LANL DIRECTOR WARNED ABOUT INACTION ON PU REPROGRAMMING

With the end of the fiscal year looming, Congress has still not signed off on a $120 million reprogramming request from the National Nuclear Security Administration to begin work on an alternate plutonium strategy despite dire warnings from Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Charlie McMillan. In a July letter to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz obtained by NW&M Monitor, McMillan said the lack of action on the reprogramming request and funding cuts included in the House and Senate versions of the Fiscal Year 2014 Energy and Water Appropriations Act endanger the lab’s plutonium mission. With the multi-billion-dollar Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility deferred, the lab has suggested an alternate plutonium strategy based on a modular approach to maintaining the nation’s plutonium capabilities.Parts of the reprogramming request would go to studying that approach while other money would allow the lab to begin purchasing materials and equipment for existing facilities that will play a larger role in the plutonium strategy, which is expected to enable the lab to produce up to 30 pits by 2021. “Los Alamos will continue to do everything possible to keep our people and programs intact should these funding reductions come to pass, but I am very worried that these FY 14 Pu program reductions will place the mission on an unrecoverable trajectory,” McMillan wrote in the July 1 letter. “With the 2019 closure of CMR [the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research facility] and significant underfunding of Pu infrastructure, we will simply not have the capability to produce much more than the current pit output.”