PLUTONIUM SAMPLING AT LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
Cost of RECA Chart
In 1985, US President Ronald Reagan and Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
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The Plutonium Circus Comes to Town
AC: How did the idea of doing a documentary about Pantex come
up?
GR: Just growing up around it, I’d always wanted to do something about Pantex, really. It’s a very eerie feeling to grow up with that sort of thing there. Of course, I didn’t consider it eerie growing up, I considered it sort of… comforting. It was sort of an easy way out, if and when the world ended. I grew up always thinking the world was about to end, and I think that’s a pretty common belief for everyone in Amarillo. And that’s a very good excuse, a
very powerful reasoning to not keep up with what’s going on out at Pantex anyway. I think most of the United States, and Amarillo, as far as the religious thinking, feels that the world is going to be over any time anyway,
so why worry? They’ve watched Nostradamus a few too many times, I think.
| October 20, 1995 austinchronicle.com
George Whittenburg Ratliff is not the kind of guy you would peg for one of the most talented filmmakers around these days. Tall and lanky, with an unruly shock of dirty-blond hair and large piercing blue eyes that seem to take in everything and everyone at once without alarming you, he’s soft-spoken and speaks almost shyly of the documentary film he’s made – The Plutonium Circus.
Set in the Texas Panhandle town of Amarillo, The Plutonium Circus focuses on the gargantuan Department of Energy Pantex plant, which looms over the sprawling North Texas Plains like some evil, radioactive monarch. Since the 1950s, Pantex has been the final assembly point for every nuclear weapon made in America. This is the place where the gadgets, gizmos, priming devices, and
plutonium cores arrived, by unmarked train, to be finessed into the country’s arsenal of democracy. Sort of like a General Motors plant headed not by Lee Iacocca, but by the military industrial devil himself.
Amarillo, a hometown I share in common with Ratliff, has always been behind the plant 110 percent. The Pantex plant (or death factory, according to a few observers) is now engaged in the business of dismantling our nuclear stockpile and storing the deadly plutonium on-site, despite the fact that the plant rests directly above the precious Ogallala Aquifer, which is the largest fresh water
aquifer in North America and the primary source of drinking water for the people of Amarillo and surrounding towns such as White Deer and Claude (site of the film Hud), as well as eight neighboring states, and the land and animals that supply 70 percent of the wheat, corn, and beef grown in the United States. The people of Amarillo have wholeheartedly embraced the plant with open
arms because employment and the local economy are the issues here (the plant is said to be responsible for a total of 11,000 jobs, a figure that includes all the local businesses that service the plant), not lymphoma statistics and the perpetual possibility of disaster. It’s a mindset that’s hard to swallow, but then, so are most Panhandle politics.
Literally a world unto itself, Amarillo exists on the periphery of anarchy…
COMMENT TRAINING for the Plutonium Pit Production Draft PEIS – Recording of Kansas City-Focused Training May 6, 2026
Learn more about the government’s plan to mass produce new plutonium pits for nuclear weapons, Kansas City’s role in this program, and how to give a well-informed and impactful testimony at the public comment hearing in Kansas City on May 7 or submit written comments until July 16.
Presented by PeaceWorks KC, Physicians for Social Responsibility KC, Veterans for Peace KC and special guests from Nuclear Watch New Mexico and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
See more info at https://PitPEIS.com
https://peaceworkskc.org/plutonium/
Plutonium Pit Production Draft PEIS – Recording of Public Hearing North Augusta, South Carolina, Tues May 5, 2026
Kansas City: Inside America’s Nuclear Weapons Capital, As It Builds the Newest American Bomb
“For seventy-seven years, Kansas City has built most of nearly every American nuclear weapon. On May 7, the federal government will hold a hearing to ask if Kansas City consents to the next chapter.”
