ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Judgements varied here this week between two senior civilian nuclear-weapons leaders as to whether the National Nuclear Security Administration would meet some legally binding deadlines to produce new nuclear weapon cores this decade.
Questioned about the deadlines by Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor during the Exchange Monitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit, the head of National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) nuclear weapons programs in Washington hedged and the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory said the lab could meet the deadlines.
The semi-autonomous Department of Energy weapons agency is on the hook to produce at least 10 war-reserve plutonium pits annually in fiscal year 2024, at least 20 pits annually by 2025, at least 30 a year by 2026 and at least 80 annually by 2030.
Charles Verdon, NNSA’s deputy administrator for defense programs, testified to Congress this year that the agency will probably miss the 2030 deadline but is confident that it can produce 30 pits in 2026. At the Deterrence Summit, however, Verdon stopped short of saying that the agency would nail the interim production quotas for 2024 and 2026.
“That’s the goal,” Verdon said Tuesday morning in front of an audience of nuclear professionals here in response to a question from Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor about the looming deadlines in 2024 and 2025. Asked again if he thought the NNSA would meet those goals, Verdon said, “I believe we’re committed to giving it our all.”
In a short interview after a panel discussion Tuesday afternoon, Thomas Mason, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory said “yes” when the Monitor asked him whether he thought the lab could meet the 2024 and 2025 pit deadlines.
The NNSA plans a pair of pit production facilities, one at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and one at the Savannah River Site, to furnish the military with fresh plutonium pits throughout the second half of this century.
Assuming the Joe Biden administration’s nuclear posture review next year does not radically change the timeline for expanding NNSA’s pit complex, and assuming Congress appropriates the requested funding for the complex, the agency believes it can produce at least 80 pits a year by 2032 or 2035. That’s the throughput the military says is necessary for the ongoing nuclear arsenal modernization expected to continue into the 2040s.
The first pits NNSA plans to cast at its new complex will be for W87-1 warheads: one of the two kinds of warheads to be used on the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missiles the Air Force plans to deploy starting in 2030 to replace its fleet of Minuteman III missiles.
At Los Alamos National, personnel at the expanding PF-4 plutonium facility are preparing to cast the first production unit of the W87-1 pit in fiscal year 2023, Verdon and Mason said here Tuesday. The proof of concept pit will certify that NNSA’s design and manufacturing capabilities are ready for production runs.
SRS Pit Manager Foresees No Problem Staffing Up
The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility team has staffed up to about 400 people and, despite near-term competition for specialized skill sets from other nuclear-weapon sites, should easily be able to flex up to its full complement of 1,800 when it comes time to cast pits next decade, the site contractor’s head of infrastructure said at the Nuclear Deterrence Summit this week.
That headcount so far includes some people who have unretired for the third or fourth time, David Olson, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions’ executive vice president for NNSA capital projects, told a mostly industry audience here this week.
Long term, “the demand signal can be met,” said Olson, citing data from a resource-management software platform provided to the company by Pro2Serve, Oak Ridge, Tenn., and KeySource, Hudson, Ohio. “In the near-term, are we competing for similar resources with Los Alamos, Livermore and Savannah River? Yes, but the market’s been able to accommodate both of our needs.”
SRPPF is being built from what Olson called the “concrete shell” of the partially completed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at Savannah River, a plutonium recycling plant that DOE cancelled in 2018. Fluor is converting the building for pit duty, Merrick & Co., Los Alamos, is providing glove boxes for the pit program and Sandia National Laboratories is handling physical security.
The delay in converting the facility into a pit factory is “driven by the reality of all the construction that has to be done in that building,” Olson said.
Along with the pit mission at Savannah River, which has not been a weapons production site in decades, comes a new waste stream to manage.
NNSA expects that the smaller of its two planned plutonium pit factories, the one at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s PF-4 Plutonium Facility, will generate some 2,000 canisters of transuranic waste annually once it begins producing 30 pits a year, a milestone scheduled for 2026. That’s according to a slide briefed here by Richard Baca, the deputy chief of staff for the NNSA’s office of safety, infrastructure and operations who shared the podium with Olson.
DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is the only deep-underground permanent disposal facility for transuranic waste in the country. Asked by an audience member what the SRPPF would do with its waste streams if the the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant became suddenly unavailable, Baca said, “let me get back to you.”
