Foreign Policy In Focus

The construction of an expensive new plutonium pit facility has been abandoned. Will it be replaced a collection of smaller buildings?

Thanks in large part to lawsuits filed by the Los Alamos Study Group, last year the Obama administration halted the construction of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF) at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The research for which it was earmarked was  on plutonium pits, which is where the chain reaction of a nuclear weapons occurs. Even if you believe in nuclear weapons, the need for new pits is nonexistent because they’re noted for their longevity.

How difficult it is to discontinue researching and manufacturing plutonium pits is a microcosm for how the nuclear weapons-industrial complex itself endures. In February at Global Security Newswire, Elaine Grossman reported that, without the CMRR-NF, Los Alamos would

… instead permanently parcel out work to an array of smaller buildings. [The] institution’s director said. … “I’m concerned that in the current fiscal crisis, it may no longer be practical to plan and build very large-scale nuclear facilities,” Charles McMillan, who heads the New Mexico research site, said at a three-day conference on nuclear deterrence in Arlington, Va. “A new path forward is needed.”

On May 7, a Los Alamos Study Group [LASG] press release stated:

After more than a year since a halt to new funding was announced for [the CMRR-NF], a few details about the latest plan to construct a large-scale "pit" factory complex have begun to emerge.

Note that McMillan’s use of the phrase “very large-scale nuclear facilities” referred to the two main buildings of the planned CMRR-NF. The complex that LASG refers to is smaller buildings, as Ms. Grossman reported. More from the press release:

It is now clear that the "interim" "plutonium sustainment" plan [in lieu of the CMRR-NF – RW] of last year is but the first part of a much larger, multibillion dollar plan spanning approximately two decades, which could easily exceed CMRR-NF in final scope, cost, and possibly in size. 

The new plan aims not just to replace the capabilities once envisioned for … CMRR-NF but also to supplement or replace some the most dangerous and demanding capabilities of LANL's large main plutonium facility.  

This year's plan is certainly much larger than the … "interim" plan … in pit production capacity, physical scale, environmental disruption, cost, and duration [and] includes everything in the "interim plan" plus construction of underground laboratory and production "modules" connected by "tunnels" to the [large main plutonium facility].

Furthermore, states LASG Director Greg Mello:

"There are as yet no firm mission requirements, no project definition, no total estimated cost, no requested line item, no analysis of alternatives, no environmental impact statement [EIS], and no schedule for this project. Despite these deficiencies, despite wasting $500 M and ten years on the last plan, and despite NNSA’s abysmal management record, the agency now claims that hundreds of millions of dollars must be spent each year, starting right now, to get this 'non-project project' going.”

Mello then hints at how difficult it is to put the nail in the coffin of these projects. Like monsters or slashers in horror movies, they have a discouraging habit of rising up like phoenixes just when you think you’ve killed them dead.

"No U.S. warhead requires new pits, so none of this is about maintaining warheads. Pit aging is not even mentioned in the April 8 letter as a driver for this project." 

What purpose would new plutonium pits serve then? From the press release again.

The need for new pit production is tied to these two proposed Life Extension Projects (LEPs), which congressional and administration officials have described to us as, essentially, new warheads: 

• A proposed W78/W88 "interoperable" Air Force/Navy warhead for land-based and sea-based missiles. Depending on the design chosen and the size of the “build,” [it] might require pit production. 

• The proposed "Long-Range Stand-Off" (LRSO) missile warhead [which] too might require pit production.

The spirit of boondoggle flees the dying host of one project, only to seek out another to possess. We can never truly drive a stake may never be drive into nuclear weapons until the Unholy Trinity of waste, pork, and campaign financing is exorcised from the body politic. 

In fact, corporations not only manage them, but increasingly determine their agendas.

Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) recently returned from another one of his trips to Washington, during which he meets with congressional and executive-branch officials and analysts about nuclear weapons. First, he followed up on the proposed nuclear-pit laboratory at Los Alamos, the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF), which has now been delayed five years, in large part due to the efforts of LASG.

He reports in LASG's most recent newsletter that, despite the delay, the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, "will almost certainly contain (as does the House version) … a requirement to continue CMRR-NF design and construction." As of this date, I'm unable to ascertain if that's the case with the bill, which passed in the Senate yesterday (Dec. 5). Next a House-Senate committee reconciles their separate bills and sends the final version to the president.

Mello gives us an idea of the opposition the LASG has been up against in trying to put "a stake through the heart" of the CMRR-NF just locally in New Mexico (emphasis added).

When and if these provisions pass, they will do so in substantial part because of strong efforts of New Mexico Democrats (Heinrich, Udall, Bingaman, and to a lesser extent Lujan), who have consistently allied with the most hawkish members of Congress to achieve this end. 

Mello was also in Washington to reemphasize his concerns with the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which is becoming increasingly privatized.

The last sliver of NNSA which is not a management and operating (M&O) contractor (just 3%, by dollars spent) is not making many decisions.  To say there is a leadership vacuum is an understatement. 

