Confirming what appeared intuitively obvious, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said Tuesday the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico will have to manufacture 80 nuclear-weapon cores a year by itself in 2030, if a planned facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina is not ready by then.
Planned upgrades for Los Alamos’s Plutonium Facility (PF-4) “would provide the ability to produce a minimum of 30 pits per year, with surge efforts to produce 80 pits per year if needed,” the NNSA said in its Draft Supplement Analysis of the 2008 Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement for the Continued Operation of Los Alamos National Laboratory for Plutonium Operations.
Federal law passed in 2019 requires the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency to annually produce at least 80 plutonium pits in 2030.
Los Alamos is supposed to begin pit production in 2024 at an upgraded PF-4, ramping up to 30 pits annually by 2026. The planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPFF), to be built from the remains of the canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, is due to come online in 2030 and produce 50 cores a year then.
The NNSA needs pits for W87-1 warheads, which are to tip future Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missiles the Air Force wants to start deploying around 2030 to replace the current Minuteman III fleet.
The NNSA has touted the split-state pit complex as essential national security resilience, while also avoiding saying that either plant could handle the full 80-core workload each year. In 2018, the Los Alamos National Laboratory issued, then retracted, a press release in which then-interim Director Terry Wallace said the site could handle 80 pits a year following the planned upgrades to PF-4 — among them, added floor space, more glove boxes for materials handling, and more people to work them.
Just getting to 30 pits per year at Los Alamos would require the lab to hire and train 400 additional employees, according to Tuesday’s supplement analysis. With the site on the hook to cast 30 pits in 2026, that leaves a little less than six years to put the workforce in place. Surging up to 80 pits annually would require more heads on top of the 400 already needed, according to the supplement analysis.
As part of a requested, and controversial, $20 billion budget for fiscal 2021, the NNSA seeks over $835 million to upgrade PF-4: more than double-and-a-half the 2020 appropriation of just under $310 million. For the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, the NNSA requested just over $440 million for 2021, about 8% more than the 2020 appropriation. The agency expects the entire split-state pit complex to cost roughly $30 billion to build and operate over several decades.
What About the Waste?
According to the two pit-related environmental documents released this year, pit manufacturing at Los Alamos would produce far less transuranic waste than the planned Savannah River facility.
While surging to 80 pits a year, PF-4 at Los Alamos would annually generate a combined total of roughly 400 cubic yards (about 305 cubic meters) of transuranic and mixed-transuranic waste, according to the supplement analysis.
The SRPPF, on the other hand, would generate three times as much waste as PF-4, even while making only 50 pits a year, a January environmental review says. Savannah River’s annual transuranic waste from pit operations, assuming 50 a year, would be about 1,365 cubic yards (or almost 1,045 cubic meters), according to the Final Supplement Analysis of the Complex Transformation Supplemental Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement.
Transuranic waste refers to waste containing chemical elements heavier than uranium, often plutonium. Mixed transuranic waste is transuranic waste mingled with solid hazardous waste.
It was not immediately clear why Los Alamos appeared able to best Savannah River’s pit output by 60% while at the same time generating a third less transuranic waste.
An NNSA spokesperson declined this week to comment on the estimates in the two environmental documents, but did say the supplement analysis released this week for Los Alamos “is a draft subject to revision, not a final document. Questions raised about the draft document will be considered before the final document is prepared and answers to those questions will be provided at that time.”
The January document, on the other hand, is a final document — and it includes the same estimated waste volumes for PF-4 and SRPPF. The NNSA would not comment on that.
The NNSA forecasts that its future pit mission could produce enough transuranic waste to take up more than half the space projected to be available in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant: DOE’s deep-underground, transuranic waste disposal site near Carlsbad, N.M.
“The mission [at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant] becomes ever more dominated by NNSA,” Todd Shrader principal deputy assistant secretary for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, told attendees of the annual Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix this week.
After changes in 2018 to the way DOE accounts for the volume of buried waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the agency estimates the mine has just under 110,000 cubic meters of usable space left. Congress authorized the mine to hold some 175,000 cubic meters of waste.
Wayne Barber, reporter for Weapons Complex Monitor, contributed to this story from Phoenix.
