The U.S. Government Accountability Office is raising questions about whether a project underway at Los Alamos National Laboratory can meet a mandate to ramp up production of plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons – a key part of the federal government’s effort to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal over the next two decades. The GAO, in a report released this week, says the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees LANL, has not defined how the multi-billion-dollar plans will achieve the goal established by the Department of Defense and Congress of producing 50 to 80 “pits” – the grapefruit-sized plutonium cores of nuclear weapons – by 2030. NNSA’s own analysis shows the LANL project “may not support those (production) rates,” says the report by the GAO, a independent agency that works with Congress.
Albuquerque Journal 12th Aug 2016 read more »