For immediate release Dec 7, 2023

Virtual seminar on issues (and misconceptions) in plutonium warhead core ("pit") production today, 11 am MST

Contact: Greg Mello, 505-265-1200 office, 505-577-8563 cell

Permalink * Prior press releases

Albuquerque, NM -- Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group will be conducting a Zoom seminar on the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA's) program to restart pit production and the early-to-need push for new kinds of nuclear weapons in the crucial decade ahead today at 11 am MST. The seminar will run for no longer than 2 hours.

For those of you in the press, I can only offer my apologies for notifying you at this late moment. We alerted our large mailing list much earlier, but in the welter of competing strong claims on our time here I simply forgot to prepare this press release. Our ducks are far from in a row.

It is already clear that two hours will not be enough to discuss these issues, so there will be another seminar in the immediate future. 

Today's topics are closely related to those explored in the The Final Report of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States (Oct 2023), which were the subject of a public panel discussion on November (see "Posturing Ourselves to Death So Contractors can Thrive," Greg Mello; "Planning for Doomsday," Steven Starr; and the international and historical reflections of Peter Kuznick in the YouTube video.

You must register in advance for this meeting at https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEsd--sqjsqHtXZfxK7YGhYanhGNPw41-Zx. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

As I wrote to our mailing list, in this briefing I want to discuss some of the misconceptions floating around in the news media and elsewhere about pit production, what a better and more practical policy than the present one might be, what pit production at this time is really all about (one of the biggest misconceptions), and why the arms race which LANL pit production aims to enable is doomed to fail. Topics will include:

• The actual purposes of stockpile pit production, so far ahead of any actual stockpile need related to pit aging or any similar malarkey, at LANL (hint: those purposes centrally include increasing, as rapidly as possible, the number of deployable, highly-accurate, MIRVable warheads, greater accuracy being a potent "force multiplier" in nuclear war-fighting);

• Pit aging: why it is not the main driver of pit production; why we cannot say that we know that pits last "100 years or more" as some people are doing;

• Why did the NNSA decide, six years ago, never to build two pit factories, and never to depend on LANL's old plutonium facility -- and why did NNSA change its mind?
  

• What are some of the geographic, engineering, and managerial realities which ensure that the nuclear weapons establishment in the Executive, Congress, and the military will never abandon the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF) until the U.S. needs no more pits?
  

• Why not produce just "10-20" pits per year at LANL for the time being, once production gets going there, pausing or abandoning the SRPPF project? We'll tell you! 
  

Some say we at the Los Alamos Study Group are promoting pit production in South Carolina. We are not. There is a difference between accepting political and engineering realities, on the one hand, and what we all would want, in a more perfect world. I will say again that if the U.S. actually and officially actually wants to build pits in the late 2030s, we are doomed, as I wrote in “The Great Transformation: Nuclear Weapons Policy Considerations for the 116th Congress.” Congress and the military will fund and strongly attempt to build a pit production capability that is deemed adequate, reliable, and enduring. What will be done with that facility cannot be known at this time.

By way of a teaser and in case you cannot attend, I am appending the following informal remarks regarding some of the recent press articles we have seen. These are only a few of the articles we will review today and at the next seminar, and in writing elsewhere. The references for these informal remarks, where not cited, can be found on our pit pages here (for LANL and overall) and here (for South Carolina), and the references cited there. Ask me today if you need references more quickly.

The last thing we want to do is to pick on hard-working journalists, but there are so many misconceptions floating around that something must be done. Hence these notes.

• "Despite unknowns, NNSA plunges ahead on plutonium pits," David Kramer, Physics Today, April 2023, pp. 22-25.

