Los Alamos delivers Qual-1 pit

With the successful, on-schedule delivery of a certifiable plutonium pit this past April, Los Alamos has re-established the United States' capability to manufacture nuclear weapons cores. That capability was lost when the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado closed in 1989.

The effort to produce what is called the "Qual-1" pit took six years and more than 700 people, many of them from the Nuclear Materials Technology (NMT) Division. The newly manufactured pit is called Qual-1 because it was made with fully qualified processes. The pit is for the W88 warhead, which is carried on the Trident II 5 submarine-launched ballistic missile.

"The Laboratory delivered on a major commitment to the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, Congress, and the taxpayers," said Pete Nanos, Los Alamos' interim director, in making the announcement at Los Alamos' 60th anniversary celebration. "Our next challenge is to carry out the required experiments, analyses, and computer modeling so we can certify that this newly manufactured pit will perform reliably in the stockpile, without conducting underground nuclear tests."

The DOE selected Los Alamos in 1996 as the site to recapture the nation's ability to manufacture nuclear weapons pits in part because the Laboratory has the country's only full-capability plutonium facility and has made pits since the 1940s.

Los Alamos has made 18 pits under the current program, the Pit Manufacturing and Certification Integrated Project Plan. The first pit, called early Development Unit-1, was completed in February 1998. Last August the Laboratory made the first pit that used all 42 processes required for a certifiable pit, and in December of last year, the Lab completed the qualification of all 42 processes. Los Alamos will make about half a dozen pits a year from now until 2007 with a goal to begin making 10 stockpile pits a year by 2007.

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