Los Alamos National Laboratory plutonium project called ‘a house of cards’
SANTA FE, N.M. — The U.S. Government Accountability Office is raising questions about whether a project underway at Los Alamos National Laboratory can meet a mandate to ramp up production of plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons – a key part of the federal government’s effort to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal over the next two decades.
The GAO, in a report released this week, says the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees LANL, has not defined how the multi-billion-dollar plans will achieve the goal established by the Department of Defense and Congress of producing 50 to 80 “pits” – the grapefruit-sized plutonium cores of nuclear weapons – by 2030.
NNSA’s own analysis shows the LANL project “may not support those (production) rates,” says the report by the GAO, a independent agency that works with Congress.
The report notes that officials from NNSA and its parent Department of Energy provided “widely different conclusions” about the project’s pit production capabilities, from 10 pits a year to as many as 30, and that one senior DOE official “was not aware the project was needed to support pit production.”
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