No errors, excellent information, some of which is not available elsewhere (e.g. the absence of any reusable pits designed for insensitive high explosives). Comments:

• Fetter says "a more a definite pit lifetime estimate (sic -- will be warhead-specific) should be completed before the NNSA proceeds with mass production." This could be misunderstood. We concur to the extent nature allows such knowledge, but in the meantime an adequate, enduring manufacturing facility is seen as needed. Construction of such a facility should start ASAP if the U.S. wants to retain the choice of whether to retain nuclear weapons or not. The construction and startup timeline for such a facility is already constrained relative to needs for the current stockpile. If the design teams were to be disbanded, in practical terms they could never be reassembled, given the accelerating fiscal deterioration and other crises now at hand, on top of strongly competing demands for scarce skilled labor and resources.
  

• von Hippel says "There has been a loss of confidence due to the fact that LANL hasn't been able to produce reliably." This is factually incorrect. LANL has not been asked to produce reliably. LANL does not have, and has never had, the equipment to produce reliably and will not have that equipment until, according to NNSA as quoted by GAO, March 2032. The "loss of confidence" mentioned describes a feeling. That's not what's going on. It's the reality, as can be heard in many congressional hearings: the U.S. has no functional pit factory and will not have one for a long time.
  
  In more detail: We don't know when LANL might make 30 WR pits but believe it will be after the conclusion of the "30 Base" subproject of LAP4, which achieves CD-4 in "August 2030...4 years later than the high end of the preliminary date range approved at the alternative selection milestone in April 2021" GAO-23-104402, pp. 43-44. GAO says the LAP4 "30 Reliable" subproject will achieve CD-4 in March 2032 (Ibid., pp. 39-40), which in my mind is the earliest LANL date for the reliable production of 30 WR ppy, assuming all of LANL's problems can be solved. Please note the public remarks saying this by NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby on Feb. 14, 2023 (audio, 54:28 to 56:19).

• "Why is the US ramping up production of plutonium 'pits' for nuclear weapons?", Edward Helmore, The Guardian, Nov. 26, 2023.
  
  
• "All 1,900 submarine-launched missiles would be refreshed after the first 800 plutonium ‘pits’ are installed in the Sentinel ICBM systems." Not the missiles, but the 1.920 warheads. The Guardian does not know that the first "800" pits are for W87-1s. That's just a guess, following an earlier von Hippel article. "And in South Carolina, work is beginning..." Oh, it doesn't say that, does it. Work in SC is an afterthought.
  
  
• Increasing geopolitical tensions with Russia and a militarily expansionist China are behind a $1.5tn US effort to modernize the US nuclear arsenal..." Nothing else is behind this huge effort?
  
  
• "But the prospect of placing new missiles, with potentially more warheads, in the US heartlands is under scrutiny for its logic. “Why plant a $100-billion nuclear ‘kick me’ sign on the country’s breadbasket?” asked the authors of a report in Scientific American this month." The "destroy me" sign is already there.
  
  
• "The issue is that plutonium degrades over time, but estimates vary on how quickly or at what point the pits become too soft [sic] to be usable." It is one issue, but not the main one for the Los Alamos pit work. Soft? My knowledge is incomplete but, speaking with less confidence than I would like, I think the adjective should be "hard," as in harder to compress.
  
  
• Most are already 40-plus years old, but some studies say they could be good up to 80 years. The Livermore lab in northern California announced in 2012 that it had found “no unexpected aging issues … in plutonium that has been accelerated to an equivalent of ~150 years of age”. Plutonium aging is not the whole story of pit aging.
  
  
• "According to the Scientific American report, the first 800 new pits would go to the Sentinel program, and then all 1,900 US submarine-launched missiles would be refreshed." See above. Also gravity bombs and cruise missiles -- the whole shebang. They do not know the order of pit replacement.
  
  
• "The new warheads would also be shock-resistant, or “insensitive” to accidental detonation that could disperse plutonium." That report was wrong.
  
  
• "But there is now no pit-production expertise at the South Carolina facility and cost estimates have already grown from $3.6bn to over $11bn for a third fewer pits. Pit production expertise is or can be made mobile, and can be disseminated via training, and is not the limiting factor. "A third fewer" than what? SRPPF is now being tasked to make more pits than originally tasked at CD-1, not less. Which is part of why the cost has risen. See GAO.
  
