Comments on the National Nuclear Security Administrations final environmental impact statement for the plan to modernize the nuclear weapons complex are due by Nov. 24.
The process that at one time sought to consolidate various operations into a single center when it started more than two years ago seeks to reduce the size of and modernize the nuclear weapons complex.
The controversial part of the proposal includes a plan to build more plutonium pits at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The proposal calls for 20 new pits a year even though more than 12,000 pits are stored at Pantex.
The Department of Energy argues that new pits are needed even though the useful life of the current stockpile is at least 85 years because issues not currently identified could arise in the future that would reduce the reliability of the current pit stockpile, or problems might arise with other components that could affect the usability of the current plutonium pits.
As it stands, the preferred alternative would continue weapon assembly and dismantlement at Pantex, 17 miles northeast of Amarillo.
Other proposals for Pantex include consolidation of storage of strategic nuclear materials; nondestructive surveillance operations; production of high explosives for weapon triggers, including processing, testing, some high explosives experiments and machining; and by 2012, environmental testing of nuclear explosives.
One caveat to the process is that the next review of the nation’s nuclear weapons plan can start as early as next year with the start of the Obama administration.
Comments can be sent by e-mail to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

GRAPEVINE — Richard W. Fisher, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas , said on Nov. 4 that the best description of the financial crisis facing the world was not on the front page of today’s The Wall Street Journal. It was written by Washington Irving about 150 years ