Audubon’s Warbler, Willamette Valley, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Birdsongs have inspired poets and lovers, becoming one of the philosophical focal points in ancient Greece and Rome. They have also led to several long-ago debates about the relationship between birdsong and human language.

“A robust body of evidence accrued over approximately 100 years demonstrates striking analogies between birdsong and speech, both learned forms of vocalization,” states the Royal Society journal.

Some thinkers have argued that humans are the only rational animals since they have a language, unlike nonhuman animals. Yet bird communications through melodious songs sound very much like a language, casting doubts on these views. No nonhuman animals other than birds, specifically songbirds, display such fine musical articulation and use these communication skills among their species.

“Humans and songbirds share the key trait of vocal learning, manifested in speech and song, respectively. Striking analogies between these behaviors include that both are acquired during developmental critical periods when the brain’s ability for vocal learning peaks,” adds the Royal Society article.

The Philosophical View on Songbirds

Aristotle, a philosopher and scientist educated at Plato’s Academy, first systematically studied birds and all other known living creatures. In addition to his other works, he wrote the monumental History of Animals (the original title in Greek was the more modest Inquiries on Animals). It remained the authoritative source for Western zoology until the 16th century.

Aristotle asked the questions of what and why. He already knew, ages ago, that birds learn their songs. In History of Animals, he states:

“Of little birds, some sing a different note from the parent birds, if they have been removed from the nest and have heard other birds singing; and a mother-nightingale has been observed to give lessons in singing to a young bird, from which spectacle we might obviously infer that the song of the bird was not equally congenital with mere voice, but was something capable of modification and of improvement.”

In particular, parrots may be able to closely mimic the human voice due to the use of their tongue. According to popular opinion, in ancient Greece, parrots didn’t produce melodies but had a semi-human voice and could learn Greek. Aristotle didn’t buy it. According to him, only humans had logos[reason] and the ability to use language to communicate. What parrots did was simply mimicry. Fast-forward to the poignant story of “Humboldt’s talking parrot.”

In 1799, during his explorations along the Orinoco River, German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt “stayed with a local Indigenous Carib tribe near the isolated village of Maypures,” located deep in the Venezuelan jungle. The Indigenous inhabitants kept tame parrots in cages and taught them how to speak. But among them was one bird that “sounded unusual.” When Humboldt asked why, he learned that the parrot had belonged to a nearby enemy tribe who were driven from their home village and land. The few surviving members fled to a tiny islet perched between the river rapids. It was there where their culture and their lingo endured for a few more years until the last tribesman died. The only creature “who spoke their language” was the talking parrot.

Fortunately, Humboldt transcribed the parrot’s vocabulary phonetically in his journal. This helped rescue a portion of the vanished tribe’s language from extinction.

Today, some linguists accept this story as a metaphor for the vulnerability of languages, with one lost every 40 days. Still, skeptics wonder if the tale is accurate. Whatever the case may be, Humboldt himself reports in the second volume of his Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Year 1799-1804, published soon after his return to Europe, about his stay with a group of natives in an isolated village beside a waterfall on the Orinoco River:

“A tradition circulates among the Guahibos, that the warlike Atures [another tribe], pursued by the Caribs, escaped to the rocks that rise in the middle of the Great Cataracts; and there that nation, heretofore so numerous, became gradually extinct, as well as its language.”

This animal-supporting mindset has stood against the rise of Christianity, which held that all other beings were created to serve humans and their needs. Consequently, the Church favored the side that regarded animals as irrational. Therefore, Aristotle governed supreme in religious teachings, philosophy, and scholastic learning within universities until the arrival of the 16th century.

Despite the belief that animals were inferior to humans, people had their own ways. Songbirds were widely liked and were memorialized thanks to the great poets of the Middle Ages. Both the French Provencal troubadours and the German and Austrian Minnesingers cherished singing birds and, above all, nightingales. These are a few lines from Walter von der Vogelweide, who used a last name that means “of the bird meadow:”

Besides the forest in the vale
Tándaradéi,
Sweetly sang the nightingale.

According to legend, the poet left a will requesting that the birds at his tomb be fed daily.

Solitary Thrush, Roaring River Wilderness, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The Language of Animals

In the second half of the 18th century, the philosophical focus shifted from the age-old argument that nonhuman animals lacked reason to a serious study of animal language. German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder’s 1772 Treatise on the Origin of Language asserts that “these groans, these sounds, are language” through which the animals communicate. Even if nonhuman animals are not rational, they have, for example, the language of pain. For human and nonhuman beings, “there is a language…which is an immediate law of nature,” Herder adds.

