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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Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to be Spent on Plutonium Pit Production – NNSA Chooses Speed Over Safety, Condones Potential Lethal Radioactive Doses to Public
Santa Fe, NM – The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the semi-autonomous nuclear weapons agency with the Department of Energy, is no longer pursuing a safety class active confinement system at PF-4, the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium pit manufacturing facility. This is a long-running battle between the independent Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) and NNSA.
The Safety Board has strongly recommended active confinement systems since 2004, reporting that they “will continue to function during an accident, thereby ensuring that radioactive material is captured by filters before it can be released into the environment.” [i] However, a few years ago NNSA tried to kill the messenger by seriously restricting DNFSB access to NNSA nuclear facilities across the country.
LANL would get over $1B bump in proposed budget
BY SCOTT WYLAND, THE SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN | April 20, 2022 santafenewmexican.com
New Mexico: Number One in Nuclear Weapons and Radioactive Wastes Near Last in Citizen and Child Well-Being
Santa Fe, NM – According to budget documents just released by the Department of Energy, DOE facilities in New Mexico will receive $9.4 billion in FY 2023, substantially larger than the state’s entire operating budget of $8.5 billion. Seventy-one percent ($6.7 billion) will be for core nuclear weapons research and production programs under the DOE’s semi-autonomous nuclear weapons agency, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). That is 40.5% of the NNSA’s total nation-wide nuclear weapons budget of $16.5 billion. It is also double that of the next closest state, since the Land of Enchantment has two of the nation’s three nuclear weapons laboratories (the Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories). Both of these Labs are within the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe, whose Archbishop John Wester has echoed Pope Francis’ call for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
In contrast, the goal of NNSA programs in New Mexico is to indefinitely extend the service lives of existing nuclear weapons while giving them new military capabilities. This will be followed by completely new nuclear weapons that cannot be tested given the global testing moratorium. Alternatively, it could prompt the U.S. back into nuclear weapons testing, which would have serious international proliferation implications. NNSA’s claimed rationale is “deterrence” which requires only a few hundred nuclear weapons. In reality the U.S. and Russia each have thousands of ready-to-launch weapons for nuclear war-fighting that would result in global catastrophe, no longer so hypothetical since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Los Alamos Lab: More Plutonium, More Nuclear Weapons
Santa Fe, NM – On Good Friday afternoon, just before the Easter weekend, the Department of Energy (DOE) posted its “Laboratory Tables”, the best source for site specific budget information. DOE boosts funding for the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to $4.6 billion in FY 2023 (+21%), which begins October 1. With another typical $300 million in “Work for Others” (the Defense Department, FBI, CIA, etc.), LANL’s total institutional funding for FY 2023 will be approximately $4.9 billion.
Out of that, $3.6 billion is slated for core nuclear weapons research and production programs. The percentage of nuclear weapons funding at LANL has steadily grown as the Lab increasingly banks its future on plutonium “pit” bomb core production. A decade ago, nuclear weapons programs were 59% of LANL’s total institutional budget. Today it is 73%. Moreover, the remainder of Lab programs (including nonproliferation and cleanup) either directly or indirectly support nuclear weapons programs, for example through a 6% internal tax for “laboratory-directed research and development” that has historically tilted towards nuclear weapons.
LANL’s largest funding increase is for “Plutonium Modernization”, jumping 61% to $1.6 billion in FY 2023. Within that, funding to expand the production of plutonium “pit” bomb cores at LANL’s aging plutonium pit production facility is increased 68% to $588 million.
SRS WATCH: Nuclear Weapons Funding Request for DOE, Savannah River Site Takes a Huge Leap in Support of Dangerous, Enduring U.S. Plans to Fight a Full-Scale Nuclear War
SRS to Take a Larger Role in Nuclear Weapons Activities as Funding for SRS Plutonium Bomb Plant Spirals Out of Control, Increasing 189% in One Year and Nearing $1 Billion Per Year
Columbia, SC – Details of the U.S. Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons budget request for Fiscal Year 2023 were released on Friday, April 22, 2022, and a frightening picture emerges of a nation engaged in a nuclear weapons buildup emerges. A key to DOE’s plans to make new nuclear weapons and upgrade old ones is dependent on a host of new production facilities, with the proposed Savannah River Site (SRS) Plutonium Bomb Plant (PBP) playing a key role in expanded reliance on nuclear weapons.
Link to SRS Watch news release, which include links to DOE’s FY23 budget justification, released on April 22, 2022:
https://srswatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/SRS-Watch-news-on-DOE-budget-April-22-2022-1.pdf
Governor Backs Citizens’ Concerns About Diluted Plutonium in Letter
[Michelle Lujan Grisham] sided with residents’ contention — which she has stated in the past — New Mexico shouldn’t be home to the nation’s sole nuclear waste storage site.
“The petitioners would like to see the DOE develop a new disposal site in a state other than New Mexico,” she wrote in the letter.
| April 18, 2022 santafenewmexican.com
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is asking the Department of Energy to be more open about its plans to dilute and dispose of surplus plutonium and to address concerns by New Mexico residents about the radioactive materials that would be shipped through the state multiple times.
In a letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, the governor cited a 1,146-signature petition her office received in which residents expressed uneasiness about the agency’s vague plans to dilute dozens of metric tons of plutonium — which partly would be done at Los Alamos National Laboratory — before disposing of it at an underground site in Carlsbad.
Biden’s FY 2023 Budget Fuels New Nuclear Arms Race
Santa Fe, NM – The Biden Administration is slow rolling its nuclear weapons budget for the federal fiscal year 2023, which will begin October 1, 2022. Top line budget numbers released on March 24 showed that Biden is increasing the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA’s) budget category for “Total Weapons Activities” by 7.4% to $16.5 billion. That may seem like a relatively modest increase, especially given accelerating inflation.
However, huge increases in specific programs have now been disclosed in an obscure budget chart entitled “Comparative Appropriation by Congressional Control FY 2023.” These NNSA programs are the tip of the spear in the United States’ $1.7 trillion nuclear weapons “modernization” program. It will rebuild every nuclear warhead in the planned stockpile with new military capabilities; design and manufacture new-design nuclear weapons as well; construct new production plants expected to be operational until the 2080’s; and procure at enormous taxpayers’ expense new missiles, subs and bombers to deliver these weapons of mass destruction. It is, in short, a program of nuclear weapons forever.
