Barriers to producing plutonium nuclear weapon cores in South Carolina remain, but the way is wide open in New Mexico, where the National Nuclear Security Administration has entered the peak spending years of upgrades aimed at producing a war-usable “pit” by fiscal 2024.
The Department of Energy’s semiautonomous stockpile steward is entering peak construction years on upgrades at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where it is expected to produce a war-ready plutonium “pit” by 2024. In the 2019 fiscal year that began Oct. 1, the NNSA plans to spend some $220 million upgrading Los Alamos’ plutonium complex — a little more than 5 five percent less than what the Donald Trump administration requested.
There are two specific projects on the slate for this year.
One is recategorizing the lab’s Radiological Laboratory/Utility/Office Building as a hazard category 3 nuclear facility from its current designation as a radiological facility. This would allow the NNSA to store about 10 times as much of the bomb isotope plutonium-239 in the building as it does now: 400 grams, compared with the current limit of just under 40 grams.
The other project is rearranging equipment in, and adding new equipment such as glove boxes to, the PF-4 Plutonium Facility. This will allow the building to cope with the levels of manufacturing throughput and analytical chemistry that will be necessary for the agency to ramp up pit production to 30 per year by 2026.
Both upgrades are part of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement (CMRR) Project: the NNSA’s name for the infrastructure improvements needed for future pit production. The agency established baseline costs for the project in 2016, saying it would cost between roughly $2.5 billion and $3 billion to complete the upgrades in fiscal 2024.
At Los Alamos, the NNSA plans to produce 10 war-usable pits in 2024, 20 in 2025, and 30 in 2026 and each year beyond.
A spokesperson for outgoing lab management and operations contractor Los Alamos National Security did not reply to a request for comment this week about the status of the CMRR subprojects at the start of the 2019 fiscal year.
The incumbent is less than a month away from turning the reins of the nation’s oldest nuclear weapons lab over to the nonprofit Triad National Security. Triad in June won an NNSA lab-management contract worth more than $20 billion over 10 years, with options. The consortium, set to take over Nov. 1, is a partnership of Department of Energy staple Battelle, longtime Los Alamos manager the University of California, and Texas A&M University.
Meanwhile, in South Carolina, a federal appeals court this week put the NNSA a step closer to establishing a complimentary pit-production capability the agency says is necessary for it to produce 80 pits a year by 2030. That was the number the Donald Trump administrator ordered in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review published in February.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals removed a legal barrier to shutting down the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF): a plutonium disposal plant under construction at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., that NNSA wants to turn into a new pit factory. A three-judge panel struck down a preliminary injunction issued in June by a lower court as part of a lawsuit brought against the NNSA this year by the state of South Carolina.
At deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, the NNSA would not say whether it had officially notified MFFF prime MOX Services that it planned to terminate the facility.
The NNSA has left little doubt it plans to convert MFFF for pit production. Just last week, its Office of Defense Programs led a what an agency spokesperson called “a plutonium pit production workshop” at Savannah River. Participants at the three-day workshop “included senior managers and staff from across the Nuclear Security Enterprise,” the spokesperson said.
Congress had resisted the plan to convert the MFFF for pit duty, though lawmakers in bills passed this year and last permitted DOE to opt out of its obligation to build the plant for plutonium disposal. The agency signaled it would do so on Sept. 14, when NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty wrote a letter to Congress reaffirming a May declaration from Energy Secretary Rick Perry that the government would end MFFF’s disposal mission.
South Carolina’s congressional delegation has yet to support a pit mission at the Savannah River Site.
The Pentagon has said DOE needs to start work on a South Carolina pit capability by early in calendar year 2019, if the agency means to produce 80 pits a year by 2030 for future nuclear-weapons refurbishments. The converted MFFF would produce 50 of those pits annually, the NNSA has said.
