May 17, 2020

Study Group to host public Zoom meetingTuesday May 19, 6:00 - 7:30 pm MST; quick updates

Permalink for this letter (give us a few minutes). PLEASE FORWARD!Other Letters
Home page; Press Releases; Bulletins;
To subscribe to our Activist Leaders listserve (formerly "Friends") send a blank email here. To unsubscribe send a blank email here.  
To subscribe to our Main listserve (less content, less frequent) send a blank email here. To unsubscribe send a blank email here.
Our blog (makeover soon, LOL): Remember your Humanity. Twitter.
Contribute. Volunteer. Contact us (Greg, Trish in main office, Lydia Clark in Santa Fe)

Dear New Mexico activist leaders –

1. Tuesday's meeting

The Study Group will be hosting a public Zoom meeting this coming Tuesday, May 19, from 6:00 - 7:30 pm MST.

At this meeting we will provide updates about LANL issues and answer questions submitted through Zoom's chat function. (This formality is the best we can do in a wide-open virtual setting, with hundreds invited. If it turns out that there are only a handful of people present, we may be able to ask and answer questions less formally -- we'll just have to see how many attend.)

If you don't have access to the meeting via computer you can telephone and listen but you won't be able to ask questions.

Here's the link to join the meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89129974698

Meeting ID: 891 2997 4698
Password: 863314

If you are joining us by telephone, please dial in using one the following numbers that correspond to your general area (about 99% of those invited are in New Mexico; the TX number should work for you):

WA area: 253 215 8782
TX area: 346 248 7799
CA area: 669 900 6833
MD area: 301 715 8592
IL area: 312 626 6799
NY area: 929 436 2866

Many of you are by now quite experienced at virtual meetings of various kinds. If not, "getting your ducks in a row" technically ahead of time is a very good idea. We also have to learn new forms of etiquette ("Zoom meeting etiquette: 15 tips and best practices for online video conference meetings"). There are tons of tutorials on line, e.g. here.

Please join promptly, as we will start right away. Our agenda will be more or less as follows:

The first hour (short topic introductions by Greg Mello, 7 minutes each, then Q&A, also 7 minutes):

• An overview of US nuclear weapons programs: the US nuclear arsenal and its modernization; costs, schedules, locations.

• The proposed rapid expansion of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) for warhead core ("pit") production and warhead design: the role of LANL in specific planned nuclear weapons and therefore the critical role northern New Mexico can play in halting those weapons.

• Why we think pit production is unlikely to succeed, and why LANL is the worst place to do it. The essential and growing role of Santa Fe in enabling pit production.

• Why we think the pit mission is incompatible with national survival -- and will, sooner or later, be abandoned.

The final half hour (introduction by Lydia Clark, our Outreach Director, then Q&A):

• What we in New Mexico can do to halt this folly.

We'd like to have as much participation as possible at this and subsequent virtual meetings. If there are only a few people present we may be able to open up mics.

If there are really important questions that don't get answered in sufficient depth due to gaps in our knowledge or inadequate time we can take them up in greater depth in subsequent meetings.

We want to know how to make future meetings better, so if you have suggestions please write.

We would like to meet again rather soon, among other topics on the matter of LANL's regional economics: what to say to people who say we need pit production, etc. because of "jobs."

2. A few quick updates

As most of you know there was recently a comment period on the Draft Supplement Analysis (DSA) to LANL's old site-wide environmental impact statement (SWEIS), addressing pit production issues only. Since it would be a little like commenting into a hole in the ground, we didn't ask you to waste your time commenting. Given the lack of any legal context, our own comments were limited to several big issues which encompass most of the dozens of specific problems we tabulated. It was important for this organization to comment despite evident federal insincerity, in order to forestall any future laches defense. As we say, and as we will discuss, much more expansion is going on at LANL than just gearing up for pit production.

For citizens it is a much better use of your time to write and publish your opinions about pit production in newspapers, on blogs, in virtual campaign meetings, or really in any (virtual) public place and manner, than to submit them to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

In South Carolina (unlike here), an EIS process for pit production is underway ("Study: Savannah River pit hub could meet national demand for nuclear weapon cores," Aiken Standard, Apr 8, 2020). We have participated fully there and will file formal comments.

As you can begin to see from the graphic which begins this article, the Savannah River Site (SRS) has a lot of room, in every sense, for pit production. From an engineering point of view, it's a better site.

The Trump Administration originally just wanted one pit production site, not two. The notion of having two sites arose because the New Mexico Democrats saw that SRS's advantages threatened LANL's pit mission. The upshot is that now we have two sites preparing to make more than 80 pits per year each. Only one of these site makes any engineering sense. Neither makes long-term policy sense -- provided the US is willing to start retiring nuclear weapon systems in the late 2030s and beyond.

As we will see, as far as pits are concerned LANL is going to be one of --

1. a "disposable" pit factory (that is something like "wasted waste", "waste squared");
2. a bigger and far more expensive pit factory than is currently admitted; or
3. a pit R&D and training facility, i.e. no pit factory at all.

Interested? Ask on Tuesday via chat, if our explanation isn't complete.

The New Mexican had a good article today on pit production in the Democratic primary race for Congressional District (CD) 3 ("Plans to boost LANL pit production get mixed reactions from CD3 candidates," May 16, 2020). Good, except the lede had a factual error. It said, with the mistake in italics:

Controversial plans to ramp up plutonium pit production at Los Alamos National Laboratory have drawn mixed support from candidates running for an open seat in the 3rd Congressional District — a shift from state leaders’ traditional bipartisan backing of the lab’s nuclear weapons program.

It's a mistake anybody could make who hasn't been around for a while. It has been pointed out to them. To assert a history of bipartisan support for pit production is dangerous.

In fact there was uniform bipartisan opposition to pit production at LANL a very short time ago. See https://www.lasg.org/MPF2/PitProdOpposition.html. Domenici, Bingaman, Richardson, Udall, all opposed LANL as a pit production site. None of them saw LANL as appropriate for a production mission. They all thought WIPP was a better site for such a production mission, and wrote DOE accordingly. Neither did the University of California, which ran LANL then and still partly does,  want that mission.

3. Update on US Nuclear Weapons Modernization for the International Disarmament Community

The above resource may be of use to you, both for the facts it draws together and the conclusions it makes. We'd have liked to make the latter clearer. We had to keep the style rather dry and some of the most important conclusions, implicit. There's a lot to discuss in the last section, especially.

4. Cascading, converging crises

I hope you understand that there will be no return to "normal" "after" this pandemic. We can't see far ahead, or clearly, but at least that much is clear. The defense literature is rife with statements of fear that military budgets may not be supported going forward, as indeed they may not be.

To meet and seize the day, it is important that we not be cowed but rather be very ambitious, realistically ambitious, and to make plans based on those ambitions. At the same time we notice that everything takes longer!

It's a tremendously important inflection point in narrative, politics, economics, and society. It's also horrible, and more attention is going into basic security and safety needs in our own community. People are hunkering down into intellectually and emotionally safe groups.

Views are changing. There are new possibilities.

Stay in touch, stay safe,

Thank you for your attention,

Greg Mello