A look at Savannah River Site’s weapons production colleague.

by Don Moniak
January 1, 2024

The Pantex Plant in the Texas Panhandle is about one-twelfth the size of the Savannah River Site (SRS) but stores five times more plutonium. Most of this plutonium is tentatively scheduled to be shipped to SRS over the next twenty to fifty years. Any major accident at Pantex could accelerate that ever evolving schedule.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Pantex nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly plant in the Texas Panhandle has been the sole endpoint in the nation’s nuclear weapons complex for nearly fifty years. After the first Cold War ended, the cessation of plutonium production, coupled with the abrupt termination of of Rocky Flats plutonium (Pu) pit production left Pantex as both the beginning and the end of the weapons complex. Or, as DOE puts it, All Roads Lead to Pantex.

Pantex is also the home for the nation’s supply of primary nuclear explosive “triggers”—quaintly known as plutonium pits—that have been removed from the nuclear weapons stockpile. Each pit is estimated to contain an average of three kilograms of plutonium-gallium alloy.

Although the approximate number of pits stored at Pantex is now classified, it is estimated there is anywhere between 17,000 and 20,000 currently stored in WWII-era bunkers. An estimated 11,000 to 13,000 are surplus to military needs; thousands more are in a strategic reserve and categorized as “national security assets.”

The future of SRS plutonium operations begins at Pantex. First, the renewed plutonium pit production mission, currently planned for SRS and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), is reliant on the strategic reserve pits. Second, the 35-40 tons of plutonium in surplus pits remains tentatively scheduled for shipment to SRS for disposition into various waste forms, as it has since 2000. (1)

The difference between Pu at Pantex and SRS is four-fold. First, at 200,000 acres, SRS is twelve times larger in area than the relatively tiny, 16,000 acre Pantex plant. An accident at Pantex would have bad consequences for neighbors, especially since all the neighbors are farmers and even the rumor of crop contamination can have a disastrous economic affect. SRS has a miles-wide buffer between its high-consequence radiochemical operations and materials storage and the nearest residents.

Second, the plutonium-gallium alloy contained in pits is considered the most stable phase of plutonium, whereas SRS has what is essentially the Cold War’s Pu dregs; which require a more rigid level of monitoring, and are more difficult to process.

The only time Pantex has processed loose plutonium was in response to an accident. This well known fact once led former SC Senator Strom Thurmond to foolishly refer to Pantex worker as “amateurs.”

Third, Pantex sits on the dry, windswept prairie of the Texas Panhandle, (Figure 1) not hidden within humid and dense southeastern forests.

Finally, the State of Texas has accepted the long-term mission of storing sixty plus tons of plutonium in a small area of the Texas Panhandle for up to fifty years; whereas the State of South Carolina objected to its essential long-term storage role, but only after it was no longer tied to the long-term and lucrative production job called MOX fuel fabrication.

On the Llano

The Southern Great Plains of Texas consist of a broad plateau known as the Llano Estacado. The LLano sits above the Southern Ogallala Aquifer and is often referred to as the “world’s flattest mountain.”

The Llano has a steady undulation imperceptible to newcomers. It is dissected in the South by canyons of various depths, the most notable being Palo Duro Canyon. The natural vegetation is mid-grass and tall-grass prairie. (Figure 2)

It is dotted by shallow depressions containing ephemeral to intermittently-occurring bodies of water known as playas (Figure 3). The playas attract large flocks of migratory waterfowl and can get deep and full enough to water ski.

It is the kind of place where darkness can be viewed to the east before the sun sets in the west. Smoke from wildfires in native prairie and conservation reserve grasslands appear deceptively close, when it is actually very distant. Grain silos are visible from miles away and act as landmarks.

The country is predictably laid out in square grids. Drive around a square enough times and it seems circular. It is only a twenty-mile drive around Pantex—twenty minutes if in a hurry, or an hour while sightseeing.

Pantex Plant

The windswept, dry, open prairie is surprisingly not a bad place to mask the presence of a nuclear weapons assembly plant. Unlike grain silos, the low physical profile of the Pantex Plant makes it unnoticeable from long distances and even unobtrusive from its barbed wire fences.

