Abstract
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 inbred 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.