On Wednesday, only days after announcing he will not stand for re-election, Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) again roasted Energy Secretary Rick Perry for the decision to move most of the agency’s plutonium-pit production out of New Mexico.
The Donald Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review directed DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to make at least 80 of these fissile warhead cores a year by 2030. The NNSA subsequently decided to make 30 of them annually at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and 50 at a converted plutonium-disposal plant at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
Udall has never been happy about the decision and reminded Perry, at a hearing of the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, that splitting the pit mission between these two states comes “close to doubling the life-cycle costs” of the program.
Splitting pit production between New Mexico and South Carolina could cost about $30 billion over the decades-long pit mission, according to a 300-page engineering analysis written by Parsons Government Services and published last year by the nuclear watchdog groups Nuclear Watch New Mexico and Savannah River Site Watch.
Keeping the pit mission at Los Alamos, on the other hand, could cost around $14.5 billion, according to the Parsons report.
But DOE has said that price alone did not drive its decision, and that a two-state strategy would give the agency a brand new production site in South Carolina that it could easily expand, while reducing reliance on 1970s infrastructure at Los Alamos.
“We’ve asked the [Department of Defense] about this,” Perry said. “They agree that having these two different sites is an appropriate thing, and we may not agree on that, senator, at the end of the day.”
Congress could get further into the weeds on the DOE pit plan over the next few days. Perry and NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty are scheduled to testify today before the Senate Armed Services Committee on DOE atomic energy defense programs. Gordon-Hagerty and other NNSA leaders will then testify Tuesday in the House on the agency’s budget request.
