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Pit Pork
Plutonium Manufacturing Process

$5.75 billion

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has two parallel projects underway to create factories for the production of plutonium cores for nuclear bombs, otherwise known as "pits." Pits comprise the core of the first, or "primary," stage of a thermonuclear weapon. They are the most difficult, expensive, and hazardous component of a nuclear weapon to fabricate.

The first project is located at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico. It is expected to be a 12-year project aimed at producing up to 20 pits/year for the U.S. nuclear stockpile by 2007, and up to 50 pits/year some time thereafter. The total price tag for this project, up to the point when the first "certifiable" pit is expected to be produced in 2007, is estimated by LANL to be about $1.75 billion -- not including considerable hidden costs.

Actually, the full cost of this program is difficult to compute, since pit production incurs costs across much of the U.S. weapons program. A conservative estimate, including these hidden costs, would be $2 billion. Deadlines have been repeatedly missed, and the program is, to a great extent, now being used to generate questions justifying open-ended appropriations, not answers that lead to confidence and economy.

The second project is the design, construction, and operation of a "Modern Pit Facility" (MPF) a factory designed to produce up to 450 pits/year, which would run in parallel to the Los Alamos facility. This project is expected to cost up to $4 billion, but massive cost overruns are the norm in large, unique nuclear weapons projects. The MPF is to come on line in about 2018. It is a project laden with technical and environmental risk, and would end any pretension of compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) by the United States.

DOE/NNSA is now examining where to build the MPF, with Los Alamos the top choice, followed by the Savannah River Site in Aiken, South Carolina, and three other candidate sites. An environmental impact review for siting the MPF is now underway. As in the case of the existing program, hidden costs abound, including handling, transporting, and disposing the long-lived nuclear waste that will result from pit manufacturing.


Green Scissors Proposal
Terminate all funding for new pit production capacity, saving more than $5.75 billion plus operating expenses, nuclear waste transportation and disposal costs, and non-monetary environmental, worker safety, and security risks.

Current Status
In the fiscal year 2003 Omnibus Appropriations Bill, pit production was funded at about $236 million; the president's budget for FY04 includes $320 billion for the program.

Both projects are to be capable of building and certifying types of pits not previously deployed -- the source of much of the current cost and delay. Given the huge inventory of existing, modern, fully-tested pits (see below), the MPF is largely driven by the need to make pits of new designs. None of these pits could be fully tested without a nuclear explosion that would involve breaking the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). The U.S. has signed but not ratified the CTBT.

Project Hurts Taxpayers

There is no need to invest taxpayer dollars in new pit production in this decade. The U.S. now has about 10,600 pits in deployed weapons and at least 13,000 extra pits in storage, of which approximately 5,000 have been specially designated for possible reuse (the others might be reusable too). All pits in storage are fully tested and could replace many of the pits that are currently deployed if necessary. According to NNSA and its laboratories, all existing deployed pits are expected to last at least 45 to 60 years . Of the pits in the U.S. stockpile, some 79 percent were made in the 1980s, with at least decades - and possibly many decades - of serviceability ahead.

It is unwise to invest in expensive nuclear weapons factories that will not be needed. The Moscow Treaty signed by presidents Bush and Putin would liberate several thousand weapons from deployed status in the U.S. These pits could then join the large inventory of spares, negating the need for additional pit production.

Project Hurts the Environment

Processing and manufacturing plutonium is an extremely dangerous industrial activity. At the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility, hundreds of fires and other accidents contaminated a wide area, creating serious worker and public health problems. Both Los Alamos and Savannah River may be subject to large earthquakes. Even if all accidents and natural hazards could be avoided, the expected best-case legacy would be permanently contaminated "sacrifice areas" at on- and off-site nuclear dumps. The nuclear dump at LANL is already near capacity and the proposed doubling of its size to accommodate the growth in pit production and other related programs would require destruction of several Native American ruins.

Contacts

• Greg Mello, Los Alamos Study Group, (505) 982-7747.