Amid billions spent in upgrades, federal report foresees replacing LANL plutonium facility

Oct. 20—A congressional commission foresees eventually replacing Los Alamos National Laboratory's plutonium facility — despite the billions of dollars being spent to refurbish it — as part of its recommended strategy to bolster the U.S. nuclear arsenal to keep pace with Russia and China.

The Congressional Strategic Posture Commission has released a 160-page report that pushes for the U.S. to boost its nuclear capabilities and conventional military to deter what it describes as increasingly aggressive and well-equipped adversaries, namely Russia and China.

One section calls for improving and expanding infrastructure to research, develop and make better weaponry at a higher volume — and buried in a footnote is a statement of how the upgrades would include replacing the lab's plutonium facility, known as PF-4, for production and science.

No timeline is given for when PF-4 might be phased out, but the document confirms anti-nuclear critics' longtime contention the federal government is spending billions of dollars on a facility with a finite life.

At the moment, this is the only facility in the country that can produce the bowling-ball-sized plutonium cores, or "pits," to detonate warheads. Nuclear security officials want the lab to make 30 pits a year by 2030, saying they're needed to modernize the arsenal and equip two new warheads being developed.

An anti-nuclear watchdog group contends the pits' main purpose is to be fitted into the new warheads — not to upgrade existing weapons — and expanding the arsenal requires more pits than the lab can make.

"The commission ill-advisedly wants a replacement for LANL's plutonium pit production facility to help fuel the new nuclear arms race with new-design nuclear weapons," Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, wrote in an email. "This is so tragic and unnecessary when no future pit production is scheduled to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing, extensively tested stockpile."

Wasting money has never bothered the federal agencies, whether it was cost overruns on projects or boondoggles that never panned out, he said.

The budget for modernizing this facility and funding plutonium operations has grown to almost $1.8 billion, more than five times the $308 million of several years ago. The total amount to be spent ramping up pit production also is growing as the finish line gets extended.

The original target date for rolling out 30 pits per year was 2026. But recently, lab Director Thom Mason acknowledged it will be at least 2028 before the lab reaches that goal.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the arsenal, didn't address the report's statement about eventually replacing the plutonium facility.

But in an email, she wrote the agency will review the panel's findings and look to build on its conclusions.

"We share the commission's sense of urgency and are committed to doing what is necessary to sustain and strengthen deterrence now and in the future," spokeswoman Millicent Mike wrote. "NNSA agrees that the United States must be prepared to deter two major nuclear-armed competitors. We are moving ... to implement our strategy and respond to this challenge."

The commission's chairwoman, Madelyn Creedon, is a former deputy director for the nuclear security agency. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, another member, headed the agency under the Trump administration.

Former U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, is the vice chair. In all, the body has a dozen members with expertise in national security and defense.

Coghlan believes the report will carry a lot of weight because of the members' collective credentials. So the statement about eventually scrapping the plutonium facility could affect long-term funding, he added.

Some lawmakers on both the House and Senate armed services committees have expressed support for the panel's recommendations to amp up deterrence in response to Russia's increasing aggressiveness — including with its full-scale invasion of Ukraine — and China investing heavily in its military.

An anti-nuclear activist noted a 2020 Energy Department report presented to Congress pegged the lab's upgraded plutonium facility running until 2045.

However, it's far from certain the facility will last that long, said Greg Mello, executive director of Los Alamos Study Group, because the lab will be "running PF-4 into the ground."

"When PF-4 ages out, all the pit production will go to Savannah River," Mello said, referring to a South Carolina facility planned to produce 50 additional pits per year by the mid-2030s. "We think pit production at Los Alamos is a temporary project."

In the past, China and Russia were described as near-peer adversaries. This report refers to them as peers whose growing nuclear strength requires the U.S. to step up its defenses in this "power competition."

"We will face a world where two nations possess nuclear arsenals on par with our own," the report said. "It is an existential challenge for which the United States is ill-prepared, unless its leaders make decisions now to adjust the U.S. strategic posture."

Coghlan said he finds the report's specific recommendations a disturbing throwback to the first nuclear arms race.

They include putting multiple warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles, possibly mounting these missiles on road vehicles, building more heavy bombers and submarines that launch cruise missiles and deploying battlefield nuclear weapons with a smaller blast range.

In an email, an anti-nuclear advocate echoed those concerns.

"This report is calling for a full-fledged return to a Cold War nuclear warfighting strategy, not a deterrence strategy," wrote Geoff Wilson, director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight. "If we learned anything from the Cold War, it should have been that simply possessing more nuclear weapons ... did not make us any safer."

Wilson also noted the report strongly advocates Los Alamos lab and Savannah River Site making at least 80 nuclear bomb cores combined per year, even though there are thousands of existing pits already stockpiled.

"I think if you need one measure of the new global nuclear arms race, that fact alone is telling," Wilson wrote.