Fukushima Be Damned, Federal Court Brushes Off Seismic Nuke Risks
Regular readers are aware of how alarmed we are by the construction of a facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico intended, in large part, to help produce something known as plutonium pits. Before examining the latest development in attempts to halt it, first some background on the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF) from recent posts.
1. Plutonium pits are the living, breathing heart of a nuclear weapon, where the chain reaction occurs. In other words, mad science at its most extreme.
2. The CMRR-NF’s projected cost, adjusted for inflation, may be greater than all the work done on the Manhattan Project in New Mexico during World War II.
3. The land the building will occupy is seismically, uh, challenged (subject to seismic shocks as great as those experienced at Fukushima).
A watchdog association called the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) has been spearheading efforts to stop the CMRR-NF in its tracks via a lawsuit against the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the Department of Energy (DOE). Re the objections to CMRR-NF, again from a previous post:
In the hearings Mello and noted nuclear physicist Frank von Hippel, who, during Perestroika, helped sell the Russians on monitoring and verification (as chronicled in David Hoffman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Dead Hand), testified. LASG’s lawyer asked von Hippel why he thought a new study of alternatives to the CMRR-NF was called for? His reply (in truth, to an imaginary question: why do we need more nuclear pits anyway?):
The need for large-scale pit production has vanished. In 2003, the [NNSA] was arguing that the [United States] needed the capability to produce 125 to 450 pits per year by 2020 to replace the pits in the US weapon stockpile that would be 30 to 40 years old by then. . . . But, in 2006, we learned that US pits were so well made that, according to a Congressionally-mandated review of Los Alamos and Livermore studies on pit aging, “Most primary types have credible minimum lifetimes in excess of 100 years as regards aging of plutonium.” [Besides, although] the Los Alamos and Livermore National Laboratories have been lobbying to develop and manufacture new-design “reliable replacement warheads,” and the Bush Administration supported the idea, Congress refused in 2007 to fund the program.
Also the updated U.S. Nuclear Posture Review Report mandates that
In any decision to [develop] warhead LEPs [Life Extension Programs], the United States will give strong preference to options for refurbishment or reuse. . . . the preferred strategy is to reuse existing pits where necessary, or simply refurbish the balance of the warhead. . . . As of the end of Fiscal Year 2009, the total size of the U.S. warhead stockpile was about 5,000 warheads . . . and about 14,000 pits recovered from [decommissioned] warheads . . . were in storage at the Pantex warhead assembly/disassembly facility in Amarillo.
In other words
There will be no shortage of pits to reuse.
Let’s hope that those who worry that the United States would run out of these infernal little infernal destruction machines will rest easy now. Also testifying was LASG executive director Greg Mello. When asked by LASG’s lawyer about the CMRR-NF’s estimated cost, he responded.
In November 2010, the White House estimated the budget at “$3.7 to 5.8 billion.” Defendants recently pushed back the projected date of a reliable cost estimate to 2015.
In fact (emphasis added)
In its submissions to Congress, NNSA is just writing “TBD” in the future cost and schedule columns.
Echoing von Hippel, Mello explained that the Department of Energy’s science advisory group, known as JASON,
. . . reviewed research done at LANL and Livermore on pit life. JASON concurred with these labs that most U.S. pits would last for a century or more. There are also extra pits for almost every kind of warhead, thousands in all, and these reserves [as von Hippel also mentioned] are growing as warheads are dismantled. . . . Production of new plutonium pits is not necessary to maintain a very large, diverse, powerful nuclear weapons stockpile for several decades to come.
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