FORMER LANL DIRECTOR RIPS NNSA FOR BURDENSOME OVERSIGHT

Former Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Sig Hecker told the Albuquerque Journal this week that he’s still not comfortable with the nation’s understanding of the lifetime of plutonium pits, and in an article that was published yesterday, he pointed a finger at the burdensome requirements that the NNSA has placed on its nuclear weapons laboratories. So much paperwork has been required by the NNSA that little work is actually accomplished, Hecker told the Journal. “By the time you add all those up—six, seven, eight layers—the poor person that’s supposed to do work in a glove box, for example, is so handcuffed that he can’t get anything done,” he said. The result, he said, is that, “We have never done enough of those experiments that would make me feel more comfortable with plutonium lifetimes in pits. So as far as I’m concerned, we still haven’t demonstrated that these pits can last 50, 60, 80 or 100 years as some people claim.”