Hein van den Berg, an assistant professor from the University of Amsterdam, published an excellent paper on these developments in 2022. He writes, “Herder affirmed that each animal species has a distinctive language.” And that especially includes songbirds.

In addition, Herder endorsed sympathy and empathy as qualities that may enable interspecies communications. Humans don’t understand what animals say, and animals do not comprehend human concepts and speech. But this can be surmounted by Einfühlung, slipping into the nonhuman being’s skin to understand how it feels. It is like “walking in someone’s shoes.” It is a word Herder invented. Perhaps birdsong is so beloved by humans because it enables this feeling to resonate instantly and naturally. A person usually reacts to a singing bird with spontaneous and joyful emotions.

Interestingly, Herder’s work on empathy almost certainly provides the foundation for the Seattle Aquarium’s empathy-themed programs. The aquarium fosters empathy for wildlife, develops teacher resources, offers empathy fellowships, operates an empathy café, conducts empathy workshops in Seattle and around the country, and holds biennial conferences.

Arthur Schopenhauer, frequently dubbed the philosopher of artists and pessimists, was one of the earliest supporters of animal rights. He was blunt about his views in his book The Basis of Morality:

“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.”

Hindu philosophies and Buddhism greatly influenced Schopenhauer, who respected and supported animals. He was also prescient, anticipating current conditions by writing, “The world is not a factory, and animals are not products for our use.”

While philosophers have emphasized birds and their songs, what did scientists, researchers, ornithologists, and regular bird lovers learn about birds’ origins?

Evolution of Birds: The Scientific Perspective

Amazingly, our beautiful birds started as not-so-handsome dinosaurs. The evidence shows that they emerged from theropod dinosaurs during the Late Jurassic period, some 150 million years ago. The Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin displays the most complete specimen of Archaeopteryx, regarded for more than a century as the oldest bird fossil from the transitional phase of evolution from dinosaur to bird. Resembling a raven, the fossil was unearthed in 1860. An additional 12 fossils, most with imprints of feathers, were discovered afterward. All of them came from the Solnhofen Limestone formation in Bavaria, Germany. In recent decades, however, a few different small and feathered dinosaurs were excavated in other locations. These may, likewise, have a role in the story of the evolution of birds.

Songbirds are a suborder of birds, specifically of perching birds called passerines or oscines. There are more than 4,000 species, all of which have a unique vocal organ: the syrinx.

The songbirds can execute various tasks and performances with their vocal organs. They use short, practical calls to communicate details about food or predators and long, learned, and practiced songs to find and seduce mates, defend territories, compete, and develop social bonds. Perhaps even more fascinating is that they all do it in their own way. For example, the males of the highly social Australian zebra finches do not sing to defend territory and do not perform to impress potential mates. They wait until they find their love partner and then serenade her, often daily and for years to come.

Songbirds are actively involved in learning, listening to, and practicing the complex creations we call songs. Birds of the same species use different dialects in various locations.

Peter Marler, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Davis, did groundbreaking work on how birds talk. He told the Sacramento Bee in 1997 that “[d]ialects [in birds] are so well marked that if you really know your white-crowned sparrows, you’ll know where you are in California.” Once Marler’s student, Fernando Nottebohm was already fascinated by birds as a boy growing up in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is Dorothea L. Leonhardt, a professor emeritus at The Rockefeller University. Nottebohm “discovered that adult canaries regenerate neurons from neural stem cells. … [and believes] doctors may one day be able to replace neurons in the human brain to offset the effects of disease, injury, or aging,” according to the Franklin Institute.

Scientists have also ascertained that songbirds hear their melodies differentlythan humans. People have dissimilar hearing capabilities and can’t discern the nuances and subtleties vital to birds. Many composers have used bird sounds, including Vivaldi in “The Four Seasons,” Handel in the aria “Sweet Bird” in L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, Beethoven in his “Symphony No. 3,” and in “Symphony No. 6,” in which you can hear a nightingale (played by the flute), a quail (oboe) and a cuckoo (clarinet). Nightingales can be heard in the compositions of Mendelssohn, Liszt, Grieg, Ravel, and various others.

