A full one billion dollars is being added to plutonium “pit” bomb core production at the Los Alamos Lab for fiscal year 2027 (which begins this October 1). This tops out at $2.3 billion for each of the next five fiscal years, for a total of $11.5 billion.
None of this pit production is to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing nuclear weapons stockpile. Instead, it’s all for new-design nuclear weapons which can’t be tested because of the international testing moratorium, thereby perhaps eroding confidence in the stockpile. Alternatively, it could prompt the U.S. to resume testing (which Trump has already threatened), after which other nuclear weapons powers would surely follow, thereby accelerating the new nuclear arms race.
Other than for new-design nuclear weapons, plutonium pit production is simply not needed. In 2006 independent experts found that plutonium pits have serviceable lifetimes of at least 100 years (their average is now around 43 years). The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has avoided fully updated pit lifetime studies since then. There are already at least 15,000 existing pits stored at the NNSA’s Pantex Plant near Amarillo, TX.
Plutonium pit production is the NNSA’s most expensive and complex program ever.
However, the independent Government Accountability Office (GAO) has reportedly reported that the agency has no credible cost estimates and no “Integrated Master Schedule” for simultaneous production at LANL and the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina. NNSA, its predecessors, and its parent Department of Energy have been on the GAO’s High Risk List for project mismanagement and waste of taxpayers’ money ever since GAO started the List in 1991.
Los Alamos County is the 11th richest county in the USA thanks to nuclear weapons, but the rest of New Mexico limps along at the very bottom of national socioeconomic indicators such as the quality of our public education and the lives of our children. Imagine what that $11.5 billion going into plutonium pit bomb core production could otherwise do.
It could clean up LANL’s massive chromium contamination groundwater plume that has crossed onto San Ildefonso Pueblo land. It could comprehensively clean up the half million cubic yards of existing radioactive and toxic wastes that LANL plans to “cap and cover” and leave permanently buried in unlined pits and trenches as a perpetual threat to groundwater. It could go into reducing wildfire threats as New Mexico grows more arid. It could help restore and expand a medical system that truly supports the people.
But no, we’re going to get an accelerating nuclear arms race instead. This won’t change until we the people demand that it changes. A starting point for that is citizen involvement in a nationwide plutonium pit production programmatic environmental impact statement that Nuclear Watch New Mexico successfully sued NNSA to complete, expected in late May or June.
Jay Coghlan
Nuclear Watch New Mexico
www.nukewatch.org
This was written as published, public comment under this Santa Fe New Mexican Article: www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/federal-budget-could-mean-nearly-1-7b-more-for-los-alamos-lab/
Federal budget could mean nearly $1.7B more for Los Alamos lab
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