80-plus pits needed annually in future; Savannah River to pick up the slack, NNSA admin says

February 17, 2023

By Dan Leone

ALEXANDRIA, VA. — With delays piling up for its two planned plutonium pit factories, the National Nuclear Security Administration already believes it will have to exceed the military’s minimum annual order for the nuclear weapon cores, the head of the agency said here Tuesday.

“We anticipate that due to all the different things going on that we actually will have years that we can already see where we’ll need more than” the minimum of 80 pits annually that federal law and the military require, Jill Hruby, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said here at the Exchange Monitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit.

“My belief and the enterprise knows this pretty well is the increase over minimum should be at Savannah River,” Hruby said.

The NNSA is building pit plants at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. Los Alamos will notionally be capable of making at least 30 pits a year while Savannah River is supposed to make 50 a year.

The first batches of new pits the NNSA makes will be for the W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile warhead, one of two that will tip the Sentinel missile the Air Force plans to begin deploying in 2030 to replace the Minuteman III fleet. The W87-1 will be the second warhead to be installed on Sentinel. W87-0, a Minuteman warhead with old pits adapted for flight on the successor missile, will be first.

Both of NNSA’s pit plants, which are running behind schedule, were being designed to exceed their production quotas, mostly by adding shifts. NNSA thinks the Savannah River plant will open about six years later than hoped, in 2036, while the Los Alamos National Laboratory should be able to make 30 pits a year by 2030 or so, the agency said. That’s about four years later than hoped, though the NNSA has said there may be ways to reach the hoped-for throughput earlier.

But when it comes to picking up the slack, the job will fall to Savannah River, not Los Alamos.

“We really do need Los Alamos to make 30 pits per year but also do plutonium science and process development and so the way I think about this is 30 pits per year at Los Alamos and 50 or more at Savannah River,” Hruby said here.

The NNSA administrator broadly attributed the delays to generally poor conditions for the construction industry and the skilled building trades, which she had were worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“These are big projects and they’re happening, it’s just we’re running into problems,” Hruby said.