Birds have, in fact, influenced our musical creativity since the times of the hunter-gatherers. “Birdsong has inspired musicians from Bob Marley to Mozart and perhaps as far back as the first hunter-gatherers who banged out a beat. And a growing body of research shows that human musicians’ affinity toward birdsong has a strong scientific basis,” states a 2023 New York Times article.

Birds have the habit of practicing their singing daily. Songbirds “require daily vocal exercise to first gain and subsequently maintain peak vocal muscle performance,” according to a December 2023 Nature article.

But that’s not all. Not only has the field of birdsong biology experienced rapid growth, but studies about vocal learning, neurobiological aspects, and theory of mind insights have expanded our knowledge. A 2020 article titled “Birds are Philosophy Professors” credits the capacity for flight and highlights the skill of gliding when birds are confronted by adverse conditions. “When faced with torrential wind, they fully acknowledge nature’s forces are stronger, and the best way to deal with it is to simply be in it. … Birds stop flapping their wings and they simply glide. This awareness is crucial because they would otherwise spend energy flapping that wouldn’t amount to any progress,” points out the article.

A quote by the Stoic Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius stresses the wisdom of such behavior: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Birds act accordingly. Resistance to the stronger forces of nature would waste energy, so they wait, gliding, until things improve.

Surprisingly, birds also can remember humans. The evidence for this is clear. For instance, species like robins, mockingbirds, and pigeons have “some of the most well-documented cases of facial recognition,” states Chirp Nature Center. Pigeons even react to facial expressions. Be kind, and they will recall. Chase them away, and they will not forget. Moreover, birds certainly remember dependable food and water sources and show up daily; suddenly, there they are, just stopping by to eat and drink.

Chestnut-sided Chickadee, Cape Disappointment, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

How Birdsongs Help Humans

But these beneficial factors are a two-way street. Humans also gain great psychological value from their interaction with songbirds. An article in Wild Bird Feeding Institute reports on a recent study by Emil Stobbe of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin that explores the mental health benefits of soothing bird melodies. Among them are stress reduction, mood enhancement, and connection to nature. “[F]or the first time, beneficial, medium-sized effects of birdsong soundscapes were demonstrated, reducing paranoia,” the study states.

Soldiers in the trenches of World War I knew this already. The poem “Dead Man’s Dump” gives voice to their feelings, stating that while “the air [was]… loud with death,” the soldiers gained resilience and kept their sanity by listening to the song of birds, counterbalancing the noisy chaos of war. Michael Guida wrote a lovely, powerful book called Listening to British Nature.

“According to one analysis, living in an area with 10 percent higher avian diversity rates increases life satisfaction 1.53 times more than a higher salary,” points out the Conservation magazine.

Another small book, A Short Philosophy of Birds—written by French ornithologist Philippe J. Dubois and Elise Rousseau, philosopher and author of several works on nature and animals—is a delightful gem overflowing with stories and details about birds and human life. The book also highlights the mortal danger birds are in. We don’t see this since it happens discreetly, but since 1970, a staggering 2.9 billion breeding adult birds have vanished across North America as of 2020.

The book reflects on the threat humans pose to the existence of birds:

“Birds hide away to die, so they say. And it’s true. Have you ever seen a dead swallow, except for one… hit by a car or flown into a pane of glass?”

Meanwhile, the philosophical association between birdsong and human language is still as relevant as in antiquity. A 2013 linguistic study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a 2014 genetic study at Duke University found that early humans may have acquired language by imitating birdsong and that identical genes are activated when learning to sing (birds) or talk (humans).

“If early humans developed their own language by imitating birdsong, it’s nothing short of incredible that this linguistic history was expressed in creation myths several hundred thousand years after the fact, from Africa to Kansas,” states a 2023 Patheos article.

The Hopi Tribe, a sovereign nation located in northeastern Arizona, emerged from the underworld with the help of a singing mockingbird who gave them the gift of language. According to the Osage of Kansas, “their ancestral souls were once without bodies until a redbird volunteered itself to make human children by transforming its wings into arms, its beak into a nose and by passing on the gift of language.” Birds are similarly key players in various creation myths worldwide.

The profound connection between birdsong and human language continues to captivate scientists, philosophers, and artists alike. From Aristotle’s early observations to modern linguistic and neurological studies, the parallels between avian and human communication remain striking. Birds not only inspire poetry and music but also challenge long-held beliefs about the exclusivity of human language and cognition. Their songs offer a sense of wonder, a bridge between species, and even psychological benefits to those who listen.

