Nuclear Watch Blog

Remembering Nagasaki: Attacked with a Plutonium Bomb

John Witham — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 19:50:27 +0000

Sixty-five years ago today the Japanese city of Nagasaki was destroyed by a nuclear weapon powered by plutonium. As we remember the 70,000 dead… and the tragedy, suffering and terror caused by the use of atomic bombs, let us heed the growing global call to rid the world of these terrible weapons. Let us take action, NOW, towards that goal by stopping the needless expansion of the plutonium complex at Los Alamos. The proposed 4.5 billion-dollar CMRR Nuclear Facility is too expensive, excessive and even dangerous in a world on the path towards less, rather than more nuclear weapons. The impact of building this facility is not known and should be carefully reconsidered. Serious questions must be asked before the greedy momentum to rebuild the obsolete cold-war nuclear weapons industry proceeds. Among them: Does Northern New Mexico (or the world) really need a modern, expanded plutonium bomb complex? Should Los Alamos National Lab base its future on plutonium? Perhaps reflecting on the legacy of Nagasaki will guide our actions.

Protest a NEW Nuclear Bomb Plant in Kansas City Aug. 13-16

John Witham — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:57:14 +0000

From KC PeaceWorks-

YOUR PRESENCE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN KANSAS CITY NEXT MONTH.
HERE IS YOUR INVITATION FOR ALL OF THE ACTIVITIES…

Peace people from KC and around the country will gather Aug. 13-16 for the KC Nuclear Weapons Plant Conference: Close It! Clean It! Don’t Repeat It!

What’s that all about?

Well, the city of Kansas City, Missouri has sold $687 million dollars of municipal bonds, backed by the feds, for a new mind-boggling $4.8 billion dollar KC Plant, the first new U.S. nuclear weapons plant to be built in 32 years! It is a complex public-private scheme that uses “urban blight” funds to develop a soy bean field on the southern border of the city.

The three-day gathering begins Friday, Aug. 13 with the KC premiere of “Countdown to Zero” at the Tivoli, 4050 Pennsylvania, followed by a panel discussion on the costs and consequences of nuclear weapons production and the new START treaty.

Saturday, Aug. 14 at 10 a.m. we’ll meet at Linwood United Church, 3151 Olive, for a conference featuring nuke-related nonviolence training, science and spirituality.

At 7 p.m. Aug. 14, come to All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church at 4501 Walnut, KC, Mo., for peace-related scientific and spiritual reflections/discussions, and at 9 p.m. enjoy entertainers The Recipe and Sahj Kaya!

On Sun., Aug. 15, the gathering visits the current and future sites of the KC Plant!

On Mon., Aug. 16, at 10 a.m., the gathering shifts to civil resistance!

Please R.S.V.P if you plan to attend, and let us know if you will need housing (either sleeping bag room or a real bed).

Needed: folks to hold signs, folks to march, local folks to house out-of-town protesters, and folks to cook for hungry peacemakers.

To register for the gathering and to offer housing or food, contact PeaceWorks member Jane Stoever (janepstoever@yahoo.com), or call 913-206-4088.

Countdown to Zero: Santa Fe Opening Night Fundraiser

John Witham — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:58:42 +0000

On Friday, August 6, we kick off Santa Fe’s exclusive theatrical run of this film (at CCA Cinematheque/1050 Old Pecos Tr. Santa Fe, NM) with an introduction by Valerie Plame Wilson and a panel discussion: New Mexico and the Bomb (with Nuclear Watch Executive Director, Jay Coghlan and others)

For Tickets/Reservations call (505) 982-1338 (Reservations strongly recommended)

Proceeds benefit the CCA Cinematheque.

Friday 8/6 (7 pm)

Saturday 8/7 (4:30 and 6:30)

Sunday 8/8 (4:30 and 6:30)

Monday 8/9 (4:30 and 6:30)

(for other show times see CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS)

New Nuclear Weapons Stockpile Stewardship Plan is Backwards

John Witham — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 15:45:10 +0000

Large Arsenal Maintained, Dismantlements Bottlenecked, Plutonium Pit and Waste Production at Los Alamos Expanded.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has prepared but not publicly released a FY 2011 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan. NNSA describes it as “an unprecedented and comprehensive effort to detail the plans for managing the Nation’s nuclear deterrent in the coming decades.” Other than some incremental arms reductions, conspicuously lacking are planned concrete steps toward reaching the nuclear weapons-free world that President Obama claimed as a long-term national security goal in his now-famous April 2009 Prague speech.

