The virtual seminar will be held from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. (E.T.)
For three decades, the US Department of Energy has been trying to resume production of new plutonium cores (pits) for nuclear weapons. The sole Cold War era pit factory, the Rocky Flats plant, which produced 1000 to 2000 pits a year between 1953 and 1989 was shutdown in 1992 following a raid by FBI agents due to violations of environmental protection and occupational safety standards. Despite thousands of pits in storage from disassembled weapons, in 2015 the Department of Energy launched yet another pit production plan, with the goal of making at least 80 pits per year by 2030 at two facilities: the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. This presentation will examine the technical necessity, risks, and costs of this pit production plant. It will argue that producing new pits is not only expensive, time consuming, and logistically challenging, but it is technically unnecessary and politically destabilizing, and presents undue risks to workers and communities. It draws on the May 2025 report Plutonium Pit Production: The Risks and Costs of US Plans to Build New Nuclear Weapons.
About the speaker: Dylan Spaulding is a senior scientist in the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. His work focuses on technical issues related to nuclear weapons and policies that can reduce the threat they pose. He previously served as a Project Scientist at UC Davis where he commissioned and directed the Shock Compression Laboratory, and was a postdoctoral fellow in Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University and at France's Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives focusing on high-pressure/high-temperature experiments. He has a PhD in Earth and Planetary Science from the University of California, Berkeley.