Browse the U.S. Department of Energy’s fiscal ’09 budget request, and you may be absorbed in a game of “now you see it, now you don’t,” said Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group.

At first blush, you’ll notice a budget of $0 for the agency’s “Pit Manufacturing and Certification Campaign,” the technical category that has so far held most of DOE’s efforts to renew its manufacturing of nuclear bomb triggers, called pits, the director of the nuclear watchdog group said.

But look closer. The funding isn’t really gone.

It has just moved — to three new cryptically titled categories: Directed Stockpile Work, Science Campaign and Transformation Disposition, Mello noted.

Blink too quickly, and you might miss it — or at least get one hell of a headache, Mello said.

“This is about the maturation of the program,” Mello said. “It’s moved from technology development to actually making things for the nuclear stockpile. We think that’s wrong — it’s the wrong purpose. It’s counterproductive and it’s just plain ethically wrong.”

DOE has instructed the lab to produce between 50 and 80 plutonium pits a year by 2014-2018 to replace pits that are aging in the current stockpile.

The lab built 11 in 2007 and is slowly increasing production, Los Alamos spokesman Kevin Roark has said.

The goal is to have Los Alamos make pits so that they can be used to replace aging pits in the existing nuclear stockpile — so the government can be sure that all of its nuclear weapons will function as intended.

But government studies have indicated pits already in the stockpile won’t decay for about 100 years, which makes the project at the very least premature, Mello said.

“The problem we face is getting Congress’ attention in an election year,” Mello said. “The house has killed this project three times and deeply cut it twice.”

But hidden in the budget, it’s pretty much fully funded, he said.

The fiscal 2007 budget for the Pit Manufacturing and Certification Campaign was about $242 million. The fiscal 2008 budget is about $214 million, and the 2009 budget is $0.

The other budget categories don’t define which funds are actually designated for pit production programs. But each shows a significant increases.

Directed Stockpile Work increases from $1.4 billion in 2008 to about $1.7 billion in 2009. The Science Campaign increases from $288 million in 2008 to about $323 million in 2009. And Transformation Disposition goes from $0 in 2008 to $77 million in 2009.

Those numbers indicate the program is still going forward with about the same budget as it had in the past, said U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M.

And while he thinks the nation should be able to make bomb cores, he’s not so sure that Los Alamos should become the new production facility for that work, Bingaman said.

“I’ve always taken the position that Los Alamos is capable of pit production, and I don’t have a problem with maintaining that capability,” Bingaman said. “But if we’re going to significantly increase production, I think we should look at a site other than Los Alamos.”

The budget also includes somewhere between $10 million and $40 million worth of work on the Reliable Replacement Warhead, which is basically a project to design new, more durable nuclear weapons.

“It’s a change in the philosophy of designing,” Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said in a news conference Monday. But Congress flat- out denied DOE’s prior requests for that project, Bingaman noted.

“I’m not sure exactly what they intend to do with that,” Bingaman said. “Congress made it pretty clear at the end of the last session that we were not interested in a reliable replacement warhead project.”

That’s something very likely to come under harsh scrutiny when the budget gets to the Appropriations Committee, which starts up in the next month or so, he said.
When asked by a reporter at the conference about why the replacement warhead funding was included, Bodman said, “We think it’s important.”

But Mello argued funding for that program and for the pits is more about sustaining DOE’s status quo.

“They’re afraid that if they don’t make new weapons, they’ll lose their relevance and die,” Mello said.

Contact Sue Vorenberg at 986-3072 or svorenberg@sfnewmexican.com.