sometimes be asked to take a back seat to equipment upgrades.

“By giving dedicated access to the installation teams to some of the rooms for a period of time, it’s much more efficient than doing production during the day, switching gears, doing installation on the back shift then switching back to production,” said Mason. “If you can say for two months ‘installation, have at it!’ you’ll get more done.”

The first two-month block of installation-only work at PF-4 began in January, Mason said.

“There’s definitely a desire to pull the schedule forward, get to production faster, increase the margin in case something happens that we don’t anticipate,” Mason said.

To meet the military’s long-term goals of making at least 80 pits a year, the NNSA plans to build a pair of pit plants: one at Los Alamos and the other at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.

The South Carolina plant, which the NNSA thinks will be built by 2036, will be the larger of the two and, according to agency administrator Jill Hruby, could quickly be asked to shoulder a larger production load than initially planned.