The primary tasks at Pantex are disassembly of retired nuclear weapons and reassembly of existing models in the nuclear arsenal.

The latter includes utilization of fresh canisters of SRS-produced tritium gas which boosts the destructive power of primary nuclear explosives ten to twenty-fold; highly enriched uranium subassemblies from Oak Ridge which are necessary for secondary nuclear explosions; and hundreds of replacement nonnuclear parts from the Kansas City plant.

Development, testing, and fabrication of high explosives weapon components constitute another militarily critical role at Pantex. Pit storage and monitoring is perhaps the most passive task.

Pantex’s origin was obtrusive and controversial to many. Just as thousands were displaced from Aiken, Barnwell, and Allendale Counties to make way for Savannah River Plant, Pantex was founded on land seized from mostly German immigrant farmers to construct a World War II munitions plant.  Many of the WW II bunkers remain at Pantex, stocked with pits and used for temporary weapon storage.

The seized Pantex lands were not returned after the war, fostering a lingering resentment by the dislocated families that endured for at least half a century. The munitions plant was converted in 1951 to a nuclear weapons assembly site with a major high explosives testing and development role.

Proctor and Gamble was Pantex’s first operating contractor, and many locals came to believe it was a detergent plant. P&G reportedly left after five years to avoid its family friendly products from being associated with the bomb, and was replaced for nearly the next half-century by the Mason and Hangar Company.

Pantex is the only plant in the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex where an inadvertent nuclear explosion can occur, though it is such a remote possibility that it was deemed as “beyond credible” until the turn of this century.

The Perimeter Tour: Cells, Bays, Firing Sites, Center Pivots, and Pits.

The best starting point for a drive around Pantex is also the closest point from the Amarillo airport, the nearby maximum security prison (where the inmate population was not considered in Pantex radioactive exposure analyses for years), and an IBP meat processing plant. The airport sits only miles away and the risk of an aircraft crash into pit and weapon storage bunkers was a fierce and persistent subject of debate for years.

Huge industrialized pig farms emerged as a major industry in the 1990s in counties north of the plant. Though these farms are visually unobtrusive in the landscape, their all-encompassing stench is most certainly not. In early 2000, a truck carrying dead pigs too far gone for rendering stopped suddenly at a traffic light west of the plant, causing its cargo to fly over the top of the cab onto the highway, a comical confluence of three economic mainstays of the Amarillo area—plutonium, prisons, and pigs.

The route around Pantex, heading west to east at the start, involves three left turns. Jim Hightower, the former Texas Agricultural Commissioner turned pundit, is credited with the saying, “As my mother used to tell me, two wrongs don’t make a right. But I soon figured out that three left turns do make a right.’

The west-to-east route on the southern boundary is also the route used in the motorcycle scene of the locally famous docu-comedy The Plutonium Circus. (Figure 4)

The 160-640 acre farm parcels on the south side of the road are interrupted only by the historic Peace Farm, a ten-acre tract where members gathered for years to bear witness to weapons transports.

A few miles further east is the first left turn. The first farm site on the right was once owned by Lee Cockrell. In the early 1990’s, Lee was one of the few farmers who supported a Pantex expansion that included a plutonium pit production role, and criticized neighbors who did not. The situation changed later in the decade when a plume of groundwater contaminated with hexavalent chromium polluted his drinking water well and he started breaking out in hives.

Within two years Pantex officials alienated Mr. Cockrell. He became a persistent, formidable critic who always carried a sheaf of his documents. Soon Department of Energy officials, who for years had claimed the contamination would never migrate “off-site,” ended any remaining fondness for Lee.

Catty-corner from Cockrell’s old place is DOE headquarters, the only building with public access, and one of the few facilities easily visible from the road. (Figure 5)

A mile or so further north, the main plant with its array of “cells” and “bays” enters the view, but still remains inconspicuous. There are six cells in Zone 12, five of them operational. (Figure 6)

The cells, also known as “gravel gerties,” are host to the most sensitive and delicate weapons assembly and disassembly work. The ~115-pound high explosive package is “mated” onto the plutonium pit during assembly, and removed during disassembly. On rare occasions, there can be issues like one in 2005 when there was an “unexpected cracking of a high explosive main charge during disassembly.”

