Albuquerque and Santa Fe, NM --  This past Friday (October 16), the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced that its plutonium warhead core ("pit") factory, under construction at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina, had cleared a major milestone ("Critical Decisions Two and Three," CD-2/3), allowing for construction on all its subprojects, not just some. 

Study Group director Greg Mello: 

"The new construction cost baseline at SRPPF is roughly comparable with previous estimates. However a new cost variable is represented by the estimated further 3+ year schedule delay, which would introduce additional program costs. The additional program costs at SRS are likely to approach $3 billion for those three years, which in our own tally of construction plus program costs would bring the overall facility acquisition cost at SRS to the $32 B range. 

[To make these estimates and those which follow we have informally updated these June 2026 historical tallies and estimates with today's new information.] 

"The comparable figure for acquiring pit production capability at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is also $32 B, including construction and program costs through 2034, the current estimated completion date. 

"We estimate future pit factory acquisition costs at LANL to be $18 B, vs future acquisition costs at SRS of $24 B, including construction and operations at each site through 2034 and 2038 respectively. 

"NNSA promised a baseline for the flagship LANL pit project, the Los Alamos Plutonium Pit Production Project (LAP4), by Sept. 30 of this year (p. 66). So the public, Congress, the Pentagon, and NNSA itself do not know, within any reasonably tight estimate, what the LANL pit production effort is going to cost or how long it will take. All we have are the rough estimates from the most recent presidential budget request. Now that SRS has finally produced a baseline for its project, where is LANL's baseline? 

"As we have often pointed out, the SRS project, when completed, can support the entire U.S. stockpile for decades to come -- and this is what Congress and the Pentagon will be looking at, like it or not. The LANL project cannot. In the meantime, all parties agree that there is no pit-aging-related need to make pits for at least another decade if not two. 

"From these facts we conclude that, in the absence of arms racing, there is no sound justification for pit production at LANL beyond technology demonstration and training. Meanwhile building SRPPF does not require using it at maximum capacity. 

"Please see the briefings and analyses at https://lasg.org/MPF2/first_page.html for further background."