John_F Loc: Minneapolis, MN

Because of the length of this Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article, I am only posting the first section. It is written by Frank Von Hipple.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the organization within the Energy Department that is responsible for producing and maintaining US nuclear warheads, is moving forward with a plan to build a plutonium-pit-production factory at DOE’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. “Pits” are the form of the plutonium in the fission trigger “primaries” of US two-stage nuclear warheads.

The primary motivation for this move is lack of confidence in the pit-production capacity at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has been responsible for preserving US pit production expertise since production at the Rocky Flats Plant outside of Denver shut down at the end of the Cold War. There are also political motivations, including filling the jobs gap at the Savannah River Site resulting from the collapse of NNSA’s effort to build a Mixed-oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility there to process some of its excess Cold War plutonium pits into power reactor fuel.

NNSA’s rush forward may result in a debacle on top of a debacle. If the experts at Los Alamos can’t manage pit production there, why does NNSA think that they can design and train the staff to operate a pit-production facility at the Savannah River Site?

Also, the United States need for pits is unclear at the moment. In 2007, the pits produced at Rocky Flats—now 30 to 40 years old—were pronounced to be good for at least a century and, in 2012, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory upped the durability estimate to 150 years. NNSA did not support the necessary research to solidify this conclusion, however—an oversight that it now promises to remedy.

The NNSA also claims that it needs to produce new pits for two types of safer primaries for two new nuclear warheads, but there seem to be enough already-existing pits for one of the warheads, and the design for the second has not yet been decided.

Thus, there are multiple arguments for delaying a decision on the proposed second pit-production facility for a decade or so. By then, Los Alamos should have mastered the production of pits, the longevity of the legacy pits will be better established, and the need for pits not available in the legacy stockpile should be clarified.

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

Why not provide a link so we can read the entire article?
--Bob

John_F Loc: Minneapolis, MN