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Greg Mello / Los Alamos Study Group

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From the Los Alamos Study Group

Bulletin 307

• https://www.lasg.org/ActionAlerts/2022/Bulletin307.html

by Greg Mello

August 28, 2022

As a result of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has provided some highlights of its grand plan for rebuilding and expanding Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the so-called "Campus Master Plan" ("Plan"). We described these highlights previously here and here.

....

The Plan would add the equivalent of a whole additional national laboratory to LANL, for the new mission of "reliably" producing plutonium warhead cores ("pits").

Implementation of the Plan would have profound impacts locally, regionally, and nationally. It would facilitate evolution of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, albeit at a cost of more than $50 million per pit, roughly tripling the cost of warheads using LANL pits.* (*See the discussion from 2020 at slide 30, which could be updated with more current but still too low cost figures for pits from here and updated warhead costs estimated by GAO here. Further cost information will be available this fall.)

NNSA's pit production endeavor is by far the largest project in the agency's history, with LANL expected to require the majority of funding. (See: "Warhead plutonium modernization spending, actual & proposed by site," May 6, 2022). Given the revelations of this Plan and other documents we have obtained via FOIA, LANL costs have increased significantly beyond those shown so far in NNSA's budget documents.

There will be efforts to make the entire cost of expanding and rebuilding LANL on a vast scale, while adding and executing a huge new production mission -- $20 billion or more over the coming decade -- DISAPPEAR FROM DISCUSSION, on grounds that "it has to be done, so the cost doesn't matter." In other word, these costs may disappear into NNSA's ever-rising "baseline" spending "requirement." Unless citizens mobilize, there may be no objection in Congress or elsewhere in government.

While do not yet have the Plan itself, the highlights indicate that much more than $10 billion in additional costs, beyond those currently budgeted, will be required to sustain pit production at LANL, assuming it can be safely started at all, a major assumption. Why?

More than 4 million square feet of new construction is needed in the main LANL technical area (TA-03) and the western end of Pajarito Canyon alone, the latter being where LANL's plutonium operations are located. "Several thousand" additional new staff members will be needed in Pajarito Canyon beyond those working there a year ago, raising operational costs by $10 billion or more over the following decade. LANL's main plutonium facility ("PF-4") will need to be replaced or augmented with one or more additional high-hazard plutonium facilities. Assuming a place could be found to put it, PF-4 replacement would cost at least $10 billion; smaller plutonium production "modules," which do not appear feasible and entail high risks (slide 8), would also cost billions. According to the Plan and other documents, the Sigma nuclear facility in TA-03 must also be replaced, another "billion-plus" project. Numerous smaller projects necessary for pit production (but funded outside the pit production budget) are required...

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