Despite our partisan divide, there are some thing the Obama administration and Congress can agree upon. The trouble is with what that something is, however.
Congress and the Department of Defense, together with New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), are gearing up to dramatically increase production of nuclear weapons cores to numbers not seen since the cold war.
This plan to expand the production of nuclear bomb cores as already been approved by the armed services committees in both the House and Senate. It’s contained in the proposed 2015 Defense appropriations bill, and is expected to cost $355 billion over the next ten years. The effect will be to ramp up production of nuke cores by thirty times the production rate in 2013. Which is odd, since we already supposedly have 15,000 reserve cores on hand.
But the far greater concern is that we have a extremely serious radioactive waste disposal problem because the current primary waste disposal center is shut down thanks to this:
This month, the Department of Energy released its initial findings into one of the worst American nuclear accidents since the end of the cold war. On February 14, a 52-gallon drum containing radioactive waste from nuclear weapons production exploded at a storage facility near Carlsbad, New Mexico, exposing 22 workers to radioactivity and leading to the closure of the facility. In its preliminary briefing, the DOE recommended a 7,000-point checklist that must be met in order to reopen the facility and indicated that congressional support for the plan was strong, despite a price tag that would likely run into the billions of dollars.
The closing of the facility, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), the nation’s only such repository, has caused a storage backup of radioactive materials …
[Critics of this plan] also point to safety risks at [Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratories] that are acknowledged in the CRS report, which suggests that the current plutonium pit production building should be retrofitted to withstand earthquakes, as the facility sits adjacent to a seismic fault line.
This strikes me as unnecessary and highly reckless, from several standpoints. We are committed, supposedly to reducing our nuclear weapons stockpile to around 1500 weapons by 2016. However, the current number on hand exceeds 4000 nukes. Tell me why we need to place people at risk of another nuclear waste accident to produce so many more nuclear weapons in all but name when we already have more than enough on hand, and plenty of spares? Not only that, but how do you think the other nuclear weapons superpowers, especially Russia and China, will react to this plan.
The justification being touted for this massive increase in nuclear weapons core production is our nuclear arsenal needs to be modernized. Yet one branch of the armed forces that deploys nuclear weapons, the US Navy, has looked at this issue and has concerns with the administration’s decision to proceed with this extraordinarily rapid and costly nuclear weapons core expansion program.
The Navy also expressed reservations about the plan, even before the administration formally introduced it this year. In a September 2012 memo to the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Council — an interagency organization of the Energy and Defense Departments — the Navy said it did not support entering into the next phase of study related to developing a combined W78/W88 life extension program “at this time.” It suggests “delaying this study effort until the mid 2020s.”
The General Accounting Office (GAO) also expressed concerns with this plan in a report to Congress back in September 2013, in which it said the administration’s proposal requires more study, and that going forward now with the proposal could lead to “further program delays and potentially costly modifications.”
In light of all the issues with this proposal, including the likelihood of cost overruns, mismanagement and unsafe waste disposal facilities, not to mention that there is no pressing need to rapidly modernize our nuclear arsenal, and that this plan may very well violate existing treaties on nuclear proliferation, the massive increase in the production of these weapon cores is, in my opinion, ill-considered and not in the best interests of our national security.
Not surprisingly, the Union of Concerned Scientists opposes these current efforts and proposals to expand our capacity to make more nuclear weapons cores.
The Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy group, said on Thursday that the nuclear modernization plan is misguided and violates international agreements to reduce the number of nuclear weapons, according to Reuters. […]
The massive spending comes despite the Obama administration’s endorsement of a world without nuclear weapons and US negotiations with Russia over the “New START” treaty, which committed the former Cold War rivals to reducing deployed strategic nuclear weapons to 1,550 each by 2018.
The plan that the administration has proposed and that Congress may very well to pass into law next year should be put on full stop until further assessments can be made as to what “modernization” is actually needed, the legal and national security implications of the proposal, the potential cost of proceeding with that modernization and the environmental and safety risks to workers and our civilian population from our currently grossly inadequate waste storage capacity.
