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For immediate release: February 24, 2025
Contact: Greg Mello: 505-265-1200 office, 505-577-8563 cell, Bex Hampton, 505-545-9578 cell
Permalink * Prior press releases
Albuquerque, NM -- According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, newly-confirmed Energy Secretary Chris Wright is visiting Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) today and will visit Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) tomorrow, fulfilling a confirmation-hearing promise he made to Senator Heinrich.
In that hearing, Wright noted that the U.S. ability to produce plutonium warhead cores ("pits") for new nuclear weapons has collapsed to "nearly nothing.” That single comment was his only reference to pit production.
There is little doubt that preparations for pit production, now LANL's largest program activity, will be major theme of Wright's LANL tour.
Quick partial pit production background
In May 2018, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) decided to try to make pits at two sites: LANL in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina. As a result of the two-site strategy, acquiring pit production capability, according to former NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby, is "the largest and most complex infrastructure undertaking at NNSA since shortly after the Manhattan Project," with a total acquisition cost, again according to NNSA, of between $28 and $37 billion.*
[*If program costs are included through the end of the pit-related construction at LANL (2032) and through the initiation of production at SRS (2035), we estimate the total acquisition cost for pit production will lie in the neighborhood of $44.5 billion.]
Pits are the only nuclear weapons component for which NNSA has decided to build two factories. NNSA's May 2018 decision reversed its October 2017 decision to make pits at a single site (p. 82; see also this executive summary).
This reversal occurred after protests led by senators Reed and McCain, and then by senators Heinrich and Udall, joined by Congressman Ben Ray Lujan. All of these congresspersons argued for sourcing all future pits from existing LANL facilities augmented by underground production "modules." The "modular approach" was deeply criticized by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2016 and by NNSA in 2017 (p. 81) and is not being pursued today.
In its decision, NNSA decided to use LANL's old PF-4 facility for one of the two production sites, reversing its decision of the previous June (pp. 47-48, 76-77).
The Los Alamos Study Group has argued that pit production at LANL is wasteful, extremely expensive, and risky. Pit production could be delayed a decade if the W87-1 warhead were delayed or canceled. See also this short summary, among other work here.
The draft Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) for LANL includes actions to prepare for "surge" production of up to 80 pits per year (ppy).
Study Group director Greg Mello:
"Before going to LANL, Secretary Wright knew next to nothing about pit production policy. After he leaves today he will know even less, because everything he thinks he knows will have been supplied by NNSA and LANL and much of it won't be true. He'll get the "company line," literally.
"Senator Heinrich has been at the forefront of forcing NNSA to build a pit factory at LANL, despite the age and capacity limitations of LANL's facilities. No doubt Senator Heinrich is working with LANL and NNSA to impress the new Secretary of Energy with LANL's importance in several potential growth areas, not just pit production.
Assuming they are ever made, pits from LANL's enormously expensive operation will cost in the neighborhood of $100 million apiece, roughly 200 times what they would cost if they were made of solid gold. It is an incomprehensibly wasteful program, one that requires a lot of politicking to make happen -- which is what we see today.
"LANL pits are only being made, IF they are ever made, in order to add extra warheads to the proposed new Sentinel missile. There are plenty of existing, modern, "safe," accurate, long-lived warheads for that missile system -- if it is ever deployed, God forbid. Using multiple warheads on each missile is not currently done because it is destabilizing and because the New START treaty prevents deploying additional warheads overall. New START expires next February.
"As it turns out, the LANL pit production planned is not endorsed by any analysis of alternatives as would be normally required by DOE regulations.
"The waste and extravagance in laboratories such as LANL, and in programs such as Sentinel -- now reliably projected to cost over $200 billion to build -- is so vast it is hard to take it in. It is equaled only by the unimaginable horror that would ensue if any of these weapons were actually used."
***ENDS***
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