WASHINGTON — The Pentagon and the National Nuclear Security Administration should reconsider their decision to make nuclear-weapon cores in two states beginning in 2030 after yet another study concluded the plan cannot meet a White House production deadline, a key lawmaker said this week in a hearing here.
“The Institute for Defense Analyses found that none of the options analyzed by the NNSA [National Nuclear Security Administration] can be expected to provide 80 pits per year by 2030 and none of the options were demonstrably better than the others,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) told Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, during a Wednesday hearing of the Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee.
The Donald Trump administration last year directed the NNSA to annually produce at least 80 fissile plutonium pits by 2030. The NNSA later decided to split production between a facility it is upgrading at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a new pit plant to be built on a partially constructed plutonium disposal facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
To comply with a congressional mandate in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, the NNSA paid the Virginia-based Institute for Defense Analyses to vet a few agency-provided options for future pit production, including the split-state approach that NNSA and the Pentagon prefer: manufacturing 30 pits a year at Los Alamos starting in 2026 and 50 pits a year at Savannah River by 2030.
The other three options the institute examine involve Los Alamos-only pit plans.
Lord told Heinrich the split-state approach provides “multiple options to meet our requirements” for future pit production, and a way to “mitigate any type of catastrophes we might have in one [pit plant] or the other.” Lord is also chair of the joint DOE-Pentagon Nuclear Weapons Council, which sets nuclear weapons acquisition policy.
When the Institute for Defense Analyses study was delivered to Congress in April, the NNSA said only that the report found all four production options are “potentially achievable.” Heinrich, ranking member of the strategic forces subcommittee and a staunch ally of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, provided a crucial caveat Wednesday, when he said “potentially achievable” did not mean potentially achievable by 2030.
The NNSA has declined to release the Institute for Defense Analyses study publicly because it contained unclassified controlled nuclear information.
Previous NNSA-chartered studies, including an analysis of alternatives and an engineering analysis by Parsons Government Services, estimated that neither the Los Alamos-only pit plants nor the two-state strategy would produce 80 pits annually by 2030.
“I would like to ask that in light of this report, that you report back to the committee on re-evaluation of your certification” in May 2018 that the two-state pit plan was the NNSA’s best option, Heinrich told Lord.
Lord did not respond to Heinrich’s request at the hearing.
The NNSA is seeking $410 million in fiscal 2020 to begin preliminary design studies for the planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility. Charles Verdon, NNSA deputy administrator for defense programs, told Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor in April that agency subject matter experts have a plan to get the Savannah River pit plant online by 2030 — as long as Congress funds the NNSA’s 2020 request.
The agency does not yet have a formal life-cycle cost estimate for the Savannah River plant. However, the Parsons engineering analysis estimated that a two-state strategy would cost about $30 billion over its decades-long life cycle, compared with some $15 billion to keep production in Los Alamos.
The first pits the NNSA plans to produce in its new pit complex, whatever form it eventually takes, will be W-87-style pits, suitable for use in future intercontinental ballistic missile warheads.