As we learn more about songbirds’ intelligence and emotional depth, we are reminded of our shared evolutionary past and the importance of preserving these creatures and their habitats. Whether through scientific research, philosophical inquiry, or personal appreciation, birdsongs continue to enrich human understanding of language, empathy, and the natural world.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Jonah Gas Field, Wyoming. Photo: Erik Molvar.

Yesterday morning, the White House announced its nomination to head the nation’s largest land-management agency: Kathleen Sgamma, perhaps the most notoriously slippery lobbyist of the famously dishonest oil industry. The Bureau of Land Management oversees 700 million acres of publicly-owned, federally-managed mineral deposits in the United States beneath both public lands and private property. Today, one of the industry’s most aggressive shills is awaiting Senate confirmation to be put in charge of these extensive fossil fuel deposits.

In oil and gas industry circles, the Independent Petroleum Association of the Mountain States (IPAMs), now known as the Western Energy Alliance, has long been viewed as a radical element that consistently stakes out the most anti-environmental positions. Kathleen Sgamma’s name started showing up on IPAMS documents in 2006, when she was co-author of several reports linking oil and gas production to nitric oxide and ozone pollution associated with Clean Air Act violation in Wyoming and Colorado. By 2010, Sgamma had become IPAMS’ chief lobbyist, given the title Director of Government Affairs.

In 2009, after natural gas production caused a spike in smog in Wyoming’s Upper Green River Valley that exceeded air quality standards, Sgamma complained that proposed ozone regulations under consideration by the state “would create undue burdens and complexities for industry.” In the winter of the following year, the smog in Pinedale, Wyoming exceeded the worst air pollution in Los Angeles, and local residents were warned to stay indoors to protect their health.

When Congress responded to increasing human fatalities from toxic fracking compounds used in oil and gas well completions with a bill in 2009 to regulate fracking chemicals, Sgamma characterized fracking as having an “exemplary safety record” and said that fracking compounds were 99.5% water and sand with the rest food-grade chemicals. Definitive science later exposed major health risks, undercutting Sgamma’s claims.

Sgamma’s industry lobbying has undermined sage grouse conservation. With the sage grouse population of the Jonah Field down to just 6 strutting birds by 2015, Sgamma touted her lobby group’s report arguing that the use of directional drilling had successfully avoided, minimized, and mitigated impacts to sage grouse. Environmentalists had famously urged the use of directional drilling in the Jonah Field, but industry representatives fought back, claiming it couldn’t be done. Despite a leaked report that showed that 54 directional wells had already been drilled in the Joanh Field using directional technology with considerable success, the Bureau of Land Management instead denied the directional requirement and instead authorized up to 128 surface wellpads per square mile, making the Jonah Field the West’s most destructive oil and gas project. Later, Sgamma was an enthusiastic proponent of the first Trump administration’s gutting of the rangewide sage grouse plan amendments, an effort later blocked by the courts.

Sgamma has been as slippery as an oil slick on climate issues. In 2016, Sgamma testified before Congress that “We do not need federal rules to tell us to capture methane, because it is the very product we’re working so hard to capture and sell.” The very next year, Sgamma was one of the industry’s leading cheerleaders for a new rule allowing the oil industry to waste natural gas by releasing it directly into the atmosphere or burning it at the wellhead, without even paying federal royalties on the valuable commodity. “We’re pleased that the proposed rule delaying the BLM venting and flaring rule has been released, Sgamma said in 2017. “It doesn’t make sense to have companies comply with a rule that will be substantially changed in the near future.” In the wake of a lawsuit by a group of concerned children seeking to establish a constitutional right to a climate capable of sustaining human life, Sgamma mocked the children as having unrealistic goals, and asserted that climate change and fossil fuels were not harming young people.

If the Senate confirms Kathleen Sgamma to be put in charge of the Bureau of Land Management then we will have a land management agency headed by a Big Oil lobbyist that sees what is best for the public land as maximizing the oil industry’s footprint on those lands.  “With that attachment to the land, we take public lands stewardship very seriously,” Sgamma testified before Congress in 2021. “We’re proud that oil and natural gas on federal lands is done sustainably and furthers the goals of environmental justice.” It would be laughable if it wasn’t so bonkers.

