Next Wednesday, April 30, is the deadline for public comments on the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) draft Complex Transformation Supplemental Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (SPEIS). First announced in 2006 as Complex 2030, Complex Transformation is an ambitious plan by the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration to upgrade the entire U.S. nuclear weapons complex and recreate a "responsive infrastructure" to research, develop, and manufacture new nuclear weapons. If you have not already done so, please write to the DOE with your thoughts and views on this momentous proposal.

(The deadline for this action expired on April 30, 2008.)

Our Take

Before deciding on the future of the weapons complex, UCS maintains that the United States must first develop a new nuclear weapons policy based on a comprehensive re-evaluation of the role of these weapons in U.S. security policy. That policy will enable the DOE to determine what is needed in order to maintain a safe, secure, and credible nuclear deterrent. Congress has joined UCS in this call, requiring the next president to undertake a new Nuclear Posture Review

In terms of the future of the complex, UCS is focused on one key issue: plutonium pit production. A pit is the core of the primary, or first stage, of a modern nuclear weapon. It is surrounded by high explosives, which compress the pit so that it fissions; this fission explosion ignites the secondary, or second stage fusion explosion. We maintain that the United States does not need to produce more plutonium pits; the DOE would like to do so.

Plutonium Pit Production: Increased Capability Is Unnecessary

In 2007, the United States reacquired the ability to make certified pits for nuclear warheads. Eleven pits were produced in 2007 at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico, the first new pits since the Rocky Flats plant in Colorado shut down in 1989.

The DOE says it can make up to 20 pits per year with the existing facilities and has long sought to increase that capacity. Until two years ago, the DOE had proposed constructing a "Modern Pit Facility" with the capacity to manufacture up to 450 plutonium pits every year. More recently, it sought a "Consolidated Plutonium Center" to produce 125 pits per year. However, these ambitious proposals have met consistent opposition in Congress.

In the Complex Transformation SPEIS, the DOE announced a new "preferred alternative" that seeks a more modest goal. The DOE aims to increase production to 50-80 pits per year at an existing facility at LANL by building a new Chemical and Metallurgical Research Replacement (CMRR) Nuclear Facility, also at Los Alamos. This new building, at an estimated cost of $2 billion, will take over enough work and provide enough storage to allow more pits to be made in the existing building.

UCS opposes any increase in pit production capability. In 2012, the United States will have between 1700-2200 deployed warheads, and a reserve or "hedge" of several thousand more. It also has more than 10,000 pits in storage at the Pantex plant in Texas. Given the recommendations made in our recent joint report, Toward True Security, calling for a unilateral reduction to 1,000 warheads total, there is no need to produce additional warheads.

Moreover, in 2007, the JASONs (an independent panel of scientists and engineers that has long advised the U.S. government on nuclear weapons issues) assessed data from plutonium "accelerated aging" experiments conducted at the nuclear weapons laboratories and concluded that the plutonium components in U.S. nuclear warheads have minimum lifetimes of 85-100 years—and possibly much longer. Since the pits in the current arsenal were produced largely between 1980 and 1989, the core nuclear components of current warheads will remain vital for at least another fifty years.

In the highly unlikely event of a dramatic change in the global security environment that called for the United States to increase its nuclear stockpile, we could reuse the pits stored at Pantex or, given the extended warning time that would be available before such a threat developed, recreate a pit production capability.

The current limited pit production capability at Los Alamos is more than adequate while the country's overall nuclear weapons policy is re-evaluated—as has been mandated by Congress in last year's FY 2009 Defense Authorization Bill.