Some key points from the FY 2011 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan:

• The new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia limits each side to around 1,550 deployed strategic warheads. However, the total future stockpile planned by NNSA is double that with 3,000 to 3,500 warheads, including deployed weapons, spares and reserves.

• The current backlog of retired U.S. nuclear weapons slated for dismantlement won’t be completed until 2022. If ratified, START may add yet more weapons to the queue. The Plan outlines an aggressive schedule of Life Extension Programs that block dismantlements because the same facilities are needed for both assembly and disassembly of nuclear weapons.

• NNSA’s nuclear weapons budgets are projected through 2030, rising to $9 billion by 2018, 40% above the historic Cold War average. From there the budget continues to climb to $10 billion in 2030, which perhaps reflects a modest rate of inflation. In any event, no decline in NNSA nuclear weapons spending is planned in the next two decades, despite the U.S. government’s official position that it is working toward a nuclear weapons-free world.

• The production complex is to be expanded through the creation of a plutonium pit production complex at Los Alamos; a new $3.5 billion Uranium Processing Facility for thermonuclear secondaries near Oak Ridge, TN; and a new privately financed Kansas City Plant for nonnuclear components production that will cost taxpayers $1.2 billion in rent over 20 years.

• Los Alamos Lab has repeatedly denied that production of the cores of nuclear weapons, the plutonium pits, will take place at the planned $4 billion Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Project-Nuclear Facility. However, the Plan states that the Nuclear Facility “provides analytical capabilities in support of pit surveillance and production” and will “ramp up to full operations in 2022.”

• Immediately following that, the Plan calls to increase plutonium pit production capacity and capability at the adjoining, existing production facility and to ramp up to 80 pits per year in the same year of 2022.

• To meet future plutonium pit production requirements the Plan proposes a “master plan” Consolidated Waste Capability at LANL. This includes a new Transuranic (TRU) Waste Facility ($60 million) for plutonium bomb wastes; an upgraded Radioactive Liquid Waste Treatment Facility ($115 million); and new, probably unlined, “low-level” radioactive waste dump pits (costs not available) to replace those in Area G ordered closed by the New Mexico Environment Department.

• The Plan states “Modernization of the stockpile will be accomplished through life extension programs …” and lists three possible options: refurbishment, reuse of existing components, and complete replacements. The Plan states the first two methods are preferred, but ultimately the Lab Directors are to pick and choose based on technical assessments. However, in the recent past the Lab Directors have strongly supported new-design Reliable Replacement Warheads. Their choices may also be motivated by the fact that they also act as presidents of the for-profit corporations that run the labs.

• Approximate costs for planned Life Extension Programs are given: the sub-launched W76 warhead $4 billion, the B61 bomb $4.9 billion, the W78 ICBM warhead $4.8 billion.

• The Plan states that the U.S. is committed to pursuing nuclear disarmament under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and will not give existing nuclear weapons new military capabilities. But the refurbished W76 is being fitted with a new fuse that is believed to have selectable heights of burst. In combination with increased warhead accuracy, the W76 is transformed into a nuclear warfighting weapon that can destroy hardened, deeply buried targets.

Jay Coghlan, NukeWatch Director, commented, “This Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan is backwards. Its priority should be to accelerate dismantlements instead of extending the lives of nuclear weapons for many decades and possibly giving them new military capabilities. We should be cleaning up, not building up new production plants that will produce yet more radioactive and toxic wastes. We should be following a conservative curatorship program that prudently maintains the stockpile, saves American taxpayers dollars, and demonstrates leadership toward the nuclear weapons-free world that global security truly needs.”

Also see:

Further Analysis on the Plan by Nuclear Watch New Mexico

LANL’s Consolidated Waste Capability

The NNSA FY2011 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan is available along with our extensive compilation of annotated excerpts at our front page.

Additional analysis by our colleagues:

Union of Concerned Scientists
The Federation of American Scientists (FAS)
Tri-Valley CAREs

Resistance for a Nuclear Free Future

John Witham — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 23:54:05 +0000

Maryville, Tennessee- Over the July Forth weekend, Jay Coghlan, and many others, will be joining The Nuclear Resister, Nukewatch (the Wisconsin-based environmental and peace action group) and the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA) for a national gathering, culminating with nonviolent anti-nuclear direct action to declare our independence from nuclear weapons and nuclear power. The gathering will be held at Maryville College in Maryville, Tennessee, with protest and action at the Y-12 nuclear weapons complex in nearby Oak Ridge, where OREPA has sustained a nonviolent campaign for over 20 years.

