A change in the federal government鈥檚 priorities for its nuclear weapons arsenal couldn鈥檛 have come at a worse time for Los Alamos National Laboratory. Just as the famed facility is starting to show its age, a new initiative from the Trump administration has tasked LANL to play a central role in .
LANL was built as a research and development facility in the 1940s. It can produce nuclear materials, but it wasn鈥檛 designed to be a factory. But the campus, spanning 25,661 acres is now the nation鈥檚 only producer of plutonium pits, which are spheres of plutonium about the size of a bowling ball.
A plutonium pit is the core of a nuclear weapon. A recent New York Times investigative report explores why the Trump administration wants the labs to produce more plutonium pits - and why that鈥檚 easier said than done.
Northern New Mexico journalist Alicia Inez Guzman, a fellow for The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship, reported the story. She said that the facility itself is aging and has been beset by myriad structural problems.
鈥淚 looked at the number of times that there was a flood or a leak,鈥� she said. She also looked at the trolley that moves plutonium and other nuclear materials across the facility.
鈥淪o I was looking at the number of times that the trolley had issues or an outage, and so we counted those up. I was looking at basically this dual simultaneous construction and renovation that's happening alongside pit production,鈥� Guzm谩n said. 鈥淪o that's kind of the heart of the article, in which you have this very important mission happening at the same time that you have actual construction or renovation activities happening.鈥�
The United States has plenty of nuclear weapons, so one might wonder why the government wants more plutonium pits. The answer is that scientists aren鈥檛 quite sure how plutonium ages, and how long these pits retain their destructive power. A is planned to become the nation鈥檚 second producer of plutonium pits, but isn鈥檛 expected to be online for a decade or more.
鈥淪o there is this conundrum that Los Alamos has to work until at least that facility comes online, and then documents suggest that it'll continue to work into the 2040s and that's well past its 鈥榩lanned lifetime,鈥� according to federal documents,鈥� she said. 鈥淚t was really supposed to be phased out at 50 years old. And so that's right around now.鈥�
Guzman says federal documents refer to this as a 鈥渓ife extension.鈥�
鈥淎nd so, it is the only option right now, and that will be until the Savannah River site comes online again, perhaps not until the early 2030s maybe even, you know, it may not hit its own quota of plutonium pits until the mid 2030s or even late 2030s,鈥� she said. 鈥淯ntil then Los Alamos is it.鈥�
And she said that means using a building that was supposed to be phased out in a way it was never intended to be used.
You can find 九色网鈥檚 republication of Guzman鈥檚 story here.
