Albuquerque Journal: May 26, 2018

SANTA FE – Members of the New Mexico congressional delegation are fighting back against the Trump administration’s recent decision to make most of the nation’s plutonium “pits” – the cores of nuclear weapons – in South Carolina instead of at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

This week, U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., successfully inserted an amendment into a Senate appropriations bill requiring a new, independent assessment of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s plan to divide pit production – an operation that brings with it billions of dollars in operational and facility funding – between LANL and another federal lab in South Carolina.

A similar measure in the House of Representatives is supported by all three U.S. representatives from New Mexico – Democrat Ben Ray Luján and gubernatorial candidates Michelle Lujan Grisham, Democrat, and Steve Pearce, Republican  – according to online congressional documents.

The Senate Appropriations Committee’s approval of the amendments show there is “bipartisan skepticism about DOE’s plan to waste billions of dollars exploring the construction of a new facility for pit production that will likely never be completed somewhere else,” Udall said in an emailed statement.

LANL director Terry Wallace Jr., in an op-ed piece published in Friday’s Journal, said the NNSA announcement represents “a big vote of confidence” in the laboratory.

“The government’s decision not only secures Los Alamos’ long-term national security future, but our growing employment base and key weapons funding needs, which will translate in the immediate future to more infrastructure, more equipment and more staff.”

Earlier this month, the Nuclear Weapons Council certified NNSA’s plan to repurpose the Savannah River Site in South Carolina to make 50 pits a year coupled with “an enduring mission” to make at least 30 pits per year at Los Alamos, currently the only place in the country set up to make the softball-size cores.

New Mexico’s congressional delegation had been lobbying fiercely to keep all of the pit work at Los Alamos. Ramping up pit production is part of a huge plan to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Thousands of pits were made during the Cold War, but none have been made since 2011, when LANL completed the last of 29 for submarine missiles. The most ever made at LANL in a year is 11.

The Senate and House amendments call for NNSA – a semi-autonomous wing of the Department of Energy that oversees national labs – to hire a contractor to “conduct an independent assessment” of the decision to make pits at two sites. The report would be due seven months after the amendment becomes law, and NNSA couldn’t proceed with conceptual design for its pit production plan until the review contractor is in place.

Critics of LANL had different comments on the idea of revisiting the NNSA’s two-site plan for pits.

“This amendment is not about ‘good government,’ ” said Greg Mello of the Albuquerque-based Los Alamos Study Group. “It’s a desperate effort to build a bigger pit factory at LANL by second-guessing years of analysis vetted by experts in many places, not just NNSA.

“The U.S. has about 23,000 pits right now,” he said. This is all about greed, not need.”

Jay Coghlan, of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said the Senate committee “did the right thing requiring independent expert review of the government’s headlong rush to expand plutonium pit production at both the Los Alamos Lab and the Savannah River Site.” “We predict the wheels will come off once it’s under deeper public and congressional scrutiny,” he said.

WIPP involved

In conjunction with its decision to move most pit production to Savannah River, NNSA pulled the plug on a troubled operation there, intended to turn excess weapons-grade plutonium into fuel rods for nuclear power plants, as part of a nonproliferation agreement with Russia.

Instead, the 34 metric tons of plutonium would now end up in New Mexico, at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, after it has been diluted and mixed with inert material.

Another Udall amendment orders NNSA to submit to Congress by February 2019 “a plan for obtaining all necessary final state and federal permits” for storing the processed plutonium at WIPP along with scientific, legal and cost reviews for the plan.

The amendment puts “DOE on notice that New Mexico has the final say over any proposal for our state to take on additional waste missions beyond what was originally intended and authorized by current law,” Udall said.

Questions have been raised about whether WIPP has space for the diluted plutonium or was intended for that kind of material.

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