Key Finding: Plutonium Aging Not Affecting Existing Nuclear Weapons
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, August 7, 2026
Contact: Jay Coghlan, 505.989.7342, cell 505.470.3154, jay[at]nukewatch.org
Sophia Stroud, 505.231.9736, sophia[at]nukewatch.org
Santa Fe, NM – The Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has released an unredacted report entitled Plutonium Aging: Executive Summary (Unclassified), copied in its entirety below. Its key “High-Level Finding” is:
“The Pu [plutonium] in the stockpile appears to be aging slowly. The degradation issues that have been observed do not call into question present weapons performance.”
Plutonium “pits” are the radioactive cores or “triggers” of nuclear weapons. The NNSA has repeatedly claimed that potential aging effects drive the need for the aggressive expansion of plutonium pit production, which is its most expensive and complex program to date.
However, the independent Government Accountability Office (GAO) has repeatedly stated that the NNSA has no credible costs estimates and no “Integrated Master Schedule” for simultaneous production at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in northern New Mexico and the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina. In fact, DOE and NNSA have been on the GAO’s “High Risk List” for project mismanagement and waste of taxpayers’ dollars since 1991. At more than $30 billion, the plutonium pit plant at SRS is on track to become the most expensive building in U.S. history. A comparable amount will be spent at LANL on facility upgrades and related projects, for which the NNSA fails to keep total aggregated costs.
Expanded plutonium pit production has been the choke point of resumed industrial-scale nuclear weapons production by the U.S. Crucially, no future pit production is to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing stockpile. Instead, it is all for new-design nuclear weapons for the new arms race. These new weapons can’t be tested because of the existing global testing moratorium, thereby perhaps degrading confidence in the stockpile. Or new-design nuclear weapons testing could prompt the U.S. to resume testing, which would have severe international proliferation consequences.
Nuclear Watch New Mexico filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the Plutonium Aging: Executive Summary (Unclassified) in June. On July 15 we received an unclassified executive summary, but its two narrative pages were completely redacted. The date is significant because on July 16 the public comment period expired for the draft Pit Production Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS), which was meant to examine the need and rationale for pit production to begin with. The nonprofit organizations Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Savannah River Site Watch and Tri-Valley CAREs had to sue NNSA under the National Environmental Policy Act to compel NNSA to complete the Pit Production PEIS to begin with. The agency has now apparently bowed to public and congressional pressure to release an unredacted version. Nevertheless, concerned citizens were deprived of this crucial document while attempting to submit truly informed comment.
NNSA’s draft Pit Production PEIS claimed:
“NNSA’s existing pit manufacturing capability is insufficient to meet current production requirements, necessitating the establishment of additional pit production capability and capacity both to satisfy the congressional mandate and to mitigate risks associated with plutonium aging.” Draft Pit Production PEIS, NNSA, January 2026, P. S-2
[While rejecting the reuse of more than 15,000 existing pits] “Only Reuse Existing Pits. Not feasible as sole solution. Stockpiled pits age and do not mitigate aging risks or enable enhanced safety features…” Ibid., p. S-14
“Many of the aging pits will have to be replaced with new ones in the coming years to maintain a safe and reliable nuclear stockpile and deterrence.” Ibid., p. 1-3
NNSA Administrator Brandon Williams recently said that the Los Alamos Lab will begin to produce 100 pits per year by 2028. In 2021, LANL Director Thom Mason declared:
“… the pits we have today were largely manufactured in the 1980s, and we don’t have the predictive ability to say with certainty that our current, 40-year-old pits will be good until any particular date. It’s sort of glass half full, glass half empty; we can’t prove that they will fail, but we also can’t prove that they will work.” The best way to deal with this dilemma is to “take it off the table,” Mason explains. “We do that by making new pits, immediately.” [1]
Jay Coghlan, Director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, commented,
“The Lab Director certainly must be pleased that LANL is going to spend 2 billion taxpayer dollars on new plutonium pit production for each of the next six years. But it looks like his plutonium aging excuse doesn’t really hold water. LANL’s nuclear weapons programs are getting a huge $1 billion raise on October 1 for a total of $6 billion in FY 2027, while virtually everything else is being cut. We need real national security against wildfires, pandemics and adverse climate change, not empty excuses for new-design nuclear weapons for the new arms race that threatens us all.”