Visit the event website.

Jay will be giving two presentations:
A Dubious Bargain – The current status of nuclear weapons in the U.S. ( PPT: 1.7 MB)

An Enduring Nuclear Stockpile – Where the nuclear weapons complex is heading
and what can be done to stop it. (PPT: 8.1 MB)

CMRR is Key to Expanded Plutonium Pit Production

Jay Coghlan — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 20:18:33 +0000

While being narrowly correct, LANL PR man Kevin Roark is misleading when he claims [in a June 25, Letter to the Editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper] that plutonium pit production will not take place in the new Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Project (CMRR). What he fails to disclose is that the Lab is not building just one facility, but instead is creating an integrated manufacturing complex for expanded production for which the CMRR is absolutely key. This complex will consist of LANL’s existing production facility “PF-4” with ~$300 million in upgrades; CMRR’s already completed first phase, the $400 million “Rad Lab”; and the future $4 billion CMRR “Nuclear Facility,” now being debated.

The Nuclear Facility will be literally next door to PF-4 and linked to it via underground tunnel. While pits are physically manufactured in PF-4’s glovebox lines, the Nuclear Facility’s central missions of “materials characterization” and “analytical chemistry” are essential operations that ensure “weapons-grade” plutonium and pit production quality control. The National Nuclear Security Administration’s own documents show that the Nuclear Facility is being specifically sized to support expanded production of up to 80 pits per year, quadruple LANL’s currently approved rate. It is also planned to have a vault for up to six metric tons of “special nuclear materials,” capable of storing around 1,000 pits.

Roark must think that New Mexicans are naïve enough to accept the Lab’s claims that the CMRR is all about “science” even as LANL becomes more and more a production site. Sadly, this is only part and parcel of the substantial rebuilding of the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex, which will also include a new $3.5 billion Uranium Processing Facility in Tennessee and a new privately financed Kansas City Plant for production of the 1,000’s of nonnuclear components that go into a nuclear weapon.

Many New Mexicans hoped for serious mission diversification at Los Alamos, which some $5 billion sunk into its plutonium infrastructure will almost certainly shut the door on. Schools in Santa Fe and all across the country are being closed due to lack of funding. Nevertheless, our government is preparing to spend some $10 billion to build new production plants even as we are purportedly working toward the declared long-term national security goal of a nuclear weapons-free world. To get there, citizens need to push the politicians to meet the needs of everyday people, not those of the vested nuclear weaponeers.

Revised Estimates for Safer Gloveboxes Hurt Budget

BigDawg — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 13:22:47 +0000

On the heels of a GAO report made public Monday, which stated that accounting procedures used by various branches of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex are preventing NNSA from pinpointing the exact total cost of maintaining its nuclear deterrent, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) has released a weekly report also showing LANL’s inability to accurately estimate even the tiniest of specific costs.

In the June 4^th weekly report for Los Alamos Lab, the DNFSB stated that the Lab underestimated the cost of seismically upgrading gloveboxes at its plutonium pit production complex by an order of magnitude. The DNFSB stated, “…the expected cost of seismic upgrades to individual gloveboxes has risen from an original estimate of about $80,000 per glovebox to a current estimate of approximately $850,000.” In addition, the Lab also ended up doubling the number of gloveboxes that need the upgrades as a priority up to 157.

So, in effect, the Labs original estimate for this glovebox work was $6.4 million (80 gloveboxes at $80,000 each), but the revised estimate is now $133.4 million (157 gloveboxes at $850,000 each). It’s hard to understand how new bracing and bolts to upgrade the legs of these gloveboxes could cost $80,000 each, much less $850,000. It’s not rocket science. Maybe the private corporation running the Lab underestimated the profits that they wanted to make for this much-needed work. Make no mistake, there will be performance- based incentive award fees for the work, as well as for the design and even the estimates.

In safety documents, the Lab originally stated that these upgrades would be done by 2011 to mitigate the possible off-site dose of plutonium to the public in the event of a large earthquake and subsequent facility fire. Guess what? The Lab will be behind schedule as well as way over budget. But LANL is already using its commitment for future glovebox seismic upgrades to reduce the mitigated dose consequence for a seismically-induced event in its dose calculations. So the public will be safe, only on paper, until the Lab finds the time and the money to upgrade those glovebox legs.

The Lab should focus on upgrading existing facilities and equipment and prove its ability and desire to protect the public before embarking on unneeded new construction, such as the CMRR – Nuclear Facility.

