The National Nuclear Security Administration won’t need Los Alamos National Laboratory to make new plutonium pits for the nation’s stockpile until Fiscal Year 2019, according to the latest Quarterly Pit Production Report from the agency that advocates maintaining plutonium capabilities at Los Alamos until pits for the W87 warhead are needed in seven years. The report, delivered to Congress in April but made public this week by the Union of Concerned Scientists, details Los Alamos’ five-year effort to produce pits for the W88 warhead, which resulted in 29 pits for the W88 program: 18 for the nuclear stockpile, seven for “shelf life” testing, two war reserve spares, and two for destructive testing. One additional pit was produced in FY2012 to replace a pit that had to be scrapped in FY2011.
The report suggests that the NNSA continue to sustain plutonium efforts at Los Alamos in preparation for building new plutonium pits for the W87 in the “FY 2019-FY2020 timeframe,” producing pits that will be used in scaled experiments at the Nevada National Security Site and “several pit-like objects per year” to “expand the manufacturing knowledge base of pit types in the active stockpile other than the W88, including the W87.” It took the NNSA 15 years to complete production of pits for the W88, including nine years before a pit of war-reserve quality was produced, and the agency said it was important not to lose the knowledge and capability that has been gained. “The current situation is a tenuous one in which a lapse in commitment could easily translate to an unrecoverable loss of critical-skilled precision technicians and engineers, the irretrievable (non-repairable) loss of aged equipment, as well as the departure of dedicated leaders and managers with an understanding of the history and evolution of pit manufacturing,” the NNSA said in the report. “A lapse in commitment resulting in shutdown of manufacturing will demand unnecessary and expensive future expenditures to again reconstitute the base capability when such expenditures would be better invested to increase capacity beyond the base capability.”