The fabrication of the demonstration pit in February is the first step toward re-establishing the nation's ability to make nuclear weapons to replace those removed from the stockpile for analysis or fix any defects in the stockpile that affect the safety, security and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons, said Paul Cunningham, director of Los Alamos' Nuclear Materials and Stockpile Management Programs. The DOE asked Los Alamos to take over on a limited basis the manufacturing of pits, a job done at DOE's Rocky Flats plant in Colorado until 1989.
Pits are the metallic shells inside the fission components of modern nuclear weapons.
In making the early development plutonium pit, the Laboratory demonstrated that it can perform all of the complex steps necessary to make this weapon component for the stockpile. The 1996 Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for Stockpile Stewardship and Management set for Los Alamos the tasks of processing plutonium for fabrication and making pits, in part because Los Alamos has the nation's only full-capability plutonium facility. The EIS called for Los Alamos to develop the capability to make 20 to 50 pits a year eventually. But this is the first Los Alamos pit that is in the same configuration and made with many of the same methods as those in the U.S. stockpile. Los Alamos plans to make a few more development units and then produce a replica of a pit from a stockpile weapon.