Numerous detonators and actuators that are removed during disassembly and replaced during reassembly are also sensitive to everything from static electrical discharges to more powerful electrical surges during lighting storms.  Any component involved in the detonation process that “functions as designed” is an unwelcome occurrence.

The operations involve a three-person crew of production technicians (PTs). One technician serves as a procedure reader, and the other two follow each thoughtfully-produced procedure to perform the warhead assembly or disassembly according to plan. (Figure 7)

Not following the procedure, or the discovery that a procedure needs adjusting, can result in a work stoppage, where the weapon is placed in a safe configuration and an investigation ensues to chart a path forward.

In earlier days the high explosives were more sensitive, meaning a dropped package of 115 pounds of advanced high explosives were more sensitive to fire and could more easily explode on impact. The cells are designed to collapse during such an event to trap as much of the plutonium and other resulting radioactive debris as possible, and the three workers inside would never be found.

No such event has happened, but in 1978 three workers were killed and never found when a much smaller amount of high explosives detonated during a machining operation in a test facility.

In 1988, a major accident in a cell did happen and rendered the facility useless for decades. During disassembly, a small electrostatic discharge caused a non-nuclear part that releases tritium gas from its container to “function as designed.” Four grams of tritium with 40,000 curies of radioactive beta particles were released in the small space, and then vented to the outside environment. DOE did not notify Pantex neighbors of the release.

In 2010, another previously unthinkable event happened when heavy rains created a half-foot of standing water in nuclear explosives facilities. Earlier Pantex safety analyses had found that flooding was not a “potential event initiator.” No accidents occurred, but the event caused a major reexamination of previous safety assumptions and analyses.

Bays

Bays are additional assembly/disassembly areas focused on the array of components and parts found in any weapon. Violations of nuclear explosive procedures or the need for new procedures is as common in bays as they are in cells.

One of the more extreme accidents in a bay was the destruction of a weapon, meaning it was rendered useless. In 1997, during disassembling a B61 Mod 3 nuclear warhead, the procedure for a different weapon modification was used. When it came time to remove one component, technicians heard a loud boom, saw smoke, and smelled an acrid odor. The Pantex public relations department minimized the experience by describing it as a ‘pop and an odor.”

The cause remains classified, but by 2000 reports of “destroyed weapons” emerged. DOE would not confirm or deny that the loud boom, smoke, and acrid odor were the result of a “weak link” functioning as designed. Weak links are weapon parts designed to disable and render a weapon useless when unauthorized energy is introduced into the system.

Eight years later, there was a “disassembly abnormality” in a cell when, during “separation of a weapon subassembly, a component snapped and the tooling applied a force to a main charge in excess of the procedural limit.” The initial report included the fact that a detonator cable had been accidentally pulled out of a detonator assembly. In yet another report, the problem was further refined as, “high explosive main charges separat(ing) at an unexpected step in the disassembly process.” Two months passed before progress was made on final disassembly. There were later public reports that the incident could have led to an accidental nuclear detonation, but DOE would never publicly confirm such a scenario.

After passing the receiving area known as Building 16-12 is another left turn. 

The first farm on the right is the former home of Jim and Jeri Osborn. (Figure 8). The couple lived amiably with Pantex as a neighbor, even when large chunks of metal from outside explosives testing landed in their fields. Jim used to show off the heavy chunks to visiting journalists.

Visible in the short distance is the small “firing range’ where larger experimental explosions are performed. Much smaller experimental explosions occur within an indoors testing facility, where high-tech monitoring devices generate detailed images of the explosions. Also nearby are the old burning grounds, where about fifty tons of high explosives were annually burned in open pits for various reasons—declassification of shape, demilitarization, and hazard reduction. Exposure to neighbors were minimized by Pantex PR officials for decades.

