MORE DETAILS ABOUT ALTERNATE PU STRATEGY EMERGING

More details about the Obama Administration’s alternate plutonium strategy are emerging, including plans to build a series of smaller facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory to house capabilities that had been planned for the now-deferred Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility. Los Alamos Director Charlie McMillan first mentioned the approach in February, but an April 8 letter from acting National Nuclear Security Administration chief Neile Miller and Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics and Nuclear Weapons Council Chairman Frank Kendall reveals new details about the concept, which they say will not only address capabilities that had been planned for CMRR-NF but also help address aging issues at Los Alamos’ Plutonium Facility. “The concept would provide means to transfer higher operational risk activities out of PF-4, thereby extending PF-4 operational lifetime while enabling production capacity enhancements and sufficient analytical support to production,” Miller and Kendall wrote in letters to the chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. The committees had raised questions about the NNSA’s deferral of work on CMRR-NF and blocked the NNSA’s $120 million reprogramming request over the concerns. In their letters to Congress, Miller and Kendall called the reprogramming “critical” to achieving an interim capacity to produce 30 plutonium pits per year by 2021.