After years of protests and a hard-won court battle, anti-nuclear activists in Kansas City will get a chance this week to tell the federal government why they oppose a plan to ramp up production of plutonium pits — the bowling-ball-sized cores of nuclear weapons.
The National Nuclear Security Administration, a division of the Department of Energy, will hold a public hearing in Kansas City on May 7 to collect feedback on its report about the potential environmental and health consequences of increasing plutonium pit production to at least 80 per year by 2030. The country virtually stopped making plutonium pits at the end of the Cold War.
Members of PeaceWorks Kansas City, a volunteer organization that has long protested nuclear weapons part manufacturing in the area, see the hearing — one of five scheduled across the country — as a rare opportunity to have a voice in the secretive nuclear weapons industry.
PeaceWorks members have been handing out flyers encouraging the public to attend and are planning a “teach-in” the day before the hearing to help prepare the public to testify.
The government contends that making more plutonium pits is necessary to modernize the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile. But environmental activists and some scientists argue the effort is unnecessary, dangerous and a thinly disguised effort to re-ignite nuclear weapons production.
“It’s a new nuclear arms race,” said Ann Suellentrop, a retired pediatric nurse who serves as vice chair of PeaceWorks and on the national board of Physicians for Social Responsibility. “They’ve called it the modernization program. But it’s not to fix up and refurbish weapons that already exist. It’s to make new weapons.”
Public hearing information
- Thursday, May 7
- 5 p.m. — Open house and poster session
- 5:30 p.m. — Formal public hearing
- Hillcrest Community Center, 10401 Hillcrest Road, Kansas City, MO 64134
Activist-sponsored events
PeaceWorks teach-in: May 6 at 7 p.m. — All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church, 4501 Walnut St. KCMO 64111
No Nukes KC Coalition information session: May 7 at 4:30 p.m. — Outside Hillcrest Community Center
Why is Kansas City involved?
Congress mandated the 80-pit manufacturing goal in 2015. But the federal government launched an effort to upgrade the country’s nuclear program even earlier as a result of a compromise the Obama administration made with Republicans in Congress.
In order to get Republican support for a nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia — a treaty the Trump administration let expire in February — the Democratic president agreed to begin updating the country’s nuclear weapons complex.
That complex includes the Department of Energy’s National Security Campus in south Kansas City, which has been a clear beneficiary of the nuclear modernization push. The Kansas City facility, operated by Honeywell International Inc. at 14520 Botts Road, manufactures 80% of the nonnuclear parts used in the country’s nuclear bombs.
The south Kansas City complex is in the midst of a15-phase construction boom, which could reportedly cost $6.4 billion and is expected to add 2 million square feet of office and manufacturing space.
The first phase of the project, a $200 million, 700-person office building and parking structure, is expected to open this month, according to a spokesperson.
The government contracted with Promontory 150 LLC, a real estate developer affiliated with Terry Anderson of Platform Ventures, to purchase land and develop “build-to-suit” facilities immediately east of the existing location. In 2024, Missouri lawmakers adopted legislation to give the developer a tax break on the project.
The building project will accommodate significant growth that has already happened at the weapons facility. When it relocated to Botts Road in 2014 from the Bannister Federal Complex — its home since 1949 — the plant employed 2,400 people. By 2024, it had 7,000 employees. The agency said in 2024 it expected to begin a new phase of the project every year for the next decade.
“As we’ve said repeatedly over the last few years, our infrastructure needs to be more capable, flexible and resilient to meet our mission requirements for the next couple decades and beyond,” Jill Hruby, former administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said in remarks during an Aug. 7, 2024, event celebrating the expansion.
“I’d like to take a moment to put things into perspective,” she said. “The current campus was sized for one weapon modernization program in production and one modernization program in development.”
But the workload has grown to seven warhead modernization programs and other “stockpile stewardship activities,” a 2024 press release said.
In her written remarks, Hruby said the National Nuclear Security Administration had delivered more than 200 “modernized warheads” to the Department of Defense in 2023, the most since the end of the Cold War. The warheads are made primarily of nonnuclear parts coming out of Kansas City.
“We expect that rate of production and delivery to continue to be demanding over the next decade,” Hruby said at the time.
The Department of Energy did not respond to requests for comment before The Beacon’s deadline.
In a written statement, Molly Hadfield, a spokesperson for the National Security Campus, said the plutonium pit production being discussed at the public hearing “will not change the type of manufacturing done” at the Honeywell campus, which includes “standard manufacturing processes, such as machining, welding and inspection technologies commonly found in the aerospace industry.”
Increased push under Trump
The weapons modernization plans have accelerated under the Trump administration. That includes the effort to significantly increase plutonium pit production, which is the subject of upcoming public hearings.
