Pit production will continue to share space at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s PF-4 Plutonium Facility with other missions for the foreseeable future, the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration told a federal safety agency on Wednesday.
The semi autonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapons agency is upgrading PF-4 to produce multiple war-ready pits some time in the next several years, culminating with at least 30 a year by 2026.
At the same time, the federal Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) has said, PF-4 will remain home to a heat-source plutonium mission that, in the event of the most serious accidents the lab can envision, might pose a greater hazard to public health than the pits.
The lab could mitigate the threat by moving heat-source plutonium — used to power spacecraft or terrestrial craft that need very long-lasting batteries — out of PF-4 and into a modern building with a more sophisticated ventilation system, Joyce Connery, the chair of the DNFSB, said in Santa Fe, N.M., during a board hearing with officials from the lab and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
Such a move “makes a lot of sense” from a safety standpoint, but it could be cost-prohibitive, Connery said, adding that any of the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., the Nevada National Security Site northwest of Las Vegas or even a new building at Los Alamos — something the agency and the lab have explored — could potentially handle the heat-source mission.
For now though, faced with the pressure of cranking out at least 30 pits a year at Los Alamos a mere four years from now, the added cost, labor and time required to remove heat-source work from PF-4 is not in the cards, the head of the NNSA told Connery.
“We are not today planning or funding additional facilities to handle heat-source plutonium,” NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby said in Wednesday’s hearing. “It is in the best interests of the United States in my opinion to not proliferate plutonium facilities [but] to use the plutonium facilities we have as efficiently, effectively and safely as possible.
“Heat sources in PF-4 make sense from that perspective,” Hruby said, though “I couldn’t predict whether we need to relook [at] that” over the next several decades.
