Aug 3, 2020

Zoominar this coming Wednesday, 5 - 7 pm MDT: Nuclear weapons and LANL, pit production: updates, discussion

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Please endorse the Call for Sanity not Nuclear Production
Previous letter, 7/31/20: Los Alamos County Council frustrated with NNSA abuse; LANL metastasizing to other locale(s); please endorse the Call for Sanity; earthquake north of LANL, more.
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Dear New Mexico activist leaders –

1. Zoominar this coming Wednesday, 5 - 7 pm MDT: Nuclear weapons and LANL, pit production: updates, discussion

As public awareness of renewed de novo warhead production grows, many people are calling with good questions (or reporting questions from others) about plutonium warhead core ("pit") production, nuclear weapons overall, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) background or expansion, and other related matters. So on Wednesday we'll have a general Q&A session, preceded by an update on some key issues.

Since the mainstream news media -- regional and national, both -- are unlikely to catch up on what is afoot in any accurate or useful way any time soon, we'll continue these meetings on a weekly or biweekly basis as long as there is demand.

Those wishing to attend must register in advance, at this link, after which you will receive a confirmation email.

Please feel free to invite anyone else you think might be interested, but please don't share these meeting coordinates on social media.

2. Thank you for endorsing the Call for Sanity not Nuclear Production

Endorsements are coming in -- not a flood, but some. Thank you!

If some you are reaching out to have questions you can't answer, you can refer them to Wednesday's virtual meeting. There will be plenty of time for "frequently asked questions" of all kinds.

3. Developments

• There have now been three contamination/radiation dose events at LANL's plutonium facility (PF-4) noted by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) over a recent one-month period (see July 10, 2020 Weekly Site Report [WSR]). One of those incidents made it into the press (see collection in red box, right column, including this occurrence report).

The 7/10/20 WSR (published 8/1/20) refers to an unscheduled management review board meeting that was called in early July after an "uptick in the number of skin contamination events." This organization doesn't like "gotcha" journalism or "watchdogging" all that much -- it's often not fair -- but these three incidents comprise a trend, and LANL management knows it. These incidents -- and others which could be pointed to over the past few years -- are a warning that should be taken seriously. Unfortunately, sources tell us the investigation report for the recent 14-person incident on June 8, which is now awaiting final signature, is stamped UCNI (Unclassified Controlled Nuclear Information), meaning it won't be available to the public.

We believe, from multiple incidents and sources, that this administration is using the "UCNI" (and "Official Use Only") stamps to hide politically-inconvenient facts and documents.

A whistleblower from LANL who formerly worked at Rocky Flats, contacted us last year to say, among other things, that the new radiological control technicians (RCTs) at LANL are generally poorly trained and inexperienced, and that the overall safety atmosphere at PF-4 was worse, in that person's view, than it was at Rocky Flats.

We are also hearing rumors that LANL is struggling to hire and retain plutonium workers. No surprise there. As one retired LANL scientist with glovebox experience put it to us (in the context of when to change out gloves but also applicable more widely), "the margin for error ain't much." A high degree of situational awareness is required. It can be physically taxing and it is definitely dangerous, especially if combined with production pressures from management.

The present LANL effort to rapidly train and hire 2,000 new pit production workers (p. 12), and ramp up production in that old facility to 24/7 operations for 20 pits per year (required by 2024 at the latest) is fraught with peril as we, the Institute for Defense Analyses, and NNSA itself (e.g. in this document and this one) have warned.

• In Congress, nuclear weapons appropriations await action in the Senate before negotiations can begin with the House. The Senate is struggling with Covid relief legislation and is unlikely to act on appropriations bills until after Memorial Day. House appropriators would cut about $2 billion (10%) from the NNSA request overall, including about 20% from the pit production request at LANL (still however doubling funds over the current year) and would cut 30% from the request for early-stage pit production preparations at the Savannah River Site (SRS). It is likely that the Senate will add some or all of these funds back, as happened last year.

Both the House and Senate authorized the full nuclear weapons request, a staggering increase over the current year. On Friday Eric Zuesse reprised Glen Greenwald's take on that process in the more liberal House (it's even worse in the Senate). Please don't be gullible about how this process works in the Democratic Party. Reps. Deb Haaland and Xochitl Torres-Small voted with their party to bring pit production to LANL, prevent the troops from coming home, etc. etc.

• On Friday I spent a bit of time providing background for the Guardian's W93 scoop ("UK lobbies US to support controversial new nuclear warheads"). There's a lot of detailed "back story" not in Borger's article. Some of it has been, we hear, retroactively classified (there's that issue again), such as the fact that NNSA moved this warhead's initial production forward 4 years between December and February, from an agreed-upon 2036 to the present ambitious 2032. By ordinary government standards (as opposed to the Study Group's disarmament standards), the warhead is not actually needed until the 2040s -- which is to say never, given the global crises we face.

This big rush would almost certainly generate a large new near-term funding stream for LANL, with a big payoff for Sandia as well -- hundreds of millions just over the next 5 years. LANL, as I heard Thom Mason joke to his fellow nuclear weaponists in this context, actually stands for the "Los Alamos Naval Laboratory." The bought-and-paid-for Democrats on armed services voted to make this warhead a "program of record" with funding starting October 1 of this year, making it just that little bit harder to stop next year. Hopefully the Senate appropriators won't fund it. House appropriators want to slow this down but the Senate usually wins those battles, especially given the prior action of the two armed services committees, subsequently endorsed on the floors of both houses. 

Having another LANL-led warhead would make LANL and Senator Heinrich happy. You can watch him complain (video, 1:17 - 2:00; the earlier part about pits is highly promotional for LANL but he cites figures that aren't factual so don't be fooled) that LANL didn't have a lead warhead design project of its own past about 2022. Poor LANL.

The huge expansion sought at LANL assumes a new arms race, including but not limited to the "pit race" with SRS, "victory" in which Democrats would prefer to award to New Mexico.

Stay safe, be encouraged.

Greg, Trish, and Lydia, for the Los Alamos Study Group