Oil Dispersants in the Gulf: Corexit 9500 = Core Exit ?

I studied a little more into the dispersants,  used in large quantities in the Gulf right now. What are they? what do they do ? what is the risk to the ecosystem ? what is the risk to humans ? 


Just saw this little clip....looks like toxic rains to me, look at the marks, look at the spread over all plants --not some fungus or pest.





In my research I came accross this in depth article about the"Coreexit" products that are being used. My conclusion is that what is happening in the Gulf is now only comparable to the gazchambers for animals and microscopic life alike, but on a much larger scale. 
I believe that the threat of these chemicals is real and the scenarios that are outlined here will very shortlly be real. This will affect all life: with links: I highly recommend it to you,  w

Toxic Oil Spill Rains Warned Could Destroy North America

Posted by Europe on May 24th, 2010 // 219 Comments

A dire report prepared for President Medvedev by Russia’s Ministry of Natural Resources is warning today that the British Petroleum (BP) oil and gas leak in the Gulf of Mexico is about to become the worst environmental catastrophe in all of human history threatening the entire eastern half of the North American continent with “total destruction”.

Russian scientists are basing their apocalyptic destruction assessment due to BP’s use of millions of gallons of the chemical dispersal agent known asCorexit 9500 which is being pumped directly into the leak of this wellhead over a mile under the Gulf of Mexico waters and designed, this report says, to keep hidden from the American public the full, and tragic, extent of this leak that is now estimated to beover 2.9 million gallons a day.

The dispersal agent Corexit 9500 is a solvent originally developed by Exxon and now manufactured by the Nalco Holding Company of Naperville, Illinois that is four times more toxic than oil (oil is toxic at 11 ppm (parts per million), Corexit 9500 at only 2.61ppm).  In a report written by Anita George-Ares and James R. Clark for Exxon Biomedical Sciences, Inc. titled “Acute Aquatic Toxicity of Three Corexit Products: An Overview” Corexit 9500 was found to be one of the most toxic dispersal agents ever developed. Even worse, according to this report, with higher water temperatures, like those now occurring in the Gulf of Mexico, its toxicity grows.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in discovering BP’s use of this dangerous dispersal agent ordered BP to stop using it, but BP refused stating that their only alternative to Corexit 9500 was an even more dangerous dispersal agent known as Sea Brat 4.

The main differences between Corexit 9500 and Sea Brat 4 lie in how long these dangerous chemicals take to degrade into their constituent organic compounds, which for Corexit 9500 is 28 days.  Sea Brat 4, on the other hand, degrades into an organic chemical called Nonylphenol that is toxic to aquatic life and can persist in the environment for years.

A greater danger involving Corexit 9500, and as outlined by Russian scientists in this report, is that with its 2.61ppm toxicity level, and when combined with the heating Gulf of Mexico waters, its molecules will be able to“phase transition” from their present liquid to a gaseous state allowing them to be absorbed into clouds and allowing their release as “toxic rain” upon all of Eastern North America.

Even worse, should a Katrina like tropical hurricane form in the Gulf of Mexico while tens of millions of gallons of Corexit 9500 are sitting on, or near, its surface the resulting “toxic rain” falling upon the North American continent could “theoretically” destroy all microbial life to any depth it reaches resulting in an “unimaginable environmental catastrophe” destroying all life forms from the “bottom of the evolutionary chart to the top”.

Note: For molecules of a liquid to evaporate, they must be located near the surface, be moving in the proper direction, and have sufficient kinetic energy to overcome liquid-phase intermolecular forces. Only a small proportion of the molecules meet these criteria, so the rate of evaporation is limited. Since the kinetic energy of a molecule is proportional to its temperature, evaporation proceeds more quickly at higher temperatures.

As over 50 miles of the US State of Louisiana’s coastline has already been destroyed by this spill, American scientists are warning that the damage may be impossible to repair, and as we can read as reported by the Associated Press News Service:

“The gooey oil washing into the maze of marshes along the Gulf Coast could prove impossible to remove, leaving a toxic stew lethal to fish and wildlife, government officials and independent scientists said. Officials are considering some drastic and risky solutions: They could set the wetlands on fire or flood areas in hopes of floating out the oil. They warn an aggressive cleanup could ruin the marshes and do more harm than good.”

