The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) gave the Department of Energy and its semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) a year to brief the board on improvements to safety at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s pit facility in New Mexico.
The nuclear safety watchdog, in a letter to Secretary of Energy Chris Wright with NNSA administrator Brandon Williams copied at the end, said many safety infrastructure projects at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Plutonium Facility had been “significantly delayed,” even though the quality of existing safety equipment has improved.
“Maintaining momentum for these safety infrastructure projects is more important in light of the issues with the safety analysis,” DNFSB said. While Los Alamos tracks its projects in an annually updated document, the document isn’t formally approved by DOE, the board wrote.
The board said given the “enduring and essential national security mission” of the Plutonium Facility, DOE has 12 months from the date of the letter, Oct. 10, to provide a briefing on actions taken to improve nuclear safety. The briefings will then continue annually until all projects listed in the letter are complete.
Los Alamos would initially make the fissile cores, or plutonium pits, for the first stages of W87-1 warheads, which are to top the Air Force’s planned silo-based Sentinel missiles some time next decade. NNSA produced a “diamond-stamped,” or war-reserve quality, first production unit of a W87-1 plutonium pit in October, but has not disclosed how many pits have been produced since then.
Section 3120 of the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act stipulated that NNSA produce 30 plutonium pits by 2026 at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where plutonium pits were first produced during the Manhattan Project in 1945. In August, Deputy Secretary of Energy James Danly said he is “concerned” about the pace of pit production, and has ordered a special study on pit production at NNSA. NNSA has not commented on the status of this study.