Eat your cornflakes and drink your fracking fluid, boys and girls, because drilling is good for you, and if Kathleen Sgamma is confirmed by the Senate, she’ll be ramming it down your throats.

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Wind turbines in the Columbia River Gorge. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Upon being sworn in as president. Donald Trump immediately declared an energy emergency. The proclamation, issued on January 20^th, states that “The energy and critical minerals (“energy”) identification, leasing, development, production, transportation, refining, and generation capacity of the  United States are all far too inadequate to meet our Nation’s needs.”

There was a requisite promise to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ that blatantly harkened back to a slogan from the 2008 presidential campaign. By no means was it the first time Trump reached for the past on energy. His 2016 campaign featured a loud promise to restore coal and coal-mining jobs. Of course, he did no such thing. Coal production in the U.S. continued to decline throughout his first term. During the pandemic in 2020 coal’s share of generation fell below 20 percent for the first time. Last year, solar panels and wind turbines produced more electricity in the U.S. than coal power plants for the first time. Coal production has been under 600 million short tons for years and won’t be increasing anytime soon.

The purported justification for the emergency, inadequate energy supply, is off kilter in that the Trump Administration is simultaneously seeking to stop offshore wind projects. The Biden administration had approved eleven offshore winds projects worth about 19 gigawatts of energy.

As far as oil and natural gas are concerned, the U.S. is already produces more than any other country on Earth. The Trump administration overturned Biden’s pause on new Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) export terminals, however that order didn’t affect terminals that had already been approved and/or under construction. LNG export capacity was already set to about double by 2027. It is unclear how much more capacity will be built even with the reversal of the Biden pause.

The price of oil has been stable for years. Biden spent much of 2022, in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine begging oil companies to increase production. They made it clear then that passing on dividends to shareholders was a higher priority. Investors having previously been burned by the price crash of 2014, weren’t in a rush to see prices drop too much. And that’s the point: fossil fuel companies are ultimately more interested in profit than drilling. For all the positivity oil companies have toward Trump, it has already been reported that without a good rise in prices, an outcome at complete odds with the anti-inflation sentiment currently dominating DC, production will not be picking up. Energy can’t be turned on and off like a faucet. It takes years for new investments to bring up oil and natural gas. It is unlikely Trump will see much from his emergency order.

The surest way to get people in the U.S. at each other’s throats is to make something ‘cultural.’ Energy as identity or ideology has always been an asinine concept (same with other things such as food, beer, cars). It has no real substance either. No state in the U.S. deploys more renewable energy than Texas. At some times of day renewables actually provide the bulk of Texas’ power. Since the Inflation Reduction Act passed, of the four states that have added the most solar power three of them are Texas, Florida, and Arizona. In general, the states with the largest amount of renewables include South Dakota, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Idaho. Trump’s order to pause wind farm projects only applies to public land or offshore. Most renewable energy is built on private land.

As of this writing at least, one area where Trump could have a destructive short-term effect is with tariffs. To take one example, New York State is investing billions in a clean energy transmission line from Quebec, the Champlain Hudson Power Express. It is due to be operational next year.  According to the Public Power Coalition, with Trump’s tariffs, New Yorkers will pay an additional $290 million a year for energy. Massachusetts governor Maura Healey estimates that that the tariffs would raise the cost of electricity for ratepayers there by some $100 million. This when, according to the organization Public Grids, some fifty-two million Americans already struggle to pay their energy bills.

The greater problem is not that the energy transition is off, it is that it isn’t happening fast enough. After being flat for decades, electricity demand is spiking in the U.S. due to a combination of electrifying transportation and AI data centers (perhaps DeepSeek’s AI model of using less juice can take some of the edge off AI’s power needs). The U.S. is currently building 20 to 40 gigawatts of renewables every year, but the number needs to get to 70 or 80 a year.

At this point, it is possible that we have developed the low-hanging fruit. According to a study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the country could require up to 10,000 new miles of transmission to switch to clean electricity by 2035. Last year, according to the American Clean Power Association, the country built 255 miles of new transmission line. Community opposition to large renewable projects is becoming more of a factor. The transition will have to include more energy sources including advanced geothermal (which uses fracking technology to reach geothermal deposits).