The always tenuous relationship among farm families who predated Pantex intensified when DOE proposed plutonium processing missions. Unlike SRS, Rocky Flats, Hanford, and Los Alamos, Pantex had only handled plutonium contained within the sealed pits. The only time it was handled as a powder was when a pit accidentally cracked during disassembly. (2)

The Osborns’ relationship worsened in 1994 when Pantex set off a massive explosives charge less than a mile from their home during an emergency drill. The blast was far more powerful than the normal window-rattling tests which the family was accustomed to enduring. The explosion damaged the foundation and strew paintings and kitchenware around the house. The event was widely perceived as an act of reprisal for the Osborns’ outspokenness.

Due to the combination of DOE’s refusal to accept responsibility, and the lack of attorneys willing to take on the gargantuan national security bureaucracy and its arcane information classification system, the Osborns were forced for several years to argue their case in the court of public opinion. The couple began ending public comments to DOE with the phrase, “if their lips are moving, they’re lying.”

Then it was discovered that the explosion happened during an emergency drill in which a neighbor was hypothetically impacted, but the drill was only supposed to involve a miniscule explosives charge. A previous Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory report was also discovered that described the maximum safe charge at a one-mile distance from a home as about one-eighth the power of the emergency drill explosion. Enough information had accumulated to compel DOE to finally settle, though only for a pittance and without an admission of culpability.

West of the Osborn place is a short, small rise. A health researcher from the humid east, fresh off the plane and already confused by the big sky and long horizons, once incredulously looked at it and asked his hosts ‘WHAT RISE?” as if it was a joke.

At the top of the rise further west is a farm where a young family once lived and farmed. Their well water was contaminated by high explosive residues and solvents. That too was never supposed to happen.

Plant officials had long claimed that a ‘perched aquifer with high levels of explosives and solvents contamination was isolated and not connected to the Ogallala Aquifer. As neighboring farmers had informed DOE for years, that was not the case. To make matters worse, DOE and state regulators failed to publicly disclose the findings for three months.

The Scenic Pit Storage View

Just west of the rise is one of the better, though still limited views (Figure 9) of the physically low profile weapons and plutonium storage bunkers. Over a small playa is Zone 4, where the plutonium that is scheduled to someday head to SRS remains in seventy to eighty-year old storage bunkers that largely lack temperature and humidity controls.

The DOE’s Record of Decision (ROD) opting for long-term (up to fifty years) storage of surplus pits at Pantex was made in January of 1997. The same ROD included selection of Savannah River Site (SRS) for long-term (up to fifty years) consolidated storage of surplus non-pit plutonium metals and powders.

SRS’ candidacy for long-term surplus pit storage ended with that decision, in large part because thousands of non-surplus “national security assets” were also to be stored at Pantex.

Problems with pit storage have been documented since the 1990’s. Most bunkers are of WW-II origin, and many of them (Figure ) have no humidity or temperature controls, this in a region with staggering climate extremes. They are also even prone to flooding.

Until the early 2000’s the pits were not stored in sealed containers, contrary to the directives of National “design agency” Laboratories which specified that, “no pit should be stored an appreciable period of time in these (unsealed) containers.”

In 1999 the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board issued Recommendation 99-1, Safe Storage of Fissionable Material Called Pits.
The Board emphasized the need for storage in sealed containers to prevent corrosion of pit cladding; in addition to thermal monitoring to avoid excessive, damaging temperatures in the bunkers, and improved facility storage for the thousands of strategic reserve pits that had accumulated by 1999, and have continued to accumulate to this day. The Board wrote the following about the investment and existing value of the militarily critical pits:

“Pits in the strategic reserve at Pantex have great value to national defense. These pits, manufactured at great cost and great effort by the Department of Energy and its forebears, are probably only second in importance to nuclear weapons in the military stockpile. In the nuclear weapons defense system, they are effectively irreplaceable. Their assured safe protection should be a vital component of national defense.”

Thus, a cabinet agency that constantly tried to justify the need for new pits retained a policy of substandard care of potential replacement pits.

Recommendation 99-1 was closed in 2005 after Pantex managed to repackage more than 97 percent of the pits into sealed containers, and improved thermal monitoring was implemented.

