Udall pushes to keep nuclear pit production in New Mexico

By Sarah Halasz Graham | sgraham@sfnewmexican.com May 26, 2018 Updated May 26, 2018

New Mexico lawmakers are pushing back against the Trump administration’s decision to split the responsibility for manufacturing plutonium pits between Los Alamos National Laboratory and a facility in South Carolina.

Under the plan, LANL, which for the past 20 years has been the sole site capable of producing the softball-sized nuclear bomb cores, will take on about 38 percent of future production needs, while the Savannah River Site near Augusta, Ga., will handle the balance in a proposed new facility.

On Thursday, Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., successfully introduced an amendment to the Senate energy and water appropriations bill, calling for an independent review of the decision, announced earlier this month by the National Nuclear Security Administration.

The amendment passed unanimously in the bipartisan Appropriations Committee.

In an emailed statement Saturday afternoon, Udall characterized the track record of the Department of Energy, which oversees the NNSA, as “highly questionable.”

“I believe the DOE’s decision-making on such an important issue should be driven by safety and security — not by political considerations,” he said, adding “Independent analysis is needed to ensure that DOE is fully considering all the implications, costs and risks of its plan.”

Udall said there is “bipartisan skepticism” of the federal department’s plan to spend billions constructing a new facility at Savannah River that “will likely never be completed.”

“This proposal risks time, money and national security goals,” he added.

New Mexico’s three members of the House of Representatives, Democrats Ben Ray Lujan and Michelle Lujan Grisham, and Republican Steve Pearce, also supported a similar amendment in a House bill.

When the NNSA’s decision was announced, Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, undersecretary of the NNSA, and Ellen Lord, undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Defense, said in a joint statement that splitting the responsibilities between two facilities fosters “resiliency, flexibility and redundancy” and “is the best way to manage the cost, schedule and risk.”

The congressional delegation had lobbied intensely to keep all of the proposed pit-production work at Los Alamos before the NNSA decision was handed down.

It’s been six years since the lab has created a war-ready pit. Large-scale pit production halted with the end of the Cold War. The proposed uptick in production is part of the Trump administration’s move to modernize the nation’s nuclear weapons stock.

Under the new program, Savannah River would produce 50 pits annually while LANL would produce 30, a steep increase from the number of pits the facility created in its most productive year.

Leaked documents from the NNSA’s assessment of the two sites estimated it would cost between $1.9 billion and $7.5 billion to construct a facility at LANL capable of producing all 80 of the proposed pits.

Nuclear watchdogs have decried Trump’s proposal – and specifically LANL’s involvement, citing a bevy of safety issues at the aging facility.

Contact Sarah Halasz Graham at 505-995-3862 or sgraham@sfnewmexican.com.

Comment by Greg Mello on the above article:

The push to build a new Rocky Flats plant somewhere to begin to stockpile new pits for new weapon types originated with the hard right wing and Obama's promises to them, but has been enthusiastically taken up by Udall, Heinrich (a right-wing fellow as regards all things military and nuclear), and the other New Mexico Democrats in Congress, for greed's sake.

It's become hard to tell where the nuclear labs end and the delegation begins. Although there is no evidence that this mission would help the New Mexico economy (and 70 years of evidence to the contrary), serving the labs does help these politicians personally, and that's the main motive here. Don't rock the boat. Don't lose face with senate peers. Don't do anything creative. Above all support the military and big contractors, because they're powerful. No telling what they can do. That's our guys.

The world, and the US in the world, face an existential climate and resource crisis requiring (and soon, causing) very rapid changes in our economic and social life. The subtropics -- in our case the Chihuahan desert -- march north at an average rate of about 1 degree of latitude per decade, or about 100 ft per day, with lazy meanders in the circumpolar vortex greatly increasing the probability of periodic severe drought within an overall drift toward desertification. The US inexorably slips from its position of global hegemony toward a new multipolar world. Half or more of US citizens live precariously from paycheck to paycheck. The government, corporations, and households add more and more debt, shifting problems wherever possible onto the children. Very dangerous men and women have taken over our government.

Our senators, trailing our thoughtless congresspersons behind them, meanwhile dream of plutonium pits. Perhaps it will help, they apparently think, to make the Santa Fe area into the nation's industrial plutonium processing center. That is just so swell of them. They don't question the need to make pits -- in fact they are among the loudest voices in the chorus for making more pits, beyond the 23,000 we have.

I hate to be so rough on the delegation, but they really do have the power to make a very positive difference for our country, and LANL, and New Mexico, on this particular issue. Udall needs to speak up against industrial pit production, anywhere. He is to the right of his predecessors on the matter of industrializing LANL's plutonium R&D, and is going against numerous local resolutions as well.

More pernicious still, getting industrial pit production for New Mexico, and ensuring support for nuclear weapons in general, may well explain how a measure to establish a consolidated interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel has been a feature of legislation reported from Mr. Udall's appropriations subcommmittee for six years running.