A change in the federal government’s priorities for its nuclear weapons arsenal couldn’t have come at a worse time for Los Alamos National Laboratory. Just as the famed facility is starting to show its age, a new initiative from the Trump administration has tasked LANL to play a central role in upgrading the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
LANL was built as a research and development facility in the 1940s. It can produce nuclear materials, but it wasn’t designed to be a factory. But the 22,000-acre campus is now the nation’s only producer of plutonium pits, which are spheres of plutonium about the size of a bowling ball.
A plutonium pit is the core of a nuclear weapon. A recent New York Times investigative report explores why the Trump administration wants the labs to produce more plutonium pits - and why that’s easier said than done.
Northern New Mexico journalist Alicia Inez Guzman, a fellow for The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship, reported the story. She said that the facility itself is aging and has been beset by myriad structural problems.
“I looked at the number of times that there was a flood or a leak,” she said. She also looked at the trolley that moves plutonium and other nuclear materials across the facility.
“So I was looking at the number of times that the trolley had issues or an outage, and so we counted those up. I was looking at basically this dual simultaneous construction and renovation that's happening alongside pit production,” Guzmán said. “So that's kind of the heart of the article, in which you have this very important mission happening at the same time that you have actual construction or renovation activities happening.”
The United States has plenty of nuclear weapons, so one might wonder why the government wants more plutonium pits. The answer is that scientists aren’t quite sure how plutonium ages, and how long these pits retain their destructive power. A federal site in South Carolina is planned to become the nation’s second producer of plutonium pits, but isn’t expected to be online for a decade or more.
“So there is this conundrum that Los Alamos has to work until at least that facility comes online, and then documents suggest that it'll continue to work into the 2040s and that's well past its ‘planned lifetime,’ according to federal documents,” she said. “It was really supposed to be phased out at 50 years old. And so that's right around now.”
Guzman says federal documents refer to this as a “life extension.”
“And so, it is the only option right now, and that will be until the Savannah River site comes online again, perhaps not until the early 2030s maybe even, you know, it may not hit its own quota of plutonium pits until the mid 2030s or even late 2030s,” she said. “Until then Los Alamos is it.”
And she said that means using a building that was supposed to be phased out in a way it was never intended to be used.
A change in the federal government’s priorities for its nuclear weapons arsenal couldn’t have come at a worse time for Los Alamos National Laboratory. Just as the famed facility is starting to show its age, a new initiative from the Trump administration has tasked LANL to play a central role in upgrading the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
Northern New Mexico journalist Alicia Inez Guzman, a fellow for The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship, recently published an investigative feature on the topic.
“According to federal documents. (Los Alamos National Laboratories) was really supposed to be phased out at 50 years old,“ Guzman said. “And so that's right around now. But it's getting, as it's called, in these federal documents, a life extension.”
Ever since the nuclear weapons production site at Rocky Flats, Colo., closed in 1989 following a series of environmental violations, LANL has been the only facility producing plutonium pits, which are the core of nuclear warheads. Plutonium’s properties as it ages are unclear to scientists. Fearing that the nation’s aging nuclear arsenal is becoming obsolete, a new federal initiative has charged LANL with producing new pits.
“So that's kind of the heart of the article, in which you have this very important mission happening at the same time that you have actual construction or renovation activities happening,” Guzman said.
You can find KUNM’s republication of Guzman’s story here.
