.
It really is the pits
08/25/03: (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) In the Energy Department’s crowded spectrum of
technically challenged, hazardous, usually superfluous, but always
costly nuclear projects—in the region where the blinking infrared of
bureaucratic dysfunction meets the luminous green of pork-barrel
politics—the partisans of new nukes detect a ray of hope.
This glimmer is called the Modern Pit Facility (MPF), the
administration’s euphemism for a brand new $4 billion factory where
new plutonium cores (“pits”) will be fabricated for those “weapons
of mass destruction” the president is always lecturing other nations
about.
The MPF would be able to produce 250–900 pits per year. Just to
set the scale, the midpoint of this annual range would equal or exceed
China’s entire nuclear arsenal. Energy says the United States must
have the agility to: “rapidly change from production of one pit type
to another; simultaneously produce multiple pit types;” and “produce
pits of a new design in a timely manner.” But such bomb-making
abilities don’t just knock the moral-political props out from under
efforts to stem bomb programs in North Korea, Iran, India, and Pakistan.
They’re a felonious frontal assault on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty itself.
Thirty-three years after that treaty’s entry into force, U.S.
conventional and nuclear forces vastly outstrip those of any other
nation, and there is simply no way to reconcile a 17-year plan to build
a 50-year nuclear bomb factory with the obligation to negotiate “in
good faith” on the “cessation of the arms race” and “nuclear
disarmament.” Instead, the Bush team wants such nuclear superiority
that, in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s words, “would-be peer
competitors” will realize “the futility of trying to sprint toward
parity with us.”
Energy could easily maintain a sufficient deterrent without the MPF. The
average age of current stockpile pits is 19 years, and Energy assesses minimum
pit lifetime to be 45–60 years, with no “life-limiting factors”
yet identified. And there are some 15,000 pits in the inventory to
choose from, should some subset develop sudden “aging problems.”
Energy is already midway through a separate $2.3 billion pit fabrication
and related plutonium chemistry complex at Los Alamos, which will begin
producing 20 pits per year in 2007, can be equipped to produce as many
as 80 pits per year, and can be further enlarged to produce 150 pits per
year.
Fourteen years ago the Rocky Flats Plant northwest of Denver, which had
produced pits, sank permanently into a multibillion dollar cesspool of
contamination, criminality, and managerial incompetence. Not to worry,
says Energy. Rocky Flats II will have all the necessary equipment for
suppressing plutonium fires that, regrettably, “cannot be totally
eliminated,” but whose “frequency and severity can be reduced,”
and even “planned for in the structural and process design.”
The push for MPF comes in part from Los Alamos, which would like to
maintain the conceit that it is a high-minded scientific research
establishment uninvolved in the dirty business of mass-producing weapons
of mass destruction. Energy’s recently renamed but forever-Byzantine
bureaucracy, the “National Nuclear Security Administration” (and the
in-bred contracting community it feeds) sees the MPF’s $4 billion
price tag, 1,800 employees, and $300 million annual operating costs as
its best chance to reinstate the nuclear weapons “enterprise” for
the long term. And some members of Congress believe that filling the
federal pork barrel with plutonium is just another way to bring home the
bacon. “Nobody—I mean nobody in the world—does plutonium
better,” boasts Cong. Gresham Barrett, a South Carolina Republican who
wants to snag the MPF for his district’s Savannah River nuclear
complex.
He faces stiff competition from New Mexico’s senior senator,
Republican Pete Domenici, known as “Saint Pete”—the Patron Saint
of Pork. Domenici heads both the Senate Energy and Resources Committee
and the pork-dispensing Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water
Development. He favors a site near Carlsbad, New Mexico—not a part of
the nuclear weapons complex, but conveniently located on the grounds of
the nation’s only licensed transuranic waste dump. The bomb-builders
wouldn’t have to walk far to empty the trash.
Just ponder the possibilities. After the legions of tourists see the
wonders of Carlsbad Caverns National Park, they can tour America’s
shiny new monument to the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction.
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