U.S. Certifies New Nuclear Weapon Core

The Los Alamos National Laboratory has certified its first nuclear weapon “pit” since 1989, the Albuquerque Journal reported Friday (see GSN, Oct. 23, 2006).

The pit, the plutonium trigger of a nuclear weapon, received its formal certification Thursday, a move that enables its transfer from the New Mexico laboratory to the Pantex warhead assembly site near Amarillo, Texas (see GSN, May 25).  It is expected to be placed into a submarine-launched W-88 warhead.

The United States lost its ability to produce new pits following the closure of Colorado’s Rocky Flats facility, which officials shut down to remediate decades of extensive environmental contamination (see GSN, Dec. 9, 2005).

The Energy Department in 1996 announced a plan to develop an interim pit production facility at Los Alamos and workers there produced the first “certifiable” pit in 2003.  The certification process, however, was not completed until this year, allowing authorities to declare the pit ready to deploy, the Journal reported.

“This is a major success for the lab,” said spokesman Kevin Roark.

Los Alamos plans to produce as many as 10 certified pits annually (Raam Wong, Albuquerque Journal, June 8).

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