After much infighting over the massive contract, plans call for Los Alamos to manufacture 30 pits annually and for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina to make the remaining 50. But in 2018, under pressure from the Trump administration, the federal government called for at least 80 new pits to be manufactured each year, conservatively expected to cost $9 billion - the lion’s share of the expense in a $14.8 billion weapons program upgrade. The cores - known as pits - haven’t been mass-produced since the end of the Cold War. This story was originally published by Searchlight New Mexico and is republished with permission. And these are just the signs visible to the public: Within the lab, workers are busy around the clock to get facilities ready to produce the first plutonium core next year. New housing developments are appearing, one of them about a mile from large white tents that house drums of radioactive waste. Roads are planned to be widened to accommodate 2,500 extra workers. The ripple effects are already being felt. Under the proposed plan, LANL will become home to an industrial-scale plant for manufacturing the radioactive cores of nuclear weapons - hollow spheres of plutonium that act as triggers for nuclear explosions. Now the city may be on the brink of another boom as the federal government moves forward with what could be the most expensive warhead modernization program in U.S. More than 8,000 people flocked here to work for Los Alamos National Laboratory and related industries during the last years of World War II. LOS ALAMOS - Los Alamos began as an “instant city,” springing from the Pajarito Plateau in 1943 at the dawn of the Atomic Age. White tents at Area G stand on the hill near White Rock on Saturday, Feb.
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