Last spring, the National Nuclear Security Administration quietly backed off a drive to produce 30 plutonium nuclear-warhead cores per year at the Los Alamos National Laboratory earlier than the long-established target of 2026, a recently published contract modification shows.
The April 30, 2019, modification to Triad National Security’s lab management and operations contract scrubs out a directive “to accelerate manufacture of War Reserve (WR) pits to meet 30 pits/year, 1 year ahead of schedule” and replaces it with a softer instruction “to achieve 30 pits/year by 2026, and provide a list of opportunities to accelerate the schedule.”
Triad is led by the University of California, the Battelle Memorial Institute, and Texas A&M University, with Fluor Corp. and Huntington Ingalls Industries as major industry subcontractors. The nonprofit consortium officially took over management of Los Alamos on Nov. 1, 2018, from the for-profit Los Alamos National Security, led by the university and Bechtel National, with junior partners BWX Technologies and AECOM.
The day before Triad wrapped up its contract transition, the government modified the management and operations deal to include the now-scrapped directive to speed up pit production.
Since then, both NNSA headquarters in Washington and Triad have ignored multiple requests for comment about the effort to speed up pit production at the nation’s first nuclear weapons laboratory. The April 30 contract modification that softened the drive to speed up the production schedule appeared on the agency’s website after New Year’s Day.
Years before Triad submitted its winning bid to manage Los Alamos, the NNSA said it wanted to begin producing war-reserve pits for W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile warheads at Los Alamos by 2024, ramping up to 30 pits annually by 2026. The goal appears in editions of the agency’s annual Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan dating to the Barack Obama administration.
Los Alamos last produced a war-reserve pit in 2011, though that pit was not designed for a W87-1 warhead. The facility is now making W87-1 development pits: test articles intended to prove out the design the lab wants to start stamping out in 2024 at a rate of 10 a year. One of last year’s development pits “could have been used” in a warhead “if we wanted,” Bob Webster, the lab’s deputy weapons director, said in December during a forum hosted by Mitre Corp. in McLean, Va., nearby of Washington.
Los Alamos’ targeted pit output is part of the NNSA’s strategy to produce 80 war-reserve pits annually by 2030: 30 in New Mexico and 50 annually beginning that year at the planned Plutonium Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The NNSA has acknowledged that casting 80 pits a year by 2030 will be very challenging.