A Bargain – But At What Cost?

BigDawg — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 22:23:17 +0000

The Government Accounting Office (GAO) released a new report today. Actions Needed to Identify Total Costs of Weapons Complex Infrastructure and Research and Production Capabilities, GAO-10-582, June 2010

I’ll start with the conclusion –

Within the global community, the Administration, and Congress, a bargain is being struck on nuclear weapons policy. Internationally, if the [START] treaty is ratified, significant stockpile reductions [will] have been negotiated between the United States and Russia. Domestically, a new Nuclear Posture Review has provided an updated policy framework for the nation’s nuclear deterrent. To enable this arms reduction agenda, the Administration is requesting from Congress billions of dollars in increased investment in the nuclear security enterprise to ensure that base scientific, technical, and engineering capabilities are sufficiently supported … For its part, NNSA must accurately identify these base capabilities and determine their costs in order to adequately justify future presidential budget requests and show the effects on its programs of potential budget increases. As it now stands, NNSA may not be accurately identifying the costs of base capabilities because … NNSA cannot identify the total costs to operate and maintain essential weapons activities facilities and infrastructure, … Without taking action to identify these costs, NNSA risks being unable to identify the return on investment of planned budget increases on the health of its base capabilities or to identify opportunities for cost saving…NNSA has the opportunity to mitigate these risks by addressing them through the ongoing revision of work breakdown structures and through identifying means of collecting the total costs … Without taking these actions, NNSA will not have the management information it needs to better justify future budget requests by making its justifications more transparent. Additionally, the availability of this information will assist Congress with its oversight function. (Pg. 25)

It looks like NNSA does not know exactly the total costs of its infrastructure budget, but it does know that it wants more. The report tells us that without identifying the total costs of products and capabilities, NNSA will be challenged to explain the effects of funding changes or justify the necessity for increased investment to support or enhance base capabilities. (Pg. 25)

The reduction in nuclear warhead numbers will mean an increase spending. “In such an environment, NNSA is likely to face increased scrutiny of its planning, programming, and budget execution to determine the effect of funding increases on the overall health of base capabilities.” (Pg. 24)

Curating the Stockpile: Remanufacturing Fogbank

Jay Coghlan — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 18:02:13 +0000

I only now happened to run across the article below from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Nuclear Weapons Journal about how the remanufacturing of Fogbank was reestablished. As dated as it is, I think its implication is very important that existing programs are more than sufficient to keep the nuclear weapons stockpile safe and reliable, until eventual disarmament.

You may recall that the loss of Fogbank was a bit of a crisis that seriously delayed the W76 Life Extension Program. It had at various times been used as rationale for why existing LEPs would not work in the long run because of necessary changes to materials, loss of knowledgeable workforce, etc. By extension this was used to argue why Reliable Replacement Warheads should be designed and built.

But this article demonstrates that all that was needed was to simply give some emphasis to reestablishing fogbank production. Plus as an added bonus, it has some pleasing wonky detail. “It’s the impurity, stupid!” [see link below]

LANL Nuclear Weapons Journal, Issue 2 • 2009, pp. 21-22
Fogbank: Lost Knowledge Regained

Power of the Purse over DOE Projects

Jay Coghlan — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 20:44:39 +0000

I was in Washington, DC last week and heard a number of congressional offices express support for the CMRR-Nuclear Facility, indicating what we already know, that it will be very difficult to defeat directly. However, the issue of costs is another matter, and I have some hope that the Nuclear Facility can die a death of 1,000 cuts.

For example, while in DC I met with a staff person knowledgeable about DOE project cost accounting requirements introduced by the Senate Armed Services Committee. I expressed my concern that LANL could implement its first segment of CMRR-Nuclear Facility construction without having come up with total costs, thus steamrolling the project. [Reminder: we are now $4.5 billion for estimated total project costs and climbing.] That staffer said that sort of thing will not be allowed to happen. Further, while being in favor of some advance site prep, that staffer said LANL would not be allowed to construct the concrete batch plant and replace 225,000 cubic yards of weak volcanic ash strata with “lean concrete” until total project costs are in.

The requirements were introduced as SEC. 4713. NOTIFICATION OF COST OVERRUNS FOR CERTAIN DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY PROJECTS.

I realize this is not a showstopper, but it is something. It should slow the CMRR-NF down some, which hopefully we can capitalize on. Further, it may provide us with ammo over the project’s tremendous and escalating costs.

Nick Roth of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability was instrumental in suggesting this cost accounting requirement to Congress.