  
• "Questions over US nuclear weapons re-entered public conscience with Russian posturing over the use of battlefield nuclear weapons in Ukraine, then the overflight of a Chinese spy balloon close to areas critical to US nuclear deterrence in January. Huh? Had to get a dig at "bad Russia" and "bad China" in there, neither of which are factually true. It's de rigueur to establish onesself as a serious establishment journalist.
  
  
• "Those anxieties resurfaced in a recent weeks when a since-reprimanded Israeli minister speculated on dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, and the deployment of an 18,000-ton Ohio-class nuclear submarine to the Mediterranean." That sub did not carry nuclear weapons, so what's the point?
  
  
• "The US spends about 5% of its military budget on nuclear weapons.Last year, the Biden administration threw its weight behind the sprucing up of the US nuclear arsenal." It merely continued what had been started. There were no significant changes.
  
  
• "Frank N von Hippel, a US physicist and co-director of the program on science and global security at Princeton University, says the effort to manufacture new plutonium pits might be justified if a crisis existed. But without a firm understanding of how long plutonium pits take to degrade, the effort and costs to restart production may be unnecessary." (Emeritus, not co-director.) This is not at all what Frank says elsewhere, where he advocates for starting up pit manufacturing at LANL, a program which can be reliably extrapolated to cost $20 billion through 2032, using NNSA's budget requests. The live, real questions are not whether to invest in pit production, because that is happening and will continue to happen, but when to start up production, how much to do, and in what facilities, where. Not "if." “Many of us thought the problem on nuclear weapons was over at the end of the cold war. I remember a strategic air command officer saying we were on a glide path. But we’re not on a glide path any more,” von Hippel said." No one we knew ever thought that. Nostalgia for the 90's is blinding many people, including people in the highest places in this administration, to present-day realities.

• "A New Nuclear Arms Race?", Andy Oppenheimer, Forecast International, Nov. 15, 2023.


• "In 2018, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) – the agency responsible for the production and maintenance of the nuclear stockpile – formulated a crash plan to build pit production lines at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina, with a combined annual output of 80 pits." Accurate. The new plan was contrary to all prior plans and was unsupported by any analysis of alternatives, contrary to DOE O. 413.3B and common sense. The Program Secretarial Officer had previously ruled out in June 2017 relying on PF-4 for enduring pit production, as well as ruled out splitting production between sites.
  
  
• "The lab’s main role over many years has been maintenance of the nuclear stockpile." Not maintenance. Design, development, testing, surrogate testing, and surveillance. LANL does no maintenance. Intact nuclear weapons never come to LANL.
  
  
• "In this new project, under the direction of the NNSA, lab workers are preparing for renewed production of at least 30 plutonium pits per year by 2030." The earliest LANL will be able to reliably produce 30 war reserve pits per year is when its "30 Reliable" equipment set is fully installed, according to NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby. This is currently expected to occur in 2032.
  
  
• After the closure of the country’s prime plutonium manufacturing plant at Rocky Flats in 1992, where 1,000 to 2,000 pits were produced every year, a highly reinforced 236,000 sq-ft (21,925 sq-m) facility built at LANL earlier in 1978 became the first Department of Energy (DoE) facility capable of producing plutonium cores." It was finished in 1975 or so and opened for business in 1978. It was designed in the early 1970s under looser safety standards, for very different purposes. Originally, it was built to house 100 workers. Now it houses 1,000, and 24/7 work has begun. Most of the floor space cited is needed for mechanical and electrical equipment -- PF-4's laboratory and production space totals ~60,000 sq. ft. or 5,574 m2.
  