All this will require a huge increase in public investment. Trump being president for the next few years doesn’t change this a bit. While electricity gets most of the everyday focus, electricity makes up only slightly over 20 percent of world’s total final energy consumption. Vast sectors from concrete to steel need to be decarbonized. The world’s first industrial plant to make green steel is on track to begin production in Boden, Sweden in 2026, with a target of producing 2.5 million metric tons per year and eventually expanding to 4.5 million metric tons.

There is no reason similar efforts shouldn’t be happening in the U.S. Such efforts can be tied to industrial policy and union jobs. Trump’s buffoonish ideas about energy are a hindrance for now but his moment will come and go. This is no time to give up the fight.

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Savanagh River Site. Photo: DOE.

Last week U.S. District Judge Mary Lewis Geiger, South Carolina, faulted the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Agency for ignoring the National Environmental Protection Act and rushing plans to fabricate plutonium pit bombs at Savannah River Site, near Aiken, South Carolina.

Newly designed plutonium pits will serve as “triggers” for the next generation of nuclear warheads mounted atop Sentinel, the next generation of intercontinental ballistic missile, and for new submarine-launched nuclear weapons. Combined, these projects comprise major components in the trillion-dollar “modernization” of the U.S.  strategic deterrence force.

Plaintiffs including Savannah River Site Watch, South Carolina Environmental Law Project Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition, Nuclear Watch New Mexico and Tri-Valley CAREs forced NNSA to halt construction on many phases of its plutonium pit facility near Aiken, SC, to hold public scoping meetings, solicit public comments, and produce a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement within thirty months.

Plaintiffs successfully argued that the plutonium pit modernization project was complex, involving diverse entities, was spread over wide geographical regions and therefore, by definition, required a “programmatic environmental impact statement, PEIS.

The proposed plutonium pit facility at Savannah River Site will reconstruct a massive 500-room partially completely abandoned building designed for the Mixed Oxide Plant. The spectacularly failed MOX plant would have processed old plutonium pits from de-commissioned US nuclear weapons per a nuclear weapons agreement with the Russians in 2000. Poor management and engineering revisions multiplied costs exceeding $7 billion when DOE finally terminated the MOX project in 2019. DOE recently paid the State of South Carolina an extra $600 million fine for failure to remove 10 tons of plutonium delivered to the MOX plant and stored at SRS. Ironically SRS is importing a different 10 tons of plutonium pits from the PANTEX pit storage site in Texas to manufacture new pits.

NNSA’s plan for plutonium pit production at Savannah River Site involves complex coordination between Los Alamos, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad NM, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in CA and the Kansas City National Security Campus, and therefor requires a NEPA “programmatic environmental impact statement”. NNSA refused repeated calls to perform the PEIS, which resulted in the successful lawsuit agreed last week.

NNSA has yet to satisfy Government Accounting Office best practice guidelines for the SRS pit project. GAO’s repeated calls for NNSA to create quality Integrated Master Schedules and Life Cycle Cost Estimates for its plutonium pit modernization program remain unfulfilled. These plans and guidelines establish best practices for building an efficient cost-effective project, something MOX consistently ignored, leading to its disastrous failure. Congress subsequently ordered NNSA meet these GAO parameters by July 2025.

Congress had mandated in 2019 that Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico manufacture 80 plutonium pits per year by 2030.  Because LANL is a research facility, it has not produced any plutonium pits since 2011, and never at scale. It was unprepared to fulfill this Congressional mandate, authored by Senator John McCain. In response, NNSA then divided the plutonium pit project in two: Savannah River Site would produce 50 pits per year by 2030, and LANL 30 pits. SRS has never manufactured plutonium pits, though it did produce 10 tons of plutonium for pit fabrication at Rocky Flats, CO beginning in 1957. Thirty million gallons of highly radioactive wastes from that project, more than 200 million curies* of radiation, remain stored on- site at SRS, making it one of the most radioactive Superfund sites in the U.S.

Rocky Flats had produced one to two thousand plutonium pits per year for decades until it was closed in 1989. After whistleblower leaks, (see Jon Lipsky, James Stone) the FBI and EPA raided Rocky Flats discovering gross fraud and egregious violations of environmental regulations by contractor, Rockwell International. Rocky Flats was closed and will remain a superfund site into the far distant future.

Parts of Los Alamos National Lab, wedged on a tabletop mesa, comprises a superfund site with residual plutonium still found around the site and in surrounding canyons from operations and waste dumping begun in the 1940’s “Oppenheimer years”.

