Los Alamos National Laboratory

Though we won’t know for sure until the fiscal year 2013 budget is released on February 13, reports suggest that the Obama administration has decided to delay construction of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s multi-billion dollar facility, the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF). I recently wrote a piece on this topic titled, "The Case Against Increasing Plutonium Pit Production Capacity."

The key findings are:

1. While the CMRR-NF will be used for a range of activities, it can also be used to support an increase plutonium pit production capacity.

2. The Obama administration Nuclear Posture Review endorsed the Bush administration’s concept of a responsive infrastructure, restating that new nuclear warhead production facilities will serve as a “hedge against technical or geopolitical surprise.”

3. By the time of its scheduled completion date of 2024, most nuclear weapons in the arsenal will have already been refurbished or in the middle of a refurbishment.

4. Increased capacity would inhibit opportunities for increasing security by altering perceptions about the U.S. commitment to reductions or disarmament.

5.  Given the potential risks involved, the current budget environment presents an opportunity for Congress to reevaluate whether it is necessary to move ahead with this facility.

You can read the entire piece here.

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Nuclear Weapons Complex, budget, Life Extension Program, NNSA, Nukes on a Blog (all tags)

by Nickolas Roth and Ulrika Grufman

This week, Massachusetts Representative Edward Markey held a press conference announcing that more than sixty Members of Congress had co-signed his letter to the super committee urging them to substantially cut nuclear weapons funding in order to balance the budget.

In reply, Ohio Representative Michael Turner, Chairman of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, offered some of his usual rhetoric that cutting funding meant the U.S. was unilaterally disarming. His statement was quickly followed by the release of a letter sent to the Senate Appropriations Committee signed by Republican members of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee asking that the Senate fully fund the President’s request for nuclear weapons. To justify the request for more money, the letter makes a number of questionable arguments regarding the nuclear weapons budgeting process over the past year.

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Nukes on a Blog, National Nuclear Security Administration, Nuclear Weapons Complex, Congress, Budget (all tags)

In case you missed part 4 of the UCS/FAS analysis of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Stockpile Stewardship Program for fiscal year 2012, we looked at the relationship between planned nuclear weapons complex and stockpile modernization and stockpile reductions.

We find that “the use of new warhead production facilities to produce additional hedge warheads undermines the administration’s message that the new facilities are needed to allow a reduction of the stockpile. It suggests that even with a new “responsive” warhead production complex, the future stockpile will still include a sizeable hedge of reserve warheads.”

You can read the entire post on the FAS blog or on the UCS blog.

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Nukes on a Blog, National Nuclear Security Administration, Nuclear Weapons Complex, Congress, Budget (all tags)

Part three of the UCS/FAS analysis of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Stockpile Stewardship Program for fiscal year 2012, titled "Hydrodynamic Tests: Not to Scale," sheds light on scaled experiments, which are a relatively unknown form of subcritical nuclear testing.  

We find that “the push for scaled experiments is coming from NNSA officials, not the nuclear weapons laboratories. The labs have resisted because they are overburdened by the increasingly ambitious Life Extension Programs. NNSA officials claim that scaled experiments could yield ten times more data points and save money because one large scaled experiment could replace twenty of the smaller hydrodynamic experiments conducted today. Lab scientists maintain that scaled experiments would require major new equipment investments that are not currently planned.”

As you might recall, the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee recently addressed the issue of scaled experiments in its committee report. You can read my summary of its findings here.

You can read all of post #3 on the FAS blog or on the UCS blog.

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Nukes on a Blog, National Nuclear Security Administration, Nuclear Weapons Complex, Congress, Budget (all tags)

Yesterday, I wrote about the four part joint UCS/FAS project analyzing the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Stockpile Stewardship Program for fiscal year 2012. Today’s post is about NNSA’s plan for modernizing the nuclear weapons stockpile through Life Extension Programs (LEPs). We find that “NNSA’s enthusiasm for extensively modifying all warheads may be going beyond what Congress and the Obama administration as a whole will support. The foundation for such objections is clearly laid out in the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, which states explicitly that the United States ‘will study options for ensuring the safety, security, and reliability of nuclear warheads on a case-by-case basis.’ (p. xiv). This seems to contradict NNSA’s pursuit of every available surety feature for every warhead.”

You can read the entire post on the FAS blog or on the UCS blog.

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Nukes on a Blog, National Nuclear Security Administration, Nuclear Weapons Complex, Congress, Budget (all tags)

Every year, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) releases its Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan (SSMP), which is an outline of its near- and long-term plans for the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and supporting infrastructure. Right before I left the Union of Concerned Scientists, I co-wrote an analysis with Hans Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists and Stephen Young, Senior Analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, of NNSA’s SSMP for fiscal year 2012. Over the next week, UCS and FAS will be publishing that analysis in a series of four joint blogs.

Today’s post, titled Nuclear Plan Conflicts with New Budget Realities, includes a detailed analysis of NNSA’s spending strategy over the next decade and beyond. Among the pieces of noteworthy information is that NNSA’s high-end budget estimate for nuclear weapons spending between FY12 and FY24, when it plans to complete construction of two major production facilities, is more than $120 billion.

Our key conclusion, echoed by Kingston in his analysis of the Senate version of the FY 2012 Energy and Water Appropriations bill, is that the recent deal to increase the debt limit means that the funding curve for NNSA's weapons programs is likely to flatten out as opposed to drive upwards as projected.

You can read the entire post with all of its glorious details on the FAS blog or on the UCS blog.

Just FYI. It is the same piece in both links because this is a joint project between the Federation of American Scientists and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

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National Nuclear Security Administration, Nuclear Weapons Complex, Congress, Budget, Nukes on a Blog (all tags)

Yesterday, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) began construction of a new 45,000 square foot $142 million high explosives facility at the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas. The public account (which cites the wrong cost estimate) of the groundbreaking primarily focused on how the new facility, called the High Explosives Pressing Facility (HEPF), will replace old buildings and increase efficiency. In reality, the HEPF is part of a plan to significantly increase the United States’ capacity to produce high explosives for nuclear weapons.

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Nukes on a Blog, NNSA, Nuclear Weapons Complex, modernization (all tags)