LANL would get over $1B bump in proposed budget
Apr. 20—A hefty spending increase proposed for Los Alamos National Laboratory would push its budget to an unprecedented level as federal agencies forge ahead with efforts to ramp up production of nuclear bomb cores to modernize the arsenal.
The Los Alamos lab's funding would jump to about $4.6 billion from this year's $3.5 billion under the U.S. Energy Department's early budget requests for the 2023 fiscal year.
The proposed budget calls for $9.5 billion for the agency's New Mexico facilities, which include Los Alamos and Sandia national labs and an underground disposal site, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
That amount would well exceed the state's $8.5 billion budget approved this year for fiscal year 2023. The two labs' combined funding of $7.5 billion would be comparable to the state's current budget.
Watchdog groups contend the Energy Department's steep budget growth within the state has marginal value because most of it is tied to nuclear weapons.
"What good does that do for New Mexico?" said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
The Los Alamos lab's plutonium modernization funding would climb to $1.56 billion from this year's $1 billion, more than a 50 percent increase.
Much of that would go to upgrading the aging plutonium facility to prepare for making the plutonium cores, or pits, used to detonate warheads.
The goal is for the lab to produce 30 pits in 2026, nearly triple the highest volume of pits it has ever manufactured in a year. Savannah River Site in South Carolina is slated to produce an additional 50 pits by the mid-2030s.
The lab's director, nuclear security officials and some political leaders say new pits are needed to replace aging ones in the weapons stockpile, many of them dating back to the 1980s. These pits also would equip at least one new warhead being developed.
A modernized arsenal is a necessary deterrent against adversaries such as Russia, China, Iran and rogue states, which are improving their first-strike capabilities, according to the Nuclear Posture Review, a playbook President Joe Biden is updating.
Coghlan argues nuclear deterrence is a longtime excuse to develop and stockpile far more weapons than needed. Now the war in Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin's threats to launch nukes if any NATO countries intervene could further fuel an arms race, he said.
"Nuclear war is no longer so hypothetical," Coghlan said.
Another longtime critic of the lab said the nuclear weapons spending has escalated to a level that was once inconceivable.
"LANL has a bottomless appetite for money," said Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group. "The pit production mission is running over budget."
The lab arguably has the largest nuclear weapons budget of any facility in the world, Mello said.
Yet, it's still far from certain the lab will ever produce 30 pits a year, he said.
New Mexico's congressional delegates have strongly supported the lab over the years and generally press for more funding, including for its nuclear weapons program, saying it's good for national security and New Mexico's economy.
However, Coghlan said the economic benefit is questionable and appears to be limited mostly to a small segment, such as nuclear scientists and other specialists who get large salaries.
New Mexico has the highest percentage of seniors living in poverty and the second-highest rate of overall poverty, suicide and food insecurity among children, he said, citing the state Human Services Department's research.
And census data shows New Mexico slipped in per capita income from 37th in 1959 to 49th in 2019, a period covering most of the lab's history in the state, Coghlan said.
"New Mexico always ranks near the bottom of all 50 states in key socioeconomic indicators," he said.