By | May 6, 2026 kansascitydefender.com
His hands did the work. Maurice Copeland was a tool and die supervisor at the Kansas City Plant for the last twelve of his thirty-two years there, and for most of that time he passed chemicals he did not know were poison across a workbench to men he supervised.
He was a Black Vietnam veteran when Bendix Corporation hired him in 1968, one among thousands of Black returning soldiers Bendix brought in as the Cold War pushed weapons assembly to wartime pace.
The plant at 1500 East Bannister Road sat at the edge of Troost Avenue, the apartheid line that has divided this city since before he was born. What Copeland and the men he supervised handled with their bare hands, included benzene, beryllium, trichloroethylene, polychlorinated biphenyls, asbestos, mercury, lead, and depleted uranium. Group 1 carcinogens.
New Nuclear Bunker Buster Bomb Plans Revealed (Updated)
“There has been talk for decades about a true successor to the specialized deep bunker-busting B61-11 nuclear bomb.”
By Joseph Trevithick| May 1, 2026 twz.com
The Department of Energy is seeking millions of dollars for work in part on a new bunker-busting nuclear weapon called the Nuclear Deterrent System-Air-delivered (NDS-A) in its latest budget request. At present, there is only one specialized air-delivered deep-penetrating weapon known to be in America’s nuclear stockpile, the B61-11 gravity bomb, and there have been discussions about a potential successor for decades now.
The Fiscal Year 2027 budget request for the Department of Energy, which was released last month, includes a new line under Weapons Activities for Future Programs. The Department is asking for $99.794 million in the next fiscal cycle to support those efforts.
Nukes and AI require 1.4 million gallons of water a day at New Mexico lab
“In a state that’s already short on the resource, Los Alamos National Laboratory expects to double water use.”
HIGH ATOP A PLATEAU IN NORTHERN NEW MEXICO, Los Alamos National Laboratory is facing its biggest expansion since the World War II-era Manhattan Project, the top-secret government effort to produce the world’s first atomic weapons. The current expansion will require a colossal use of resources, including one that New Mexico has in short supply these days — water.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Energy projected that the Los Alamos expansion would require around 504 million gallons of water annually — about 1.4 million gallons of water per day — for at least another decade. By comparison, a single New Mexico resident uses about 81 gallons per day.
The lab started making plutonium bomb cores, or “pits” for a new generation of warheads well before an environmental impact statement was published in March. In its latest move, however, the Department of Energy has set its sights on an even larger — and thirstier — expansion.
Partnership for a World Without Nuclear Weapons’ Statement on the Convening of the NonProliferation Treaty’s Eleventh Review Conference
This statement is from the Partnership for a World without Nuclear Weapons and is endorsed by the Justice, Peace, and Life Office of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe.
| April 26, 2026 theconversation.com
We are the Archbishops of Santa Fe, Seattle, and Nagasaki and the Bishop of Hiroshima. Three years ago, in Nagasaki on the 78th anniversary of its atomic bombing, we Catholic leaders formally created the Partnership for a World without Nuclear Weapons to work on nuclear disarmament. Our four dioceses represent the birthplace of nuclear weapons, the most deployed nuclear weapons in the United States, and the only two cities that to date have suffered atomic bombings.
We follow in the footsteps of our late Pope Francis, who declared that the mere possession of nuclear weapons is immoral. We are guided today by our Pope Leo, who, in his 2026 World Peace Day address declared:
“The idea of the deterrent power of military might, especially nuclear deterrence, is based on the irrationality of relations between nations, built not on law, justice and trust, but on fear and domination by force.”
Here, we believe that our Holy Father gets into the heart of the matter. For 56 years the 1970 NonProliferation Treaty (NPT) has acted as the cornerstone of nuclear weapons nonproliferation. However, the Treaty is now badly frayed, perhaps even in danger of collapsing. This is primarily due to the never-ending refusal of the nuclear weapons states to enter into serious negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament, which they pledged to long ago in NPT Article VI.
