Paul Kreitz, who has helped manage planning and construction of pit production infrastructure at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for the past two years or so, is leaving lab manager Triad National Security in late April, a lab official said this week.
Kreitz was not one of Triad National Security’s key personnel. Before Los Alamos, he worked at a number of nuclear-weapon sites, including the long-shuttered Rocky Flats plant outside of Denver and the Paducah Site in Kentucky.
Longtime Los Alamos hand Tim Nelson will come out of what turned out to be a very brief retirement — he left the lab in February 2020 — to replace Kreitz as division director for TA55 Capital Projects on an acting basis.
Los Alamos National Laboratory is on the hook to produce 30 war-reserve plutonium pits — fissile nuclear weapon triggers — by 2030, beginning with 10 pits by fiscal year 2024, which starts Oct. 1, 2023.
Together with a planned pit factory at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., to be built at the partially constructed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, the NNSA plans to cast a combined 80 pits annually by 2030. The agency has admitted it will be severely challenged to meet that milestone.
