The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) this week officially green-lit the Los Alamos National Laboratory to make 30 war-ready warhead cores in 2026 for next-generation intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Under the long-expected decision, the northern New Mexico weapon-design laboratory “will produce a minimum of 30 war reserve pits per year for the national pit production mission during 2026 and implement surge efforts to exceed 30 pits per year as needed,” the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency stated Wednesday in an amended record of decision posted to the Federal Register.
The agency published the decision right after releasing its environmental review of the planned pit plant: an expansion of the lab’s Plutonium Facility (PF-4), which has already cast a few practice pits, and which handles other plutonium missions for the NNSA. The agency said in the environmental review that the planned Los Alamos facility could increase its output to more 80 pits annually, if needed.
That is enough, even without the addition of a planned NNSA plant at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., to meet military requirements for pit production from 2030 onward. All the new plutonium cores produced at Los Alamos and Savannah River will initially be for W87-1 warheads intended for the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent missiles expected to replace the Minuteman III fleet starting around 2030.
The NNSA estimates that the expanded planned Los Alamos pit facility would generate some 400 cubic yards (about 305 cubic meters) of transuranic and mixed-transuranic waste, if it had to turn the dial up all the way to 80 pits a year. The agency projects it will cost some $30 billion to build and operate the two pit plants over the next several decades.
Disarmament activists have complained that the NNSA’s just-completed environmental review, a pit-focused supplemental analysis to a much broader 2008 environmental impact statement that covered all of Los Alamos, failed to consider the pit mission’s affects on the rest of the facility, the state of New Mexico, and the entire DOE nuclear complex.
New Mexico itself, while not going so far as to call for an entirely new site-wide environmental impact statement, had its own concerns about the recent review’s narrow focus — concerns that did not stop the NNSA from officially approving the Los Alamos pit mission on Wednesday.
In public comments published in July, Santa Fe complained that Los Alamos’ new pit mission might illegally strand some Cold War-era transuranic waste at the lab.
The New Mexico Environment Department argued that new transuranic waste from the pit mission, plus DOE’s 2019 decision to reserve 55% of all shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in southeastern New Mexico for the Idaho National Laboratory, would leave no room at WIPP in the near term for Los Alamos’ legacy transuranic waste.
In this week’s final environmental review, the NNSA waved away New Mexico’s concerns about the deal with Idaho, saying the “[a]greement with the State of Idaho was conducted in a manner that ensures [transuranic] waste disposal needs at [Los Alamos] are recognized.”
However, the agency appeared amenable to tracking the effects of the now-approved pit mission on Los Alamos legacy waste, writing that “NNSA agrees that it would be appropriate to review environmental impacts arising from these requirements, if any.”
The NNSA did not say when it might begin that review.
An NNSA environmental review for the Savannah River facility is ongoing.
