Los Alamos’ plutonium pit production of 30 annually for Sentinel may have to wait beyond 2026

As the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration awaits its marching orders from the President Donald Trump (R) administration, the Los Alamos National Laboratory is now saying it will get to an annual plutonium pit production goal of 30 “ASAP.”

Such pits are the triggers for thermonuclear weapons.

David Dooley, the associate laboratory director for weapons production at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), participated in a panel discussion on pit production at the 17th annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit in Arlington on Tuesday. In a brief interview after that discussion with Exchange Monitor’s affiliate publication Defense Daily, when asked whether ASAP was the target, Dooley replied, “It is ASAP.”

But the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) acting administrator Teresa Robbins told the summit that the agency’s goal was to have the “capability” to make the 30 pits at LANL “in or near 2028.”

NNSA said last year that it would begin producing 30 war-reserve plutonium pits annually at Los Alamos in 2028.

Air Force Gen. Anthony Cotton, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, has said that would meet military needs. Cotton was to speak to the Nuclear Deterrence Summit on Tuesday, but he is no longer on the schedule.

A decade ago, Congress was forging the 30-pit goal to meet the timeline for the successor to the U.S. Air Force’s Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile, and Section 3120 of the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act put making 30 plutonium pits by 2026 at LANL into law. The Minuteman III follow-on program, the Northrop Grumman LGM-35A Sentinel, breached Nunn-McCurdy guidelines on cost overruns, primarily due to construction design changes, and the Air Force last summer rescinded the Sentinel Milestone B engineering and manufacturing development go ahead from 2020.

“Milestone B was a disaster,” a source said. Construction issues included a possible, slight silo tilt if the larger Sentinel missiles were placed in old Minuteman III sites and the thought then given to lowering pre-made steel-concrete Sentinel silos into place, the source said. In the early 2010s, the nuclear work force–absent the current buzz about the China threat and resulting demand–started looking for other work, and pit production dropped to 11 per year.

LANL said it replaced pits in 31 W88 warheads for Navy Trident missiles between 2007 and 2011. The source said that pit production would have likely ramped up to the required numbers by now had NNSA moved ahead on the W87 back then.

In 1945, during the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos built the first plutonium pits used in the atomic bombs detonated in the Trinity test on July 16 of that year in New Mexico and in the detonation of the second atomic bomb–“Fat Man”–above Nagasaki, Japan on Aug. 9, 1945.

NNSA had planned to make pits only at Los Alamos, but, in 2017, the agency was on a planning path to repurpose a plutonium recycling plant to make the warhead cores. The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility in Aiken, S.C., is to be up and running by 2032, turn out its first production unit of a plutonium pit by 2035, and transition to full rate production the next year.

Savannah River is to make 50 pits per year to meet NNSA’s goal of 80 annually, but the timeline has lengthened, as NNSA had said Savannah would make that 50 by 2030.

NNSA said that it finished its First Production Unit of a plutonium pit for the planned W87-1 warhead for Sentinel on Oct. 1 last year after the agency verified, or “diamond stamped,” the pit, the fissile core of a warhead first stage, after it met the requirements for readiness to be deployed to the nuclear stockpile at “war reserve” quality.

From 1952 to 1989, the now closed Rocky Flats Plant near Denver mass produced most plutonium pits for U.S. nuclear weapons. The Environmental Protection Agency shut the plant in 1992, and that same year, then President George H.W. Bush stopped producing fissionable plutonium for nuclear weapons.

At its height in 1967, the stockpile comprised 31,225 weapons, each with a plutonium pit inside, LANL has said.

Since the halt of fissionable plutonium production, the U.S. has recycled old plutonium pits to make new ones in a process starting at the Department of Energy’s Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas.

A version of this story was first published by Exchange Monitor affiliate Defense Daily.