Five Sites on U.S. Plutonium Pit Production List

The Energy Department is considering five sites to handle all U.S. plutonium research and production of nuclear bomb triggers, the Albuquerque Journal reported Friday (see GSN, Oct. 20).

The “Complex 2030” plans calls for the United States to replace its 6,000 Cold War-era nuclear weapons with 2,200 Reliable Replacement Warheads, and to consolidate all plutonium activities to one facility.

The sites include Los Alamos in New Mexico, Oak Ridge in Tennessee, the Nevada Test Site, the Pantex weapons facility in Texas and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

With infrastructure already in place, Los Alamos is seen as a front-runner. 

If the New Mexico site is selected, the new facility would probably not be a component of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said Thomas D’Agostino, defense programs chief at the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration. He indicated that the site might not be best suited to house the new work.

Experts offered reasons both for and against using the national laboratory for the plutonium work, the Journal reported.

Los Alamos is already preparing to produce 80 plutonium triggers annually at an existing facility.  It could also become home to a new plutonium laboratory at a cost of nearly $1 billion.

The federal government “will be hard-pressed to find the funds and win support for an entirely new facility when the plumbing has already been built at Los Alamos,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association.

The layout of the laboratory complex, which has numerous roads and is situated near residential areas, would create a security problem should it become home to the plutonium facility, said Pete Stockton, senior investigator at the Project on Government Oversight.  The isolated Nevada Test Site would be a better choice, he said.

The plutonium trigger plan also calls for 125 to be produced annually, significantly more than proposed for the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

“If the size of the [nuclear] stockpile is reduced to such a point that 80 pits per year satisfies the requirement to transform the complex, theoretically (Los Alamos) could satisfy that need,” D’Agostino said (John Fleck, Albuquerque Journal, Oct. 20).

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