And to understand the full import of this catastrophe it must be remembered that this disaster is occurring in what is described as the “biologically richest waters in America” with the greatest amount of oil and toxic Corexit 9500 set to come ashore in the coming days and weeks to destroy it completely for decades to come.

Reports are also coming from the United States that their government is secretly preparing to evacuate tens-of-millions of their citizens from their Gulf of Mexico States should the most dire of these scientific warnings start to come true.

To the greatest lesson to be learned by these Americans is that their government-oil industry cabal has been just as destructive to them as their government-banking one, both of which have done more to destroy the United States these past couple of years than any foreign enemy could dare dream was possible.

But to their greatest enemy the Americans need look no further than their nearest mirror as they are the ones who allowed these monsters to rule over them in the first place.

Source

Holocaust at Sea

The Associated press reports that : 
Dolphins and sharks are showing up in surprisingly shallow water just off the Florida coast. Mullets, crabs, rays and small fish congregate by the thousands off an Alabama pier. Birds covered in oil are crawling deep into marshes, never to be seen again.   (wed. 16th, June 2010)


What this means is that the animals are trying to flee the oil-spill. They are running out of oxygen, and they are running out of food, rapidly. They realize something that we humans don't: they are getting ready to die, together. This should not be confused with a mass suicide: it is a mass killing. They know there is something wrong with one of the species on this earth: the ones that walk on two legs and don't have wings. When one ecosystem such as the Gulf, goes, others will follow. For humans it means that large swats of the Gulf Coast will become uninhabitable, due to lingering fumes, and the destruction of livelihoods and culture. There will be a diaspora of communities coming from that area, desperately trying to cling to any kind of normalcy and health.


 Russian scientists have stated that the impact of the dispersants will penetrate inland as well.....as the oceans form the clouds, tiny particles of the fleetingly light dispersant and oil droplets will be swept into these clouds, and will be unleashed as rain, over forests, agricultural lands, streams, rivers and cities alike. Yet we are not even allowed to ask what kind of chemical onslaught we are facing. Corporate secret. Punkt.


 How can they get away with this...? Excuse me.....Obama.... where is your leadership.... ? 


Barack.....!  You need to get advise from people who think differently than the ones that advice you. You need people like James Hansen to advice you on ecology, Michael Pollan on chemicals and food and Greg Mello on Nuclear Weapons. 
As far as BP is concerned.... act quickly like a dictator in princely armor. A Protector.  Immediately nationalize the American portion of BP including all its assets and funds. Work with the people that are knowledgeable in BP, jail top management, and fire the rest. Then gather the best, untainted analytical data and minds in the situation, digest the knowledge and understanding of the situation and the facts... and come up with a real solution for the increasingly volcanic oil gusher. Then execute the plan. You Are the Commander in Chief. 
Did I say volcanic ? Earlier this year I sailed the Caribbean on the Heraclitus sail boat. All of the islands, Bekhia, Santa Lucia, St Johns, Haiti, etc. are islands formed by volcanic activity,  still very active (and 'young' as you can see in this photo of Santa Lucia). The recent Haiti earthquake also suggests that this whole area is internally moving.  Some have speculated that the deep underground lakes of oil, that the Horizon platform penetrated, are somewhere in their system in close contact with hot lava streams which might explain the force and composition of the oil and gasses that are spewing into the Gulf. I think this is a reasonable hypotheses and needs to be taken into account. Toxic gasses may be on the increase, as the pressure seems to be as well. Dear Father, may you have mercy on us......

 I pray for all you big beings of the Gulf, I pray for all you small beings of the Gulf..... I am afraid that I cannot offer you any hope..... this is the end of your beauty and intricacy, the end of your endless networks of subtle relationships, which we humans have never been able to fully appreciate or understand.... let alone respect. In the end we can finally see what all of you have contributed to our lives..... you have been our friends all along....we will miss you terribly...... may you some day be able to forgive our greed, hate, and delusion, but for now......rest assured that due to our own stupidity as a species, as humans, the two legged.....we almost surely will find the same fate that we have bestowed on you....lack of air and lack of food......Lament .... Lament.....

BREAD

For your and our enjoyment I have made a little video on the breads that have been produced at Cloud Cliff and brought to the Santa Fe Farmers Market. The vast majority of the grains used is grown by  farmers in Northern New Mexico, close to the Colorado border.