  
• "Although initially established for plutonium R&D, in 2003 the Plutonium Facility Building 4 (PF-4) at Los Alamos produced the nation’s stockpile quality (first war reserve) plutonium. The facility’s heavily reinforced concrete exterior walls, floor and roof are built to withstand extreme weather events and earthquakes." But much of the interior equipment is not built to that standard, and the DNFSB does not believe LANL has shown that the facility can meet DOE standards for possible exposure to the public. There are many other problems, including the fact that the facility is just 3,000 feet from residences, and serious security issues. PF-4 does not meet modern nuclear safety standards. As a legacy facility, problems are expected to increase, and in a 2020 report to Congress NNSA did not expect the facility lifetime to go beyond 2045. Other NNSA and LANL planning documents also project PF-4 end-of-life or end-of-mission in the same general timeframe.
  
  
• "In 2006, Congress instructed the DoE to focus on producing pits at this facility." No, that's not true. In 1996, LANL was asked to be an "interim," pit production facility, limited to a <20 pits per year, until a proper pit facility could be built. This program was called "Plutonium Sustainment and cost about $200 million/year in round numbers. That continued until 2018.
  
  
• "Already being produced at LANL are “development pits,” which are pending requisite quality finalization to be incorporated in warheads." No, they are taken apart. The first war reserve pit is currently expected in FY25. Reliable WR pit production at LANL is delayed by 6 years from the 2026 requirement. That in turn is delayed from prior estimates.
  
  
• "The NNSA plan also includes replacing all 1,900 US SLBM (submarine-launched ballistic missile) warheads with new ones incorporating shock-resistant (“insensitive”) high explosive technology." This is not true. There is no such plan. The Navy hates IHE, which has design inconveniences and inefficiencies. The Navy believes its proven procedures make its more compact CHE warheads as safe as USAF IHE warheads.
  
  
• "The NNSA proposes to first build 800 pits for new U.S. ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missile) warheads deployed in 400 underground silos in various locations in the northern US Great Plains." The actual number is classified, and is subject to change due to all the pit production delays and competing demands.
  
  
• "The current Minuteman III ICBM currently carries two warhead types, the W78 and W87. This is to be replaced by a new ICBM. The labs would like to replace the older W78 with an updated version of the W87, which has improved explosive sensitivity safety features." But not improved explosive sensitivity safety features over the W87-0, of which there are more than enough to equip all the Sentinel missiles with one warhead each. The real reason is not the IHE. The real reasons are greater MIRVability (an increased number of warheads over what would have to be a single-warhead W87-0) and greater accuracy, which is a force multiplier. The W78 is relatively inaccurate.
  
  
• "The first 800 pits would equip the W87-1 warheads. These would take ten years to produce by the two NNSA proposed pit production facilities operating at full design capacity. The U.S. reportedly already has 540 W87 warheads which means one warhead on each of its 400 ICBMs." Or 450 if all silos were used. Again, that 800 number is not known. Nota bene, the 80 ppy tasking will produce about 103 ppy on average.
  
  
• "Arms control advocates argue these efforts would only be necessary to increase the number of warheads on each ICBM from one to three." Correct and important.
  
  
• "...[A]ssuming that this agreement [New START] is extended in 2026. Why assume it be extended? This does not look likely.
  
  
• "There is also the inevitable question of cost. The original NNSA estimate in 2017 for a production capacity at the Savannah River facility to manufacture 80 warhead pits per year was $3.6 billion. This has since risen to $11.1 billion in 2023 – but to make only 50 pits annually." According to NNSA, the capacity of the SRS facility will be greater than 50 ppy. It already was to have >50 ppy capacity in 2021, with more than one production line to provide internal resilience according to project staff, and since then it has been redesigned to have more latent capacity. The "80" means at least 80 in 9 out of 10 years. NNSA models this at an average of 103 ppy. I believe the baseline capacity of SRPPF will certainly be this much, with more latent capacity available in the remaining "white space" and/or from multiple shifts. NNSA expects the smaller LANL facility to cost more to start up than the larger one at SRS. Pits at LANL will cost ~3-4 times as much as pits from SRS.
  
  
• "The currently installed pits in the warheads inventory are estimated as 60 years or more, bringing arms control advocates at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to recommend that LANL prove it can produce 10-20 pits in a year before committing to further expense of building more production lines." That article was riddled with factual errors, as noted in my comments published there. This "60 (remaining) years" is one of them. We don't know that.
  