DOE recently signed a consent decree with the State of New Mexico to assume greater responsibility for the clean-up of waste deposit wells and trenches that threaten nearby towns like White Rock, the San Ildefonso Pueblo and the Rio Grande River with radiological contamination. DOE paid New Mexico a $420,000 fine for mishandling hazardous wastes is 2024.

LANL itself has experienced numerous and serious safety accidents, including a plutonium fire, flooding, glove box contamination and a plutonium “criticality” accident, in recent years. The most recent 2023 safety report for LANL, operated by Triad LLC, showed improvement in its safety operations, though in that same year LANL was fined $420,000 by New Mexico for improper handling of hazardous materials.

Plutonium, Pu, is a man-made metallic element. It is highly toxic, highly radioactive, pyrophoric, (spontaneously ignites on contact with air) and fissionable. It is extremely challenging to produce, purify, mill, melt, mold, weld, control and store. All these processes have taken place at sites across the U.S. since the 1940’s and are now catalogued by DOE as “legacy hazardous waste sites”.

Because plutonium ignites on contact with air, it must be handled in “glove boxes”, self-contained hermetically sealed boxed filled with inert gases. Impervious rubber sleeves extend into the box, and workers slip their arms into these sleeves, then manipulate the plutonium through different phases of pit production. Any nicks or cracks in the rubber gloves can and have resulted in plutonium leaks, and serious illnesses.

Glove boxes and gloves for the plutonium pit project, in example, are already is short supply, demonstrating how integral and integrated every aspect of the plutonium pits program is, and how poor planning could disrupt the program; the basic tenant of the lawsuit against NNSA.

Training a skilled glove box worker at LANL can take four years. A shortage of skilled workers at LANL poses a regular challenge, one that will intensify as LANL workers will also train unskilled SRS workers. A shortage of workers at WIPP in Carlsbad NM has been a chronic problem despite significant wage increases from DOE.

Historically, sites involved with the production, refining, milling or fabrication of plutonium or plutonium pits for nuclear weapons have left a voluminous legacy of radionuclide pollution. Radioactive wastes generated in weapons production beginning with the 1940’s Manhattan Project, by statute, are destined for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, WIPP, in Carlsbad, New Mexico. Because plutonium has a half life of 24,000 years and remains lethal for much longer, plutonium waste products trucked over millions of highway miles to WIPP are stored in vaults excavated into salt domes 2000 feet underground. While WIPP is the sole repository for defense department transuranic wastes, the Government Accounting Office cautioned that WIPP may not have the capacity to accept all the plutonium pit wastes generated at LALN and SRS. Timely removal of plutonium waste from SRS and LANL is crucial for uninterrupted pit production.

A fire in WIPP’s salt dome closed the facility for 3 years in 2014.  A fire at LANL closed its operation for 3 years in 2013.

Both SRS and LANL will recycle surplus plutonium pits from the strategic reserve at PANTEX near Amarillo, TX. Currently 4000 reserve pits and 10,000 surplus pits waiting disposal are stored at PANTEX. Re-engineered pits from SRS and LANL will be returned to PANTEX for final assembly into W87-1 and W 88 nuclear warheads.

The rate of deterioration of plutonium pits, 30 or more years old, has concerned and motivated lawmakers to legislate a complete replacement of all 3,600 deployed and reserve nuclear warheads. Independent scientific groups like JASON and the Livermore National Lab have estimated that plutonium pits maintain their viability for 100 or even 150 years. Hardware within the nuclear warhead corrodes much more quickly than the pits themselves, focusing doubt on the race to replace the pits themselves.

The programmatic environmental statement ordered by federal Judge Geiger may resolve many questions posed by the rush to produce new plutonium pits. The pits produced at SRS and LANL will trigger new W87-1 nuclear warheads. What need is there for a new warhead when the old W87-0 has the same safety features? Why are SRS and LANL adopting an aggressive production schedule when the new Sentinel ICBM deliver systems is way over budget and at least a decade away from deployment?  Why does the production of new plutonium pits take priority over cleaning up the hazardous legacy of previous pit production? Has any plutonium production site ever not become a hazardous waste site?    Will NNSA slow pit production to engineer safety improvements instead of placing workers in risky dangerous situations? Do we really want to spend a trillion dollars and start a new nuclear arms race?

Note.

* A curie, Ci, is a measure of radiation per second, named after Marie and Pierre Curie. Exposure to even a few curies can be fatal.

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