Secretary of Energy Chris Wright confirmed Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has “just begun” pit production in testimony Wednesday to the House Appropriations Energy and Water subcommittee on the fiscal 2027 budget request for the Department of Energy.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), ranking member of the subcommittee, asked Wright about reforms to project management at DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and when Congress will receive a “complete life cycle cost estimate” for pit production. That’s when plutonium metal is processed into a sphere that constitutes the fissile core of a nuclear weapon.
“GAO [the Government Accountability Office] reported in February that cost overruns on NNSA’s 28 major construction projects have doubled, more than doubled, rising to $4.8 billion,” Kaptur said. She added “the plutonium pit production program is split across two sites, will likely cost well over $20 billion and still does not have a comprehensive life cycle cost estimate.”
Wright agreed the “management track record over the last decade or two” at NNSA has “not been good.” He said the department has “realigned incentives” and “responsibilities.”
“I’m happy to say, I think we’re seeing rapid progress there,” Wright replied. “The pit production at Los Alamos has ramped up rapidly. We are both moving out old legacy equipment while actually manufacturing pits.”
In accordance with federal law, NNSA must be able to produce 80 or more pits yearly to replenish the nuclear stockpile. The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF) in South Carolina will eventually work in tandem with Los Alamos to produce plutonium pits, or the fissile cores of a nuclear weapon, for the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
“Our goal is to get 100 pits produced cumulatively during this administration, and then get to that rate of 80 a year as soon as 2030 as possible,” Wright said. “And we’ll still have just the Los Alamos facility, you know, through that time period. But it is to your point, it’s critical that we ramp this up as quickly as possible so we can maintain and modernize our stockpile and our weapons.”
Savannah River is expected to make upwards of 50 pits once SRPPF completes construction at an expected date of 2035, and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is expected to make upwards of 30. NNSA also expects SRPPF’s design to be 90% complete in 2026.
Wright said “don’t wait” until Savannah River Site is finished to start pit production, and instead “come on out to Los Alamos and work with us in pit production today and developing the new lines and how we’re going to manufacture this going forward.”
Wright, in response to a later question by subcommittee chairman Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) on when NNSA will meet the mandated pit requirement, spoke to the training center at Savannah River, which received the greenlight to begin construction in March, as a way of “getting these technologies together.”
Wright added, “I think we’re seeing a rapid acceleration in our capacity to build and construct pits, and that will come with a very critical eye to the design of the facility that will be at Savannah River for pit production. We’re learning because we’re producing pits again for the first time in decades. Maybe the original plan we laid out wasn’t ideal, maybe we could be smarter.”
DOE released a Budget in Brief document that justified the White House’s toplines and also went into detail about subsections. The details include funding for each of the labs and a 35% increase to weapons activities, or its programs for producing parts of the nuclear warheads, bringing it up to $27.4 billion. It also included an 83% increase in production of the fissile core of the nuclear weapon, or the plutonium pit, bringing it up to $2.4 billion for fiscal 2027 if enacted.
In February, David Beck, deputy administrator for Defense Programs at NNSA, sent a memo requiring the agency to revitalize production capacity and complete modifications at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Plutonium Facility 4, particularly to “enable production of 100 pits and achieve a sustained production rate of at least 60 pits per year and begin production.”
The memo did not specify what was meant by “begin production.” Thom Mason, director of Los Alamos, said last month the lab was “now ahead of schedule” to get 30 pits per year by 2028, and that Los Alamos “met or exceeded” all production objectives.
Los Alamos would initially make cores 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. Savannah River will make cores for the W93 warheads, which the Navy will use in its submarine-launched ballistic missiles. The W93 warhead will begin production in the mid-2030s.