A new nuclear arms race is accelerating. There’s only one way to stop it
“What is the NPT? The NPT is considered a cornerstone of international law in relation to nuclear weapons and disarmament. It has the widest membership of any arms control agreement, with 190 states. These include five countries that manufactured and exploded nuclear weapons before 1967 – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. All other members do not have nuclear weapons.
North Korea is the only state to have joined the NPT and then renounced it. India, Israel and Pakistan, all nuclear-armed, along with South Sudan, are the only countries that have never joined.”
| April 26, 2026 theconversation.com
This week in New York, diplomats from almost every nation will convene for a four-week review of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), the most comprehensive nuclear arms agreement in the world.
The stakes could hardly be higher.
Russia, Israel and the United States, all nuclear-armed, are conducting illegal wars of aggression against countries without nuclear weapons. Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan engaged in conflict last year across their disputed border, raising the spectre of nuclear escalation.
In February, the last remaining agreement constraining Russian and US nuclear weapons lapsed, with nothing to replace it. The two countries account for nearly 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons.
And all nine nuclear-armed states are investing vast sums in modernising their arsenals with more capable and dangerous weapons. Deployed nuclear weapons and those on high alert, ready to be launched within minutes, are also rising.
Inside Chornobyl: 40 years after disaster, nuclear site still at risk in Russia’s war.
“In February 2025, a cheap Russian drone tore through Chornobyl’s confinement shelter. Workers warn the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident is not safe yet”
| April 26, 2026 theconversation.com
The dosimeter clipped to your chest ticks faster the moment you step off the designated path inside the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. Step back, and it slows again – an invisible line between clean ground and contamination.
Above rises the “new safe confinement” (NSC) – the largest movable steel structure ever built, taller than the Statue of Liberty, wider than the Colosseum, its arch curving overhead like an aircraft hangar built for giant planes.
Completed in 2019 at a cost of $2.5bn (£1.85bn) and funded by 45 countries, the NSC was built to shield the world from what lies beneath it. It sits at the heart of a vast exclusion zone, a radioactive landscape the size of Cyprus, largely abandoned by humanity. Stray dogs roam the plant in packs – workers advise against petting them.
New Nuclear Media: Art, Films, Books & More
Watch BOMBSHELL on PBS American Experience — streaming across all PBS-branded platforms, including YouTube, PBS.org and the PBS App!
The wait is over! BOMBSHELL is available NOW on PBS American Experience — and will be streaming simultaneously across all PBS-branded platforms, including YouTube, PBS.org and the PBS App.
BOMBSHELL examines how the U.S. government manipulated public opinion through propaganda and censorship to justify the use of nuclear weapons and to minimize the human toll. Against this powerful machinery, a small group of journalists—including a Black pool reporter, a Japanese American staffer, a Japanese photographer, and a freelance magazine writer—identified gaps in the official narrative and courageously reported on the human consequences of the atomic bombings.
The Wall Street Journal described BOMBSHELL as offering “lessons for our own age of ascendant AI,” while Foreign Policy called it “provocative history that brings to life the dangers that arise when government secrecy and control overwhelm press freedom.”
A House of Dynamite review – Kathryn Bigelow’s nuclear endgame thriller is a terrifying, white-knuckle comeback
★★★★★: Amid a global arms race, ending the threat of nuclear war — and even the testing of nuclear weapons — is imperative, said the Holy See’s diplomat to the United Nations.
By Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian | September 2, 2025 theguardian.com
Kathryn Bigelow has reopened the subject that we all tacitly agree not to discuss or imagine, in the movies or anywhere else: the subject of an actual nuclear strike. It’s the subject which tests narrative forms and thinkability levels.
Maybe this is why we prefer to see it as something for absurdism and satire – a way of not staring into the sun – to remember Kubrick’s (brilliant) black comedy Dr Strangelove, with no fighting in the war room etc, rather than Lumet’s deadly serious Fail Safe.