In fact, writes Mello:

There is very little space left in which a vacuum could form.  When it does, the big nuclear labs and plants (i.e. the contractors) automatically fill it. 

Worse

… when NNSA needs “independent” advice, it generally turns to more contractors to help out.  The U.S. nuclear warhead business – and it is a very big business, with sweet multi-decade contracts for the vaguest sort of work that run more than $30 billion in total value in the case of [the Los Alamos National Laboratory] (just to pick one) – has very little federal character left.

Mello explains.

The proposals of the nuclear hawks basically amount to unshackling the contractors even more – giving them even more money to begin even more projects with even less accountability.  Despite the appearance of occasional inter-party conflict, the federal government – really all parts of it, at the moment – have basically circled the wagons to protect the contractors who run the warhead complex.  

He can only conclude that

… most members of Congress do not really understand the degree of privatization involved, or that the nuclear weapons laboratories are actually corporate actors, not federal.

As regular readers know, we've been tracking the progress of the design and construction of a new nuclear facility (the CMRR-NF) at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. As we posted yesterday … Nuclear Pit Boondoggle at Los Alamos Temporarily Scuttled due to a combination of the economic climate and the efforts of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG), which has been educating the public, lobbying Washington, and filing two suits to halt the CMRR-NF on environmental grounds.

But sociologist Darwin BondGraham, who is on the LASG Board of Directors, is in no mood to gloat about the victory. In an elegiac article for Counterpunch titled Starving the Real Beast, he writes

The war machine has begun to eat itself for the sake of preserving hyper-inequalities resulting directly from the less progressive tax code instituted a decade prior, and the multitude of shelters capital now hides behind.

See what he's saying here? By paying minimal taxes, the rich and corporations are depriving the nuclear-weapons program and defense in general of funds (or forcing their reallocation from budget needs other than defense). In other words, BondGraham is providing progressives with a stunning talking point -- one seldom seen (never, in my case). It might be worded something like this: When the corporate rich don't pay their fair share of taxes, it leaves us more vulnerable to attack. (Not that we necessarily have to believe the last part.) BondGraham again (emphasis added):

Whether the Right realizes their folly at this point is not yet clear. After a decade of record breaking tax cuts for the wealthy, and economic deregulation … leading to explosive inequality and a historic crash of over-leveraged and debt ridden markets, the American plutocracy has not only [driven] millions into poverty, they have now gone so far as to undermine the budgetary and organizational basis of the military establishment upon which a larger global system of inequality, which they benefit from, rests.

Yes, you read that right. As well as putting the nation in harm's way (theoretically) they're undermining the security of their own enterprises. But less and less moored to the United States and able to afford their own security, perhaps that's their plan.

The new budget for fiscal year 2013 (which begins on October 1) just released, reports Chris Schneidmiller for Global Security Newswire, calls for the

Energy Department's semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration to receive $11.5 billion. … just shy of 5 percent above the amount allocated in the current budget … The budget would provide $7.6 billion for NNSA efforts to "maintain a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent." 

The other $2.5 billion … 

… is proposed for NNSA initiatives to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and related materials. [Nonproliferation, in other words. -- RW] That amount, if approved, would constitute a $163 million boost from the amount allocated for this year.

All in all …

… the administration is seeking $372 million less for weapons programs than it had anticipated requesting as of 2011. 

Most encouraging of all:

The administration aims to freeze development of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement complex at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which would conduct work on materials such as plutonium employed in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. … Under the proposal, funding for the Los Alamos site … estimated to cost up to $6 … would be cut by $165 million and building would be pushed back by no less than five years.

This is the infamous plutonium pit -- the living, breathing heart of a nuclear warhead -- facility about which I frequently post. Much of the credit for inserting this major blip into the United States nuclear weapons-industrial complex goes to the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG). Among their protracted efforts to halt the CMRR-NF has been incessant lobbying on Capitol Hill and two separate lawsuits it has filed against the Department of Energy on the grounds that the planned facility is not environmentally safe.

Another factor in the CMRR-NF's delay is an economic climate that makes even Republicans open to the idea of defense cuts. The Pentagon, meanwhile (or elements thereof), with its unique talent for sensing the opportunity in any crisis, stands ready and willing to re-allocate money to weapons systems it can actually use, instead of just brandish (as with nuclear deterrence).

In one of its press releases on this development, LASG Executive Director Greg Mello reminds us of the extent to which the CMRR-NF is a boondoggle. 

The CMRR project has been a fiasco from the get-go. In the beginning, [the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Los Alamos National Laboratory] proposed CMRR structures which even the most cursory examination revealed could never be built. The construction materials specified in environmental documents could not have built a shed, much less a fortified, seismically-sound nuclear facility to hold and protect several tons of plutonium. As the project developed, NNSA and its contractors kept the bad news from Congress, as they always do, until the last moment. … Right now, NNSA is spending between one-half and one million dollars per day to design a facility which is highly unlikely to ever be built -- and if it were, much of the design would need to be redone anyway.