But by 2022, as the inventory increased another ten percent over 2014 levels, up to fourteen percent of all pits were described as being in unsealed containers. If the pit storage limit of 20,000 has been reached, that means that upwards of 3,000 pits are stored in substandard conditions.

Still, despite the difficulties, there is no outcry from the State of Texas demanding early removal of the pits. This contrasts with South Carolina, where fears of plutonium storage at the most experienced site in the country were exploited by political leaders to extract a $600 million settlement from the federal treasury; and also foist some materials upon less prepared nuclear weapons reservations like the Nevada Test Site. 

If DOE begins to depopulate Pantex of its pits, well-equipped SRS will face some of the same difficulties.  It will have to accommodate pits with high heat production or whose cladding is not fire resistant—a substantive concern if pit disassembly ever reaches SRS.

Two more miles, past a group of center pivots, is the final left turn. The second farm on the right, with Pantex on the left, is owned and operated by Doris and Phil Smith.

Doris and Phil Smith were at time’s Pantex’s biggest nightmare—life long third-generation farmers, solid citizens, and knowledgeable, formidable speakers. Phil’s thundering but steady voice reverberated through meeting rooms, especially as he described DOE’s chronic arrogance towards the people. Doris would recite technical issues about groundwater, plutonium, and tritium before often ending with “We grow food for the world, you build weapons to destroy it.” In 2017, she told the Amarillo Globe-News, “(Pantex) didn’t necessarily lie to you — they just didn’t tell you the whole truth.”

Doris was also a promiment local artist, whose “Midnight Mass” painting of their beloved St. Francis of Assissi Church adorned many homes across the Panhandle and beyond. The original hung in the entrance way of the church. Adjacent to the church is the community center where semi-annual dances were held.

A former pastor of St. Francis, Bishop Leroy Mathiessen, once urged Pantex workers to leave their weapons jobs, and offered assistance in finding new work. In 1998, on the same day that Bishop Matthiessen received an award in Washington D.C. from an alliance of nuclear weapons plants neighbors, somebody lit the church on fire and it burned to the ground. The arsonist was never found.

A few miles to the west of the plant’s southwest corner, where the drive around Pantex ends, the new St. Francis of Assissi church stands on its original ground. No money from the Pantex contractor was accepted for the reconstruction.

Footnotes

(1) Originally, pit plutonium was to be processed into a plutonium/mixed oxide fuel (MOX), a mission which devolved into a prime example of a failed mega-project. Now, plans are for processing the 27 to 34 tons of surplus pit plutonium into a less complicated waste form, simply labeled as “dilution.”

As described in Plutonium is Not for Amateurs, this planning began in the mid-1990s and has yet to progress past the pilot stage. SRS currently processes about 0.3 tons/per year at its K-Area plutonium waste production area. Although it must be noted that the current slow rate is influenced by prioritization of the most difficult materials, it could still take up to more than 30 years to finish processing the ~11 tons of plutonium presently stored in K-Area.

While South Carolina political leaders cried foul in the mid 2010’s over the continued presence after fifteen years of a mere eleven to twelve tons of plutonium at SRS, the much larger plutonium stockpile at Pantex has continued to grow for the past twenty years due to continued weapons disassembly work dictated by nuclear weapons treaties with the former Soviet Union.

(2) The cracked pit was a Livermore National Laboratory-designed pit. Livermore had a reputation for designing weapon components that were more difficult to disassemble because they were only designed to be used.

Notes

Texas Monthly’s Disarmed and Dangerous is the best long-form journalism about Pantex in the 1990’s, the “boosters” and the “bashers,” and living near daily explosions.

Don Moniak worked for Serious Texans Against Nuclear Dumping (STAND) of Amarillo for four years. STAND was an informational and advocacy group monitored current and proposed work at the Pantex Plant and provided assistance to other communities affected by proposed radiochemical dumping plans. STAND also worked with PANAL and Peace Farm to produce The Nuclear Examiner, a monthly newsletter with a mailing list of 3,500 interested parties.