LOS ALAMOS, N.M. – By December 2024, the Los Alamos National Laboratory will produce a proof-of-concept pit for a new intercontinental ballistic missile warhead, a senior lab official said here Thursday during an extremely rare media tour of the building where workers will cast the weapon’s plutonium core.
That pit will not go into one of the hundreds of W87-1 warheads the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is set to build for the Sentinel missiles the Air Force plans to sink into silos starting in 2030 or so.
Instead, following its midwifing inside the highly secure PF-4 Plutonium Facility, a windowless concrete building built in 1978 and, the lab said, last opened to the press in 2005, the pit will be torn apart and scrutinized by experts.
Those experts will either send PF-4’s small cadre of plutonium smiths back to the drawing board or, as Robert Webster, Los Alamos’ deputy director for weapons believes, approve the cloistered workforce to immediately churn out copies of the pit for the next generation of U.S., land-based nuclear weapons.
“That first pit will probably be a development and process-proven [pit], but the very next one will go to Pantex,” Webster told members of the media, including the Exchange Monitor, during a tour of PF-4.
Webster would not say exactly how long it will take for pits to begin flowing to the Pantex Plant, the nuclear-weapon service center near Amarillo, Texas, where the NNSA puts together new nukes and services old ones.
Congress set the latest legally binding schedules for pit production in 2018 but every year since, the NNSA has forecast a smaller and smaller likelihood of making any of them. Even as these deadlines became all but impossible to meet, Democrats and Republicans in Washington have resisted changing them.
On Thursday, they resisted again.
As reporters from major outlets including Time and the Wall St. Journal wound through Los Alamos alongside the Monitor, lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee in Washington killed a proposal to repeal requirements that the NNSA begin multi-pit production in 2024, hit 30 a year by 2026 and make at least 80 pits annually by 2030 using a combination of PF-4 at Los Alamos and a larger pit factory planned at the Savannah River Site across the country in Aiken, S.C.
Back at Los Alamos, Webster repeated the schedule projection the lab has given publicly since February, when the Monitor broke the news that PF-4 would not receive the equipment designed to meet Congress’ pit quotas until next decade.
“We will get to 30 pits per year by 2030,” Webster said Thursday at the lab. “It could be sooner, but definitely by 2030.”
The U.S. stopped producing pits en masse around the end of the Cold War, when it shut down the Department of Energy’s Rocky Flats plant in Colorado after an FBI raid in 1989. The bureau was investigating alleged environmental crimes.
Since then, the NNSA, created in 2000, has made multiple attempts to restart a more modest and modern pit-production enterprise, each of which sputtered and died before attaining anything like the momentum the current two-state pit plan enjoys.
Before dealing with the technical, operational and supply chain challenges that might affect any top-secret project requiring peculiar expertise and first-of-a-kind equipment, the NNSA and its labs had to pull off a political balancing act with Congress.
Lawmakers from New Mexico and South Carolina each wanted a piece of the pit mission, and the delegations balked multiple times at some of NNSA’s early efforts to split the baby.
By autumn of 2017, the idea of splitting production between PF-4 and a partially completed, soon-to-be-repurposed plutonium recycling center at Savannah River had been so well socialized inside the Donald Trump administration and on Capital Hill that rumors of the plan leaked to reporters in Washington and around the sites.
Six years later, Los Alamos, which last made war reserve pits from 2007 to 2012, is on the cusp of restoring a modicum of what was lost at Rocky Flats, Webster said.
The lab has made 11 pits this year, but they are not destined for warheads. Those pits, cast from Cold War-vintage plutonium, helped PF-4 workers hone the multi-stage manufacturing process of creating new pits from old, stockpiled pits, Matt Johnson, division leader of pit technologies, said during the lab tour.
The U.S. does not make plutonium anymore. Instead, workers at Los Alamos take plutonium from the existing nuclear stockpile, rid it of uranium growth and other impurities that accrete over time and fashion it into new pits that can be plugged into new nuclear weapons.
The ability to purify plutonium and assemble the pits that are used as the primary detonation trigger of thermonuclear weapons was nearly lost after the Cold War, but Los Alamos “became like monasteries in the Dark Ages that preserved the knowledge” of how to produce them, Webster said.
On any given day, between 500 and 700 employees work inside PF4, Johnson said. Among those, there are only about a dozen people in the world who are trained or being trained to perform final pit assembly, which must be done by hand inside a large, walk-in glovebox wearing multiple layers of personal protective equipment to prevent plutonium contamination, he said. So few workers can do the job that the lab fears identifying them might make them targets for terror attacks.
If it is to make multiple pits every year, Los Alamos will have to go on a hiring spree and reckon with a basket of challenges for each new person it brings in, including the security requirements to enter PF-4, Johnson said.
All lab employees carry a Q-level clearance from the Department of Energy, equivalent to a Defense Department top secret clearance. The work performed inside the facility can take up to four years of training, mentorship and on-the-job experience to master, Johnson said.
Even so, “we are the fast path to get to 30 pits,” Webster said. “There isn’t any other option for the country in the short term to get some pits made.”
Exchange Monitor editor Dan Leone contributed to this story from Washington.
