
Last spring, the Department of Energy quietly backed off a drive to produce 30 pits a year at the Los Alamos National Laboratory earlier than the agency’s long-established target of 2026, a recently published contract modification shows. The April 30, 2019 modification to Triad National Security’s Los Alamos National Laboratory management and operations contract scrubs out a directive for the nonprofit consortium “to accelerate manufacture of War Reserve (WR) pits to meet 30 pits/year, 1 year ahead of schedule” and…