  
• "Added to these concerns are fears that the NNSA designs, as they are new, would need to be tested – leading to demands to resume nuclear tests." This is ridiculous. The U.S. will not return to full explosive testing, for nonproliferation reasons. Already by 2005, certification of new designs without testing was available. Now the capabilities are much, much greater. "For some years now, computer modelling of nuclear weapon processes has replaced testing..." Not just this. There are also physical experiments of great sophistication.
  
  
• Based on research at both national nuclear labs, an independent group of science advisors (the Jason Group) advised the U.S. administration in 2006 that the plutonium in existing pits would be functional for a hundred years. They did not say that. See Physics Today, which got this right. Please read the more recent JASON letter report. Pit aging is not the main factor driving pit production right now.
  
  
• "Mired in the Ukraine War with Russia’s – and Putin’s – internal solidarity somewhat weakened since the notorious Wagner Group’s attempted coup, the possibility of nuclear escalation should not be overlooked." No, Russia's internal solidarity has not weakened.
  
  
• "NATO is stronger than any time since the end of the Cold War..." Well, Well, NATO's proxy Ukraine is being defeated, a huge embarrassment to NATO. After this one, a number of geopolitical statements are made which I think are incorrect or irrelevant.
  
  
• "Much of the renewed U.S. nuclear weapons efforts may be said to be in response to the respective buildups by Russia and China." Not really. They have been in the works for many years.
  
  
• "However, the production by the U.S. of plutonium cores at LANL will only at first produce enough to replace aging warhead components, rather than increase its inventory." Not exactly. This statement is contradicted by an earlier part of the article. The US has ~200 W78s deployed and could deploy 600, plus 200 W87-0s. With W87-1 at full buildout, which may or may not happen, the US could deploy 1,200 warheads in 400 silos, or 1,350 in 450 silos, and they would all be extremely accurate, which is a force multiplier. LANL pits are NOT desired, or going to be produced if they are ever produced, in order to replace aging pits, but rather to make a new warhead to allow MIRVing Sentinel and increase both the number and overall accuracy of the ICBM fleet. People who support LANL pit production are supporting this.
  
  
• "To counter these accelerating and increasingly linked Russian and Chinese nuclear threats, strengthening the nuclear deterrent is the obvious U.S. response to ensure at least its strategic equality against these decades-long adversaries. This may signal a new nuclear arms race, which may be unavoidable." Not only is this avoidable, it is stupid for multiple reasons, one of which is that the U.S. does not have the industrial base, resources, or skill set to conduct a nuclear arms race. We can stimulate others to develop new and more nuclear weapons, as we are doing, but we cannot and will not be able to keep up in the arms race we stimulate.
  
  

•  "Chess, cards and catnaps in the heart of America’s nuclear weapons complex", Alicia Guzman, Searchlight New Mexico, Nov. 8, 2023.
  

This is a great article for a number of reasons -- attention to detail, the thoughtful interweaving of human stories and regional context with public policy, good interviews with a range of people saying interesting and true things, including me. And no factual errors. I am not going to go over all the many things that are right and important in this article. For those who are in positions of influence over funding, we sent over the whistleblower at the core of the article and helped out in a number of other ways as well, beyond what readers can see.

It does say, "Plutonium pits, the group stated, “have credible lifetimes of at least 100 years,” meaning the current stock was in robust middle age." Part of the recurring problem about this "we know pits will last for 100years" claim lies in the ambiguity of the language used in 2006, like the word "credible" quoted here, which is then interpreted wishfully. Estimates of maximum pit age are not made to be believable. Decisions are and will be made by defense officials based on what is known with high confidence. Again, underlying the wishful thinking on this issue is, I believe, nostalgia for the 90's, when the arms control community had a share of power in the Yeltsin-Clinton years. Those days, which are unconsciously seen as normative by many people, are long gone.

***ENDS***