|
|
|
For immediate release: July 23, 2026
House passes requirement to build more than 200 plutonium nuclear warhead cores annually by 2050 Contact: Greg Mello: 505-577-8563 Albuquerque, NM -- Plutonium warhead cores ("pits") are the primary fissile components of all U.S. nuclear weapons.
Since pit production ceased at the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver in 1989, the U.S. has not had a factory to make these components. A $60 billion effort is underway to provide for not just one but two such factories, one at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and another to follow at the Savannah River Site (SRS) ("Plutonium "pit" production now a $60 billion program -- $20 billion down, $40 billion to go," Jun 8, 2026).
On June 15, the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) reported out its proposed fiscal year (FY) 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA, H.R. 8800), which contained, at Section 3111 (p. 1478), this pit production requirement:
Yesterday, (Wednesday July 22), the House passed H.R. 8800 with amendments. While the final ("engrossed") version of the bill as passed is not available at congress.gov as of this writing, there were no floor amendments offered to change the pit production capacity requirements that were written into the HASC version.
The corresponding Senate version of the FY27 NDAA (reported from Committee on 6/15, not yet debated or passed in the Senate) is silent on pit production requirements.
Current statutory pit production requirements top out at 80 pits per year (ppy) by 2030. There are no statutory production requirements beyond that year.
The statutory pit production requirement to make 10 pits was not met in FY24; one pit was made. The number of pits made in FY25 and so far in FY26 are classified.
The FY26 NDAA, at Section 3112, requires that LANL acquire the capability to produce at least 30 pits per year (ppy), and SRS acquire the capability to produce at least 50 ppy.
The word "capability," as used in the FY26 NDAA and in the proposed FY27 NDAA, is not the same as actual production, and is open to some interpretation. For its part, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the semi-autonomous subset of the Department of Energy (DOE) that designs and builds nuclear warheads, recently wrote that the requirement to have the "capability" to produce 30 ppy at LANL could be satisfied by the actual production of as few as 10 ppy (see p. S-12, Draft Plutonium Pit Production Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement).
In addition to statutory requirements, there are also executive branch requirements. The latter have recently more than doubled for near-term production (that is, production at LANL) ("Responsive Today, Dominant Tomorrow: Enhancing American Nuclear Dominance:" Nuclear agency outlines ambitious near-term goals for nuclear warheads, labs, factories, and operations; Pit production at Los Alamos to be at least doubled if not tripled; other NNSA sites to help Los Alamos do so, details TBD, Feb 23, 2026). At SRS, production is slated to occur no earlier than 2035.
In the HASC, the new pit production requirement first appeared in the "Chairman's Mark," which anonymizes behind-the-scenes authorship. No amendments were offered in committee to change it. Representative Garamendi offered an amendment to compare the estimated cost of the new requirement with the cost of current requirements, but this was voted down 25-31, possibly because it is impractical to estimate the cost of anything so vague and distant in time.
Conversations we held on Capitol Hill in late June did not shed light on the origins or rationale for this proposed requirement.
Last year, the Senate attempted to write expanded pit production requirements into law while also loosening near-term requirements (that LANL was unlikely to meet in any case) ("Senate bill would relax near-term production deadlines for nuclear warhead cores at Los Alamos, double outyear production requirements for Los Alamos, and cement Savannah River's production role," Aug 15, 2025).
The House did not concur and pit production requirements remained the same, apart from the new requirement previously mentioned in Section 3112, which in effect created for the first time a statutory requirement to complete the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF), the facility at SRS where pits are to be made.
In order to "reliably produce no fewer than 180 war reserve plutonium pits annually," the average production level will need to be significantly higher than 180 ppy. NNSA has quantified this average on more than one occasion, as explained here. A minimum production rate of 180 ppy would certainly lead to an average production rate in excess of 200 ppy, mostly likely well in excess of that figure if two sites are producing, as Dr. Verdon of NNSA once explained.
Study Group director Greg Mello:
***ENDS***
|
|||
|
|
|||
|