The first really serious apprentice has now become a journey man, by producing a new type of bread called Desem, based on a long term unique fermentation process. It can best be compared to a mild sourdough, yet it has a flavoring typical only of its own. Very interesting..... Our Greek Orthodox old monk Father Elias, has been coming during the baking sessions ......helping..... reading...... complaining.... and providing us with the quiet peace that in needed for full concentration on bread creation. Gratitude. We will miss him terribly if he ever decides to go back to his hermitage on Mt. Athos, Greece.
And an architect student, involved in rebuilding Mumbay slums, India, has joined the crew as a new apprentice.
Eating pizza together in the middle of the day, with who-ever comes (including my wonderful daughter), has been a great encouragement to all.

In the heat of the evening the physical labor of baking in front of a large hearth,  kind of forces you to draw from other types of resources... within... you didn't think you had....and that energy...... that you'll find.... is somehow the same energy that transforms into bread....

A few notes on BP's oil spill, dispersants and clean-up

Let me be on record:  Proposing to use a nuclear weapon to stop a hole in the ocean borders on insanity, and should be taken off the table as an option from the very start. I was very distraught to hear in the early days of the BP disaster, that the administration was seeking the advice of the Nuclear Laboratories such as Los Alamos in this. Dr. Chu realizes that the nuclear option does not exist here (and nowhere else either), which shows us again what an abuse of resources these laboratories truly are: they cannot solve any military problems, nor any civilian - either.  They are truly useless. They do not address the problems of our time. They are important only because we pay a lot of money for them. That is stupid.

O.K. I didn't want to talk about the laboratories again.... let's get back to the BP oil spill. 


My questions are these:
How much do we really know about deep geology ? Have we understood the relationships between layers of oil and the drift of continental plates.....and earthquakes ? Could it be that at the depth that they are drilling now,  some 20.000 feet under the crust of the earth, many "oil lakes" are actually connected which may explain the  increasing pressure of the "oil volcano" under the Gulf ? What is the potential magnitude of barrels of oil floating on the Gulf, if all efforts are unsuccessful  or worse....counter productive ? Any idea ? Based on what ? Go back to question one.

Whatever the eventual solution for capping the oil well may be, it is clear that there will be tremendous environmental damage. Throwing toxic oil dispersants on the oil itself will make the problem only worse.

One has to realize that life in water is only made possible by small amounts of fatty acids that envelop all living beings in the ocean. From tuna and dolphins to plankton and one celled algae --who are feeding the whole oceanic ecology-- they all share this tiny layer of fat. This layer of fatty acids prevents the total osmosis that would otherwise occur in a salty ocean. If this layer is damaged, the live fluids are drained out of every cel and the organisms die from atrophy --their internal circulation drying out. This is precisely why the oil dispersant is so harmful: it de-solves what otherwise would be a film of oil on top of the water, into tiny droplets that disperse throughout the ocean and hence throughout the food chain in the water. Each one of these oil droplets that have attached to the dispersants act like bullets assaulting every living being in its way. Once attached to any being in the web of oceanic life, they 'burn' a hole into the protective layers of fatty acids... and killing everything in its wake.

There should be an immediate halt to the use of dispersants in the gulf. They were only used (underwater no less) to hide the extend of the problem. The oil disperses and 'dissolves'  into the water.....--like when you are doing the dishes--  so now it can't be detected any longer from the surface.  This will exacerbate the real problem even more. Stop it Obama ! Dr. Chu, pay attention !

Now to the cleanup itself. This is going to be a problem for a long time to come and I realize that there are no easy solutions. But if there are any, they will come from Bio-remediation. Finding out which organisms can feed on the oil, and then promulgating them. Of course this will bring on its own set of problems, perhaps even toxicity--but we should realize these problems are caused by profound imbalances caused by humans. Imbalances in more that just the ecology.....imbalances in power structures that control the fate of the earth. We humans will pay a high price for our follies and greed.

needlenose dolphins playing in the carribean....not too long ago

Dear friends, This will be the last guest blog for awhile....promise.


