Gen. James Cartwright, the former commander of U.S. Strategic Command and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reiterated this week that Los Alamos National Laboratory could increase pit production to meet Pentagon requirements without building a new multi-billion-dollar plutonium facility by adding a second production shift. After Cartwright first made the suggestion at a Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee hearing last week, Los Alamos weapons chief Bret Knapp said the lab had found that approach to be “inadequate” in a previous analysis due to lack of support for analytical chemistry work, which would be provided by the delayed CMRR-NF. “When we looked at this before, really the issue was you didn’t have the floor space, or the floor space would be constrained and you might have to use an adjacent building for a while,” Cartwright told NW&M Monitor. “I absolutely agree with them. It’s not ideal. It’s not what you want to do for the longer term. But if today somebody walked in and said all of this capability in this one particular weapon now found to be defective, we would find ways to make it work at a rate far greater than 20 to 30.” He added: “In a day to day routine, I don’t disagree with them. In an urgent situation, a crisis type situation, we’ll do a lot of things that would not abrogate safety but would certainly put increased stress on the line to be able to do more things than we’re doing, more production than we’re doing.”
He also suggested that a possible move to take the size of the nation’s stockpile to lower numbers by the Obama Administration could alter the pit production requirements, which is why he said he favored delaying a decision on a path forward for CMRR-NF. “I think we have to be fair to NNSA and to the lab and say this is exactly what we need,” Cartwright said. “Tell us how much [pit] reuse we can get based on where we are going and then let them price it, but don’t try to build a facility before you know what the number is actually going to be. You can do planning, but we’re kind of carting and horsing this thing right now.”
Jobs