“LANL Prioritizes Plutonium “Pit” Bomb Core Production Over Safety”
News release from Nuclear Watch New Mexico, November 6, 2025: https://nukewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/LANL-Prioritizes-Plutonium-Pit-Bomb-Core-Production-Over-Safety.pdf
Santa Fe, NM – The independent Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board recently released its
Review of the Los Alamos Plutonium Facility Documented Safety Analysis. It concluded that:
“While LANL facility personnel continue to make important upgrades to the Plutonium
Facility’s safety systems, many of those projects have encountered delays due to inconsistent
funding and other reasons. DOE and LANL should consider prioritizing safety-related
infrastructure projects to ensure that the Plutonium Facility safety strategy adequately
protects the public, as the facility takes on new and expansive national security missions.”
(Page 24)
In early October 2024, the Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security
Administration (NNSA) announced with great fanfare that the Los Alamos Lab had produced its
first “diamond stamped” plutonium pit for the nuclear weapons stockpile. Tens of billions of
taxpayers’ dollars have been sunk into LANL’s long delayed and over budget pit production
program. Given no further announcements, it is not currently known whether or not the Lab is
meeting its congressionally required production goals. Endemic nuclear safety problems have
long been an intractable issue, at one point even forcing a three-year halt to plutonium operations
at LANL’s Plutonium Facility-4 (“PF-4”).
In its recent Review, the Safety Board reported:
“The [2009] Plutonium Facility safety basis described very large potential [radioactive]
dose consequences to the public following seismic events…. DOE committed to upgrade
and seismically qualify the ventilation system, with a particular focus on a specific
ventilation subsystem…”
“As the only facility in the DOE complex that can process large quantities of plutonium
in many forms, [PF-4] represents a unique capability for the nation’s nuclear deterrent. The
Board has long advocated for the use of safety-related active confinement systems in
nuclear facilities for the purposes of confining radioactive materials…Passive confinement
systems are not necessarily capable of containing hazardous materials with confidence
because they allow a quantity of unfiltered air contaminated with radioactive material to be
released from an operating nuclear facility following certain accident scenarios. Safety
related active confinement ventilation systems will continue to function during an
accident, thereby ensuring that radioactive material is captured by filters before it can be
released into the environment… (Page 2, bolded emphases added)
full release: https://nukewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/LANL-Prioritizes-Plutonium-Pit-Bomb-Core-Production-Over-Safety.pdf