Official documents unearthed this week by anti-nuclear organizations show price took a back seat when the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) settled on a strategy to produce nuclear-warhead cores in both New Mexico and South Carolina — a strategy both states dislike, and which Congress may not approve.
However, according to the roughly 300-page engineering analysis written by Parsons Government Services, the premium price tag buys the NNSA a brand new weapons factory it could easily expand, while limiting the agency’s reliance on Cold War-era facilities that could be logistically daunting to expand.
According to the engineering analysis —obtained by nuclear watchdog groups Savannah River Watch and Nuclear Watch New Mexico and published online Thursday — splitting production of the warhead cores, or plutonium pits, between New Mexico and South Carolina could cost around $30 billion over the decades-long pit mission assigned by the White House.
Keeping the pit mission at Los Alamos, on the other hand, could cost as little as $14.5 billion, according to the engineering analysis. That option involves upgrading the lab’s late-1970s-vintage PF-4 Plutonium Facility to produce up to 50 pits a year, then building a separate facility at Los Alamos to stamp out the other 30 pits on an annual basis.
The trouble with that option, as the NNSA said last year in another cost study known as an Analysis of Alternatives, is that PF-4 is supposed to start producing 30 pits a year by 2026, and upgrading the facility during the production run risks a snafu that could jeopardize the entire pit mission.
The engineering analysis that surfaced this week considered four options for future pit production, all of which assume that Los Alamos National Laboratory will begin producing 30 pits a year by 2026, and none of which would get the NNSA to 80 pits a year by 2030, as the Donald Trump administration recommended in the Nuclear Posture Review published in February.
The four options are:
- Converting the unfinished Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., into a pit plant capable of making 50 pits a year. The other 30 pits would come from PF-4. This is the NNSA’s preferred option and, at nearly $30 billion, by far the most expensive of the four considered in the engineering analysis. The agency would hit 80 pits a year by January 2035, under this scenario. According to the engineering analysis, turning the MFFF into a pit plant would give the NNSA a large, modern facility that could be scaled up to produce 80 pits a year all by itself at relatively little expense.
- Building one new facility at Los Alamos, separate from PF-4, to make 50 pits a year. PF-4 would still make 30 pits a year in this scenario, which would cost nearly $19 billion and allow for 80 pits a year by December 2034.
- Modifying PF-4 to make 50 pits a year, then building a separate facility to add another 30 pits a year to Los Alamos’ total. This, according to the engineering analysis, is both the cheapest method and the quickest to 80 pits a year. It would cost about $14.5 billion and could produce 80 pits annually by October 2033. However, as stated in the 2017 Analysis of Alternatives, the risk with the strategy is substantial. PF-4 has to produce 30 pits a year by 2026, and any wrong turn upgrading the facility during the manufacturing mission could sink the NNSA’s chances of hitting 80 pits a year by 2030 or so.
- Building three new pit-producing facilities at Los Alamos, which along with the planned 30-pit-a-year capacity of PF-4 would raise the lab’s total output to 80 pits a year. This is another relatively cheap option, at $15 billion, but would take the longest to rev up to 80 pits a year. The three additional pit modules would not hit the White House’s goal until 2038, according to the engineering analysis.
For the most part, labor costs were behind the added expense of a two-pronged pit strategy. Standing up a new pit facility at the MFFF would drive the headcount for the NNSA’s pit mission to just over 1,800, compared with fewer than 850 for the cheapest Los Alamos-only configuration, according to the engineering analysis.
Nevertheless, Parsons stated in the analysis, the NNSA should not make its choice based on price alone.
“The path forward should not be decided solely on lowest cost, which could constrain pit production to a single facility at a single site,” according to summary slides of the analysis prepared by Kelly Cummins, the NNSA’s program executive officer for strategic materials.
“The alternative with the lowest [life-cycle cost] would not meet the Administration’s stated policy for ‘an effective, responsive, and resilient nuclear weapons infrastructure’ that can ‘adapt flexibly to shifting requirements,’” according to Cummins’ slides.
The two-pronged pit approach has faced an uphill battle in public since its existence leaked to the press last year, along with fragments of the Analysis of Alternatives. South Carolina lawmakers are skeptical of canceling MFFF, which is supposed to turn 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel as part of an arms-control pact with Russia.
New Mexico lawmakers are skeptical of NNSA’s planned alternative to the MFFF, which involves suspending the surplus plutonium in concrete and burying it deep underground at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
Congress, in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, said NNSA could not cancel MFFF unless it could prove the alternative, called dilute and dispose, was half as expensive as finishing the program of record. On May 10, Energy Secretary Rick Perry sent a letter to Congress that said dilute and dispose would in total cost about $20 billion, while completing the MFFF and its mission would cost roughly $50 billion, in total.
Even so, House lawmakers have yet to OK the MFFF cancellation needed to pave the way for a two-pronged pit approach. The 2019 National Defense Authorization Act that cleared the House floor in May had full funding for MFFF and no funding for dilute and dispose. Likewise, the 2019 NNSA budget bill the House Appropriations Committee approved in mid-May fully funded MFFF construction.
Senate appropriators, on the other hand, agreed to cancel the MFFF in a 2019 NNSA budget bill that cleared that chamber’s Appropriations Committee last week. The Senate Armed Services Committee has not made its 2019 National Defense Authorization Act public yet, but Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), defender in chief of MFFF in Washington, said he put language in the bill that would forbid the NNSA from canceling the facility.
