Los Alamos National Laboratory has successfully manufactured the first approved plutonium pit as part of an effort to modernize the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal.

The National Nuclear Security Administration announced Wednesday it had “diamond-stamped” the new bomb core the day before, essentially deeming it ready to deploy to the stockpile. The pit, manufactured with recycled plutonium, is destined for the W87-1 nuclear warhead.

“I am proud of the important role our laboratory played in leading this critical mission for our nation’s security,” Thom Mason, director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, said in a statement. “I want to recognize the tireless dedication of our workforce over the last several years. … This mission is an example of ‘big science’ at work, an effort Oppenheimer established when Los Alamos was first founded nearly 80 years ago and a legacy that our nation’s laboratories and plants continue today.”

The warhead will replace an aging nuclear weapon, according to a November 2023 fact sheet from the National Nuclear Security Administration, and includes “advanced safety features.”

“The W87-1 will provide enhanced safety and security compared to the legacy W78 but does not provide new military capabilities,” the document says.

Plutonium used in the pit — a hollow, bowling ball-size bomb trigger — was recycled from several old pits. Decayed elements are removed, cleaning up the plutonium for reuse, LANL spokesperson Steven Horak wrote in an email.

Although LANL manufactured the pit, other national laboratories left their fingerprints on the final product.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California designed the pit and the Kansas City National Security Campus produced non-nuclear components.

“This complex effort executed by our mission partners represents an important step on our path to restoring and modernizing NNSA’s capability to produce plutonium pits at the quantities needed to support military requirements set by the Department of Defense,” Marvin Adams, deputy administrator for defense programs, said in a statement.

LANL is committed to producing 30 plutonium pits per year. In February, a prototype passed key tests.

“One starling does not a summer make,” said Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group, which has been critical of the lab’s mission to ramp up plutonium pit production.

Despite the successful production of one pit — which Mello called “unnecessary” and “costly” — he said he thinks the desired production rate is a long way off.

“It’s just a very different story to make one pit, one time, than to make a reliable number of pits and be prepared to do that with the infrastructure and the staffing required,” Mello said.

Horak wrote in an email the lab is making “steady progress.”

“We are confident that we will be able to meet NNSA’s goal of establishing the capacity to produced at least 30 pits per year,” he wrote.

The lab previously produced pits for research purposes from 2007 to 2011. During previous campaigns, the lab has successfully made pits at a rate of approximately 10 per year, Horak wrote.

To prepare for pit production, the federal government and lab have been bolstering its workforce and budget. Between fiscal year 2019 and fiscal year 2024, the number of employees and subcontractors has jumped from 12,500 to 18,000, and the budget increased 80% to a total $5.2 billion.

James Rickman, a former lab employee and Los Alamos County councilor, said during his 24 years at LANL, there were questions about the feasibility of pit production.

“The fact that Los Alamos was able to actually nail it speaks a lot to, not only the scientific side of the workforce, but also to the grit, the true grit of the workforce being able to persevere and knuckle down and get it right,” Rickman said.

But as a longtime Los Alamos resident, Rickman said he has concerns about ongoing safety incidents at the lab during the ramp-up to pit production.

He worries about LANL following in the footsteps of the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado, which at one time produced 1,000 pits per year before being shut down in 1989, leaving LANL as the only plutonium facility in the country.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, production at Rocky Flats, accidents and spills resulted in soil and water contamination with “hazardous chemicals and radioactive constituents.”

“We all know what happened, and it’s not a good story. It’s not an enviable story,” Rickman said. “And now, Los Alamos is moving into that space.”

Published comment by Greg Mello:

Jim, I am not sure that I see the "true grit" of the overpaid LANL workforce here. I see good people led into building weapons of mass destruction by the lure of a high salary and a mistaken notion of prestige. This has happened because the rest of us have not been successful in changing federal and state policies to provide for more constructive alternatives, and other institutions in our culture have not provided the moral leadership society needs.

There is nothing at all heroic about making pits. Each one of these pits will be the dark heart of a warhead with the explosive power of 600,000,000 pounds of TNT. That's an explosion 20 times the size of Hiroshima. Such a warhead detonated over Santa Fe -- say above the corner of Cerrillos Road and St. Michael's Drive, would destroy all of Santa Fe. All of it. Every building and most likely, every person, given that there would be nobody left to provide medical aid, food, or water in the event of a war with such weapons. They are doomsday devices, plain and simple. There is no military purpose for such "weapons," which inherently do not discriminate between military and non-military objects and persons, and violate international law even as a deterrent, let alone as augmentation to a nuclear arsenal the U.S. is committed by law to dismantle, not build up.

What Mr. Coghlan writes below is partly true, but obscures the fact that he and his colleagues have actually endorsed this mission for LANL for two decades and still do so today, as far as we can tell. Do you see any actual opposition to LANL pit production in what is said below? We don't. There's complaining, to be sure, some of it factual. As he has said elsewhere, he endorses LANL's pit mission as "better" than building pits in the brand-new facility in South Carolina currently under renovation for this purpose, which is meant to replace LANL's old, less-safe facility for this mission a decade or more from now. Nuclear Watch likes LANL for pit production because it is, he believes, inherently limited and not very competent. Alas in doing so, Nuclear Watch sends a very mixed message. In supporting LANL pit production, Nuclear Watch supports making pits right now, instead of much later, when they actually might be "needed," to the extent nuclear weapons are themselves "needed."

Quickly, what Coghlan says about knowing that pits will last 100 years is not true. Some pits might last that long, but that is not what the 2006 study, or subsequent reviews, said. Coghlan knows this. Coghlan and others use this so-called "fact" to argue that the Savannah River Site pit facility should be halted and all pit production should come to LANL. Also, the notion that nuclear testing might be "needed," or that the new warheads to be produced might not be certifiable, is also not true. Also, the $2 trillion is not for modernization only, which is the smaller part of the total; it also includes deployment and maintenance of the existing arsenal, so that figure is exaggerated by a factor of more than two. Coghlan knows this. Also, of the 20,000 or so pits stored at Pantex, only a fraction are reusable, and these "assets" are also slowly aging out. This too is obvious and widely known. All these misstatements wouldn't matter much, except that they are being used to form a rickety scaffold for the notion that LANL, for all its faults, could and should make all the pits for the U.S. arsenal -- starting right now, when we all agree they are not needed.