The federal government argues that making more pits is a matter of national security. The pits need to be replaced for various reasons, it said, including age, safety and security advancements, global risk and weapons modernization.
But manufacturing the pits is not a simple process, and observers believe ramping up to 80 a year by 2030 is extremely unlikely. They also question whether the government is prepared to deal with the resulting radioactive waste.
While plutonium pits were once manufactured at the Rocky Flats Plant outside Denver, production was halted there in 1989 following environmental violations. The plant was shut down altogether in 1992.
That left the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which technically has the facilities to do the job, and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, which is essentially starting from scratch.
According to a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Los Alamos lab produced only one pit that was certified for use in 2024. Due to facility constraints, workforce issues and “a troubling accident history,” the report said, the lab could be 10 years away from producing even one additional pit.
Dylan Spaulding, a senior scientist in the Union of Concerned Scientists’ global security program who wrote the report, said many outside scientists believe that producing additional pits is not necessary.
“The warheads we have, we believe, are not at risk as a result of age,” Spaulding said. “They could be reliable for decades into the future.”
Meanwhile, moving ahead with the plans to increase pit production could cost tens of billions of dollars, according to Spaulding’s organization, but the government has not established a master schedule or official cost estimate. That’s especially concerning, the group said, because previous attempts to revive pit production have failed “at enormous cost.”
Overall, the federal government has said it plans a $1.7 trillion overhaul of the nuclear arsenal. That could include revitalizing missile silos, producing new warheads and arming new land-based missiles, bomber jets and submarines, according to reporting in The New York Times.
Health dangers
In addition to cost concerns, Spaulding said his group is concerned about the safety of manufacturing more plutonium pits. The radioactive man-made element, created from uranium in nuclear reactors, can lead to long-term health issues like cancer when inhaled, ingested or passed into the bloodstream through a wound.
People who work with plutonium must handle it with special glove boxes that protect them from any exposure. It has an extremely long half-life, so if it is spilled into the environment, cleanup can be dangerous and difficult.
Plutonium pits manufactured in New Mexico and South Carolina will have to be shipped, probably to Texas, where weapons are assembled. That leaves potential for human exposure across the country, experts said.
“When you’re expanding so quickly, you just increase the risk of issues or accidents because humans are prone to error,” said Chanese Forté, a scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists who studies population health and plans to testify at the Kansas City hearing.
The organization is concerned that the National Nuclear Security Administration’s draft programmatic environmental impact statement on plutonium pit production doesn’t fully address the potential health and environmental hazards, including those associated with moving plutonium across the country.
The draft also doesn’t adequately address new risks that will come about at the Kansas City facility as a result of the ramped-up manufacturing, the organization said.
“It’s important for people to know what’s happening in their community,” Spaulding said. The impact statement “leaves Kansas City in the dark about what these changes are going to be, what the exposure is going to be and what the consequences are going to be to their community.”
Kansas City has already had to absorb the environmental contamination left at the site of the former federal weapons plant.
After Honeywell moved out of the 300-acre site at 1500-2012 E. Bannister Road, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources said contaminants in the soil and groundwater included: common industrial chemicals, solvents, paints, volatile organic compounds, PCB oils, diesel fuel, gasoline, low-level radioactive waste and hazardous and radioactive waste.
And news reports have documented serious health concerns and premature deaths among former employees who worked at the complex.
Lawsuit led to public hearings
The only reason the draft impact report was written was that a group of environmental organizations — including two affiliated with PeaceWorks — sued the National Nuclear Security Administration, accusing the agency of violating the National Environmental Policy Act by not producing a new environmental impact statement before moving ahead with plan to increase plutonium pit production.
Last year, a federal judge in South Carolina ruled that the agency had “neglected to properly consider the combined effects” of the pit expansion plan that would rely on production in New Mexico and South Carolina.
A settlement required the agency to conduct an environmental impact study and required public engagement, including the five hearings, which will be held this week and next. Public comments raised at the public hearings or submitted in writing before July 16 must be addressed by the agency in its final report.
Kimmy Igla, a founding member of No Nukes KC Coalition, said she wants to know why Kansas City has been called out as an impacted site. Information about Kansas City’s role in the pit production expansion, she said, is “wildly insufficient” in the draft report.
“We need more information,” she said. “We’re being asked to comment on something that is already underway and we don’t even have sufficient information.”
Without the court ruling, she added, the impact study wouldn’t have even been done.
“If transparency were really the goal, then we would already be in the know for what their mission is,” Igla said. “Instead they had to get sued and be forced to do this.”
Suellentrop, of PeaceWorks, is clear on what she wants to ask.
“Why should we make more of this crap?” she said. “It’s a huge waste of our tax money. … The whole process of making them pollutes the United States.”
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
