If you are following the issue of production of plutonium “pits” for new nuclear weapons, you will want to check out this April 27, 2023 article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:
Dealing with a debacle: A better plan for US plutonium pit production
By Curtis T. Asplund, Frank von Hippel
For two decades, the Pentagon and Congress have been increasingly concerned that the United States does not have a reliable capability to produce plutonium “pits,” the cores of US thermonuclear warheads. In 2018, the agency responsible for the production and maintenance of US nuclear warheads, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), responded with a plan to build, on a crash basis, pit production lines in New Mexico and South Carolina at the same time, with a combined production capacity of 80 pits per year.
One of the production lines is in an advanced state of installation at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the home of US pit-production expertise. The other is to be installed at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina, where there is no pit-production expertise, in a massive building that the Department of Energy built for another purpose and was then forced to abandon because of huge cost overruns. South Carolina’s congressional delegation, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham, successfully prevailed on the Trump administration to repurpose this $6 billion building—once known as Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility and intended to downblend surplus military plutonium for use as commercial reactor fuel—to plutonium pit production. History is repeating itself, however. The NNSA’s cost estimate for using the Savannah River facility to manufacture warhead pits has already risen from $3.6 billion in 2017 for an 80 pit-per-year production capacity to $11.1 billion for a 50 pit-per-year capacity in 2023.
The NNSA’s rationale for its ambitious pit production program is, to say the least, questionable. The agency proposes to first build 800 pits for new US intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) warheads, which would be needed only if the US decides to increase the number of warheads on each missile from one to three. Previous US administrations have considered such uploading destabilizing; silo-based ICBMs are targetable and increasing the number of warheads they each carry would make them more attractive targets. Loading the ICBMs with more warheads would also make compliance with the New START arms control agreement with Russia extremely difficult, should that agreement be extended in 2026.
etc. – full article posted here: https://thebulletin.org/2023/04/dealing-with-a-debacle-a-better-plan-for-us-plutonium-pit-production/
Meanwhile, the federal lawsuit calling on DOE to prepare a Programmatic EIS on pit production continues. See May 15, 2023 schedule for reviewing documents which the DOE lawyers (in the Department of Justice) and South Carolina Environmental Law Project have agreed – the case will continue at least until the end of 203: new AR schedule May 15 2023
photo: Plutonium Facility (PF4) at Los Alamos, in New Mexico