ARLINGTON, Va. — The Defense Department remains satisfied with the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) strategy to produce plutonium pits at two facilities, but time is short to get started, a senior Pentagon official said here.
“DOD is fully behind the NNSA’s current plan,” Peter Fanta, deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear matters, said in a question-and-answer session at the ExchangeMonitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit. “It is an aggressive plan, it is a difficult plan, they have to stay on timelines that are very aggressive.”
The plan is so aggressive, Fanta warned, that the NNSA is “out of margin” and needs to “Get to a pit production facility that works, and get to it as fast as possible. Stop discussing it, stop slowing it, stop looking at it again, stop looking at seven other alternatives. There is one plan. Get on it, get to it, get it done.”
In August, Gen. John Hyten, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, said the NNSA needed to “be on a path” to meet the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review goal of manufacturing 80 war-usable warhead cores per year by 2030.
The semiautonomous Department of Energy agency last year said it wanted to accomplish the feat by splitting pit production between the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Plutonium Facility (PF-4) in New Mexico and a converted Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the Savannah River Site: a plutonium disposal plant the NNSA canceled last year. By 2030, Los Alamos would manufacture 30 pits annually and the MFFF the other 50.
William “Ike” White, chief of staff to NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, said here in a separate session that officials “still hope to have repurposed” the MFFF to manufacture up to 50 pits by 2030. Beyond internal NNSA cost estimates he would not share, White said the agency has not yet calculated the price tag to convert the South Carolina plant for a new weapons mission.
Last year, then-Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Terry Wallace said the Plutonium Facility could manufacture all 80 pits annually by itself, if needed. White declined to say if the New Mexico site can produce 80 war-reserve pits a year, but that NNSA headquarters “would see what they [Los Alamos] can do” after 2026: the date the lab is supposed to hit its currently assigned output of 30 pits annually.
A former NNSA weapons boss from the George W. Bush administration said it will be a challenge to hit 80 pits anually by 2030, whether Los Alamos absorbs another 50 pits a year or the converted MFFF receives the mission.
“One of the two has to bring up another 50 pits per year by 2030,” Everet Beckner, an independent consultant and former deputy administrator for defense programs at NNSA, volunteered in a panel discussion here. “I think that’s the high hurdle.”
New Mexico’s U.S. Senate delegation is keen to keep the pit mission in the state and worked language into the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act that ordered Gordon-Hagerty to submit a report to Congress by Feb. 9 that details the NNSA’s plans for making 80 pits a year at Los Alamos by 2030.
The report was to be delivered to the Armed Services and Appropriations committees in each chamber, according to the law. A GOP aide did not know on Tuesday whether the Senate Appropriations Committee had received that document.
The NNSA has already acknowledged, in an engineering analysis by Parsons Government Services obtained last year by nuclear watchdog groups, that the two-state pit complex as currently envisioned will not hit 80 pits a year until after 2030.
In an effort to slide pit production left on the timeline, the NNSA has ordered Los Alamos to create, by the end of April, a plan that could help the lab hit 30 pits annually a year ahead of schedule: 2029, per the agency’s current public plan.
The report is in the works, Los Alamos Director Thomas Mason told NS&D Monitor here Tuesday.