Here I would like to introduce you to the work of Greg Mello. For almost 20 years now Greg Mello has been studying full time on nuclear issues, particularly exposing the role of Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL), New Mexico, as the fountainhead of nuclear proliferation world wide. It was here in Los Alamos, that the first nuclear weapons were made including the ones for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though this nuclear charade should have been halted for countless reasons a long time ago, it is here in Los Alamos that the Obama administration is poised to make the largest new investments in nuclear weaponry worldwide, now, in 2010.
Lab' budgets are said to increase by 22% and local papers are touting a 'new Golden Age' ala the Manhattan Project for LANL , while the rest of the globe is led to believe that Obama wants to lead towards a nuclear free world. Quite a feat of propaganda is needed here, and any voice that raises questions needs to be squeezed. No wonder that Greg Mello's work has not gotten the attention it deserves. Regardless of how meticulous and detailed and reasoned his analysis, it is easy to rumor that Greg Mello is some fringe radical intellectual, and pinhole him in such a way that his organization barely gets funded while lightweight fruitcakes can count on lavish contributions from nuclear weapon and policy related interests.
It is hard to be principled in our time, and yet, that is what is giving the voice of Greg Mello its power: in the halls of congress, on the internet (LASG.org), in the UN, and in prestigious publications like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, etc.. What Mello points out is that no matter how much money a country may be able to print, sooner or later real choices need to be made: think schools versus nuclear weapons, think solar versus nuclear power, think community and future versus war.
If you are like me, you want to spend little time thinking about something as dark and ominous as nuclear weapons. Yet in this pivotal time, we are going to have to engage in this issue. That is why we are lucky to have Greg Mello in our midst, whose work educates us and the powers that be on the reality of the situation.... Reality versus Propaganda. I would like to invite you to visit LASG.org  and see the scope of Greg's work and analysis for yourself. The work of the Los Alamos Study Group and Greg Mello depends on many smaller and larger contributions. Let's do our part: give generously at LASG.org.


Willem

Bunker mentality: Is NNSA digging itself into a hole at Los Alamos?

