The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) on Wednesday morning officially green-lit the Los Alamos National Laboratory to make 30 war-ready warhead cores in 2026 for next-generation intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Under the long-expected decision, the northern New Mexico weapon-design laboratory “will produce a minimum of 30 war reserve pits per year for the national pit production mission during 2026 and implement surge efforts to exceed 30 pits per year as needed,” the semiautonomous Departmnt of Energy agency stated in a Federal Register notice.
The agency published the decision right after releasing its environmental review of the planned pit plant: an expansion of the lab’s Plutonium Facility (PF-4), which has already cast a few practice pits, and which handles other plutonium missions for the NNSA. The agency says the planned Los Alamos pit facility could increase its output to more 80 pits annually, if needed.
That is enough, even without the addition of a planned NNSA pit plant at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., to meet military requirements for pit production from 2030 onward. All the new plutonium cores produced at Los Alamos and Savannah River will initially be for W87-1 warheads intended for the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent missiles expected to the Minuteman III fleet starting around 2030. An NNSA environmental review for the Savannah River facility is ongoing.
Disarmament activists have complained that the NNSA’s just-completed environmental review, a pit-focused supplemental analysis to a much broader 2008 environmental impact statement that covered all of Los Alamos, failed to consider the pit mission’s affects on the rest of the site, the state of New Mexico, and the entire DOE nuclear complex.
New Mexico itself, while not going so far as to call for an entirely new site-wide environmental impact statement, had its own concerns about the recent review’s narrow focus — concerns that did not stop the NNSA from officially approving the Los Alamos pit mission on Wednesday.
In public comments published in July, Santa Fe complained that Los Alamos’ new pit mission might illegally strand some Cold War-era transuranic waste at the lab.
The state argued that new transuranic waste from the pit mission, plus DoE’s 2019 decision to reserve 55% of all shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) for the Idaho National Laboratory, would leave no room at WIPP in the near-term for Los Alamos’ legacy transuranic waste.
The NNSA waved away New Mexico’s concerns about DoE’s deal with Idaho, saying the “[a]greement with the State of Idaho was conducted in a manner that ensures [transuranic] waste disposal needs at [Los Alamos] are recognized.”
However, the agency appeared amenable to tracking the effects of the now-approved pit mission on Los Alamos legacy waste, writing that “NNSA agrees that it would be appropriate to review environmental impacts arising from these requirements, if any.”
The NNSA did not say when it might begin that review.