In the LASG's most recent bulletin, Mello also reminds us:

This is not an Obama-led “nuclear disarmament” decision. This decision has nothing to do with disarmament. CMRR-NF is being rejected, for now, on very strong factual and management grounds by the Pentagon, DOE, and NNSA itself, among many others.  

The postponement of CMRR-NF certainly doesn't kill, but it at least clips the wings of two birds with one stone: the United States nuclear-weapons program and any future nuclear-weapons boondoggles.

You may be familiar with the term fund of funds from the world of investments. It refers to a mutual fund that invests in other mutual funds; in the same vein, a fund of hedge funds  invests in several different hedge funds. Hold that thought. 

Regular readers know that we frequently post about a proposed new facility called the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF)  at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), one of two labs in the United States where nuclear-weapon design work is conducted. On January 18, the independent watchdog POGO (Project On Government Oversight) released a report by by one of its investigators, Peter Stockton, titled "U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex: Energy Department Plans to Waste Billions of Dollars on Unneeded Los Alamos Lab Facility."

The CMRR-NF replacement facility, they write:

… will take over [the existing Chemistry and Metallurgy Research facility's] main functions of housing laboratory space for the research and development of … elements such as plutonium and … will add a vault capable of holding six metric tons of plutonium. CMRR-NF "will operate in an integrated fashion" with LANL's existing Plutonium Facility 4 … and will free up space [for] PF-4 to manufacture pits. 

Nuclear pits are, as the authors write, "the plutonium triggers at the core of nuclear weapons" -- in other words, the living breathing heart of the warhead where the chain reaction occurs. The overriding issue of the need for nuclear weapons aside, the problem with the CMRR-NF can be broken down into two -- inevitably intertwined -- components.

First, the estimated cost of just that one building has ballooned from $375 million to between $3.71 to $5.9 billion. Second --dealing with the issue of nuclear weapons on a relative, rather than absolute level -- are more pits needed to maintain the United States nuclear-weapons program? The authors write:

… the need to build any new pits is aggressively challenged by numerous experts from the nuclear weapons complex. In a 2009 hearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development … Philip Coyle, a former associate director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory [cited] the pits already stored at Pantex Plant in Texas as an alternative to the [National Nuclear Security Administration's] supposed need for a new facility to manufacture 80 new pits per year. Pantex stockpiles over 14,000 pits and has the capacity to store up to 20,000 pits [and is] authorized to reuse up to 350 pits per year. [While it] was originally feared that the plutonium in pits would gradually degrade over time. … the independent JASON advisory panel found in 2007 that [the pits] have credible minimum lifetimes in excess of 100 years."

Furthermore (emphasis added):

… to extend the life of the warhead, [the National Nuclear Security Administration] has the Life Extension Program (LEP), which aims to increase the lifetimes of existing weapons by refurbishing and replacing certain components as necessary. [Most of this work] will be finished by the time CMRR-NF is [or would be -- RW] operational in 2023. In addition, as a result of New START and the Nuclear Posture Review [there will be] even fewer warheads [that] will need to go through LEP by the time CMRR-NF is completed. These factors mean that CMRR-NF may be unnecessary. 

After all, in a time when the triggers for nuclear war between major powers have been minimized, why must the nuclear-weapons program be awash in nuclear triggers? Between Pantex and Los Alamos, it's a veritable pit of pits.

Therefore, the authors of the POGO report recommend: 

1) The Administration and DOE [Department of Energy] should cancel CMRR-NF and zero out funding for the project in the upcoming budget.

2) If the Administration and DOE fail to act, Congress should cancel funding for CMRR-NF in its next appropriations bill.

3) NNSA should continue using existing facilities, at LANL and elsewhere, in the nuclear weapons complex to meet credible nuclear modernization requirements.

To prevent future projects such as the CMRR-NF:

4) Congress should amend [the] National Defense Authorization Act … to improve the oversight of major cost overruns and schedule delays at the DOE.

5) Congress should require independent cost estimates of major DOE construction projects at an early milestone.

In his latest Los Alamos Study Group bulletin, Greg Mello refers to an article in the Nuclear Weapons and Materials Monitor for a status update.

… the Administration said it expected to spend $300 million on CMRR-NF in [Fiscal Year] 2012 and FY2013, but Congress had already begun to balk at the price tag, providing just $200 million in FY2012 with explicit instructions prohibiting the start of preliminary construction activities. …. "The eventual demise of CMRR-NF has been inevitable, given its lack of justification and astronomical cost," said [Mello, whose] organization has parallel lawsuits that contend that NNSA hasn't fully analyzed alternatives to building CMRR-NF.

As for that "eventual demise," Mello writes in the LASG bulletin:

Yes, failure of this project has been inevitable sooner or later. … There is a huge difference, however, between "sooner" and "later." By far the best outcome for all parties would be to end the project now, rather than building up to a bigger fiasco later. As I said [elsewhere],

Assuming the current rumors are true, the main thing now is to stop additional expenditures immediately, mid-year, rather than winding down the project gradually and wasting even more money.  

As with our wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the decision may finally be made to wind down, but, along with casualties, untold riches continue to be expended in the process.