The National Nuclear Security Administration is reviewing options for the future location of plutonium pit production, an agency official has said, leaving open the door for that capability to potentially be moved away from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
James McConnell, the NNSA’s associate administrator for safety, infrastructure and operation, said June 7 at a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board hearing in New Mexico that the agency is conducting an analysis of alternatives to identify locations that could host the manufacture of plutonium pits, which make up the core of nuclear weapons.
Options under consideration include production at existing Los Alamos facilities, the addition of new facilities at LANL, or “adding capabilities or leveraging existing capabilities elsewhere in the country at other sites where plutonium is already present or has been used,” McConnell said.
He added that “it’s premature right now to describe in more detail those individual options” but that the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency expects to have the results of the analysis by late summer.
“Until we come up with some explicit plan differently, we intend to continue to operate PF-4,” he said.
Los Alamos’ Plutonium Facility is the nation’s only fully capable plutonium research and processing facility. Last October it returned to full operations following a years-long pause in its fissile material operations due to criticality safety weaknesses, or deficiencies in the program meant to prevent accidental radiation release.
The Nuclear Weapons Council, the body that coordinates Defense Department and NNSA interagency activities, has determined that the NNSA’s nuclear weapons life-extension programs would require the production of 50 to 80 plutonium pits per year in the long term; the agency’s planned rates include 10 pits per year in 2024 and up to 80 per year by 2030.
Congress ordered this level of production by 2030. The NNSA’s fiscal 2017 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan noted it intends to meet this benchmark and said the agency is evaluating how to ramp up production capacity in 2027.
The NNSA plans to complete the first production unit of the B61-12 gravity bomb life-extension program by fiscal 2020, and first units for the W78 and W88 warheads by fiscal 2030.
The United States has not made more than 11 pits per year since 1989, when it shut down the Rocky Flats plant in Colorado, and no new ones for the past several years.
The Energy Department has since proposed facilities that would feature a much higher level of pit production, but those efforts were ultimately terminated by Congress, in part due to uncertainty over future nuclear stockpile needs.
The NNSA in 2004 abandoned an effort to establish a facility that would manufacture between 125 and 450 pits per year following congressional concerns over the project’s scope and timing. The locations it had considered to host this facility were Los Alamos and Carlsbad, N.M.; the Nevada Test Site (now the Nevada National Security Site); the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas; and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
