The U.S. is planning on spending a trillion dollars over the next ten years on upgrading the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Part of this project will be the construction on new nuclear warheads. The plutonium cores of warhead are called “pits”. The Pentagon expects to be producing eighty pits a year by 2030. In the past twenty-five years, the U.S. has only produced thirty pits.
In the next few days, the U.S. Department of Energy will select one of two possible sites to manufacture the plutonium pits. The two sites are the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. However, there are serious concerns for both potential sites about the safety of their operations. There are charges that employees at both sites were sloppy in the handling of nuclear materials and/or failed to monitor safety issues aggressively.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is the place where plutonium pits have been manufactured in the past. In the month of March alone, errors in the handling of plutonium by LANL workers caused three work stoppages. Workers confused the words “staging” and “storage” twice in recent weeks which resulted in plutonium being placed in containers and areas which were prohibited and unsafe. These mistakes follow three years during which work at LANL was halted because they were unable to meet safety standards for handling plutonium. They have resumed most such work since the three-year hiatus which began in 2013 and ended in 2016.
The Savannah River Site has produced materials for nuclear warheads since the Fifties. In January of 2015, the stirring mechanism for a tank of plutonium solution failed. Flakes of plutonium sank to the bottom of the tank and began to interact with each other. If there had been enough to form a critical mass, a chain reaction would have taken place that would have killed everyone in the room and released radioactive materials into the environment.
Since the incident with the plutonium tank, operations at the SRS have been overseen by the National Nuclear Security Administration. A recent report from senior DoE engineers and physicists concluded that while there had been some improvement at the SRS from the NNSA oversight, there were still problems that needed to be fixed. During a week-long inspection in the month of January, were still “alarmingly inattentive to safety and were not adequately heeding the advice of their safety experts.”
The principal assistant deputy secretary of defense of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration's stated that nuclear rivals of the U.S. are taking notice of our problems in the production of nuclear warheads. He said, “I’m sure they’re watching that. It’s not lost on anyone that there are nations out there that produce more pits than we do, including the North Koreans. That’s one of the reasons why we need to get moving in terms of our capability.”
During the Cold War, nuclear armed nations paid little attention to safety and the environment when they were working on nuclear weapons. There has been some improvement in the past twenty years since the fall of the Soviet Union, but it appears that there are still significant problems at U.S. nuclear weapons manufacturing sites.