By Greg Mello | 26 May 2010

Article Highlights

• The estimated cost of a new nuclear facility for the purpose of boosting U.S. plutonium pit production capacity has increased tenfold, re-opening questions about mission need and the specific project under design.
• After seven years and hundreds of millions of dollars, there is still no preliminary design, budget-quality cost estimate, or construction schedule for the new facility; fundamental design issues remain unresolved.
• Despite these uncertainties, and without a preliminary design, the administration hopes to move forward with construction next year.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Congress are currently weighing whether--and at what pace and scale, and with what capabilities--to build two large production facilities for warhead components with a combined price tag in the range of $6-7 billion.1
While on the surface these plans appear settled, there has been no administration or congressional go-ahead to build either project, and none are warranted. Beneath the surface, significant unresolved issues concerning mission, urgency, scale, budget, and design remain.
Some of these issues are related to the word "capacity," as in a supposed "need" to augment or replace the production capability that exists--but what remains a mystery is what precise purpose this capacity serves, how great it should be, how it connects to existing facilities, and when it might be necessary. In the case of these two facilities, none of these questions has been satisfactorily answered.
The first of these projects, and the focus of this article, is the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF) to be built at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).2
The CMRR project is composed of two buildings, CMRR-NF being the second and by far the more expensive one, comprising 90 percent of the total estimated project cost. The first CMRR building, the Radiological Laboratory, Utility, and Office Building (RLUOB), is physically complete, and NNSA expects it to be ready for use by the end of fiscal year (FY) 2013. The CMRR project is located directly adjacent to LANL's main plutonium facility, PF-4.
The primary purpose of the CMRR project, and especially the CMRR-NF, is to increase LANL's installed capacity to make plutonium warhead cores ("pits"), while minimizing the use of existing facilities at LANL and elsewhere in the weapons complex.3
CMRR-NF is currently expected to cost about $3.4 billion.
The other project, the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) at the Y-12 site in Tennessee, would make uranium-containing thermonuclear "secondaries." UPF carries an even vaguer but generally comparable cost.
Uncertain, untallied costs. Costs for each project may grow. The price of CMRR-NF has already grown by roughly a factor of 10, raising renewed questions about the soundness of the business case for the project as a whole and the particular building being designed.
Neither the CMRR-NF nor the UPF budgets, respectively, include the capital costs for all the required new or refurbished support facilities, or the expenses related to operating the buildings or related programs.
Focusing now on the CMRR exclusively, large-scale plutonium pit production may require--in addition to a few hundred million dollars in related capital projects already requested--replacement or augmentation of other major LANL facilities in projects not yet requested by NNSA.4
In documents submitted to the Senate this month as part of the New START ratification package, the administration projects $16 billion in new warhead spending over this decade. The attempt to build CMRR-NF and UPF, and to do so simultaneously, is a major part--roughly 40 percent--of this proposed additional spending. Most of the rest is needed for a proposed Obama administration increase in the pace and intensity of warhead life-extension and upgrade programs.
Not ready for prime time. CMRR-NF construction (including excavation, initial sub-foundation, site utilities, and concrete batch plant) could begin as early as next fiscal year; this is from one to three years before NNSA can complete a baseline for the project, which includes a careful cost estimate, preliminary design, and construction schedule.
NNSA currently anticipates replacing a 50-foot-thick horizon of unconsolidated volcanic ash beneath the site with a 125-foot-deep, slab of "lean concrete"--225,000 cubic yards of it--before completing preliminary building design.
CMRR-NF is a highly complex and utterly unique project. Preliminary design has taken seven years so far and isn't done. The U.S. has not successfully built a plutonium facility since 1978, when PF-4 opened its doors. An attempt to do so at Rocky Flats in the mid-1980s failed spectacularly. Despite all this, despite NNSA's poor project management record, and despite what appears to be a lack of convincing mission need (discussed below), CMRR-NF is being managed as a concurrent design-build project.
Under that approach, between one-half and $1 billion will have been spent on the project before preliminary design, cost estimates, and schedules have been completed.
NNSA currently projects CMRR-NF completion in FY 2022--this is 11 years later than originally projected. Given NNSA's history, the history and difficulty of this particular project, and future uncertainties we can only guess at, this date must be considered tentative.
The administration is currently requesting $225 million for the CMRR project as a whole for next year (FY 2011), a dramatic increase from this year's $97 million. Perhaps one-fourth of this sum would go toward outfitting RLUOB.
Pyrrhic design. The 270,000-square-foot CMRR-NF would add only 22,500-square-feet of additional plutonium processing and lab space to LANL's existing 59,600-square-feet of comparable space in PF-4, a 38 percent increase.
The new labs would comprise just 8 percent of the CMRR-NF floor area. Most of the building would be occupied by utilities, ventilation, safety equipment, and by the heavy structure itself.
A 6-metric-ton vault (roughly tripling LANL's present plutonium capacity), some miscellaneous programmatic space, and room for handling and cleaning out explosion containment vessels5 bring the total programmatic space in CMRR-NF up to just 14 percent of the total floor area. If built, CMRR-NF would be a highly inefficient building in this sense.
The current cost of CMRR-NF lab space works out to $151,000 per square foot, or $1,049 per square inch. PF-4 cost $75 million to build in 1978 ($213 million in 2009 construction dollars). Thus, in constant dollars, CMRR-NF lab space would cost 42 times as much as LANL's existing plutonium labs did, assuming costs do not increase further.
Did a New Mexico Senator's enthusiasm suppress more careful analysis? Over the past seven years, congressional discussion of CMRR-NF has waxed and waned. Senate appropriators, guided by then-Sen. Pete Domenici from New Mexico from the beginning of the project through his retirement in January 2009, have strongly favored the project. The Armed Services committees have generally favored the project as well; although in 2009, $50 million, about half the year's authorized spending, was fenced off pending provisional resolution of seismic and safety design issues between NNSA and the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, which later occurred.
House appropriators attempted to halt or delay the CMRR project for its first five years, insisting on first having a new Nuclear Posture Review, stockpile plan, and overall infrastructure plan. The first of these plans was released in April, but detailed 10-year stockpile and infrastructure plans have not yet been submitted to Congress. There has never been a business case or detailed mission analysis for CMRR-NF, and these 10-year plans are unlikely to contain any. Congress is supportive of infrastructure modernization overall. Yet at the same time there is a new and growing unease, especially in the Senate, about the fiscal and management practicality of NNSA's grand ambitions for the coming decade. These plans include three aggressive warhead modernization initiatives (more of them, and more aggressive, than were planned in President Bush's final years), the two big new factories, and other projects.
If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. For the past few years, the CMRR-NF project has struggled to adequately respond to "new" seismic and safety issues. Actually, these issues were appreciated by NNSA senior management from the beginning of the project to some degree, but they were not officially accepted as applicable. LANL is underlain by a fault system that has produced three earthquakes measuring 6.5 to 7.0 on the Richter scale in the last 11,000 years.
These "new" seismic issues, along with requirements for so-called safety-class ventilation equipment that was also not initially accepted by LANL, have dramatically increased CMRR costs and are not yet fully resolved.
These seismic issues--paired with NNSA's intent to construct a deeply-buried building, the bottom of which would be in or near a thick layer of unconsolidated volcanic ash--significantly complicate construction logistics, safety, and security. More than 20,000 heavy trucks may need to enter LANL just to deliver the concrete ingredients for this building.
Alternatives would be available if the mission weren't so absurd. Despite its name, CMRR is not a "replacement" for LANL's old Chemistry and Metallurgy Research (CMR) building. It is quite a different building, with significantly different and generally expanded capabilities, especially as regards pit production. And it is now known that at least one wing of the CMR building could be retained.
LANL has considerable latent pit production capacity, with or without CMRR-NF. NNSA's commonly-communicated production capacity--which has varied over an order of magnitude--is not based on physical limitations but rather on administrative and managerial decisions that are flexible to varying degrees with respect to changes in national policy.
But why make pits at all? Aside from the many potent reasons to steadily diminish a reliance on nuclear weapons and to decrease our stockpile size and investments, there is already a surfeit of backup pits (or backup warheads containing pits) for each delivery system. All these pits will last for many decades to come, far longer than today's planning horizons. The capability to make pits in considerable quantities is already present today and can be preserved indefinitely in LANL's existing facilities, where pit production currently occupies only about 30 percent of the total processing space.
Although there would be no rational reason to do it, production capacity could be expanded without CMRR-NF, for example, by allocating additional space and equipment to pit production in PF-4, adding work shifts, increasing management focus, conducting some of the preliminary or ancillary work needed in other facilities, setting up additional production lines in other plutonium facilities--or by implementing all of these.
There is no shortage of space to make pits, either at LANL or nationwide--assuming there were any need to make them, which there isn't. Were CMRR-NF in place, the above steps and others would increase production capacity to an even more absurd level. The policies and variables affecting pit production capacity have simply never been meaningfully discussed in the open literature by NNSA or LANL.
CMRR-NF's extremely high space costs--at least 10 times what they were at the beginning of the project--should trigger intensive examination of previously-rejected alternatives, which would require greater mission clarity as well.
With or without CMRR-NF, pit production is difficult, dangerous, and expensive. To successfully do it would require, at a minimum, a truly convincing national need. There isn't one, and there won't be one until long past the foreseeable future--assuming science matters. Spending billions of dollars on an unneeded bunker with excellent plumbing and ventilation won't create a need for new pits, however much some seem to be pining for it.
Every aspect of the CMRR-NF project, from the mission itself to the practicality of the building design, should be questioned far more deeply than Congress has done to date. For once, genuine and balanced security in all its aspects--and not just spending a lot of money to aggrandize the physics labs--should be the goal.

1 All costs are taken from the Department of Energy (DOE) congressional budget justifications, available under "products and services" at http://www.cfo.doe.gov/index.htm.  There are no direct links.
2 For more background see http://www.lasg.org/CMRR/open_page.htm.
3 Although CMRR-NF would have other uses, facilitating prompt large-scale pit production is the primary mission driver.
4 For example, Building 0066 in TA-3, the Sigma Complex, is in poor condition and did not meet seismic requirements even in 1997. Most pit components do not contain plutonium and were produced in that building, up to the late 1990s and may still. Reliable sources inform us, and both logic and NNSA site planning documents suggest, that NNSA maintains a prioritized draft list of additional infrastructure requirements for which funding has not yet been requested. For a list of requested capital projects at LANL related to increased pit production as of two years ago, see http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/the-us-nuclear-weapons-complex-pushing-a-new-production-capability.
5 These vessels, which contain explosions involving plutonium isotopes, are to help certify new pits under a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty regime.  For historical information about this program at LANL see http://www.lasg.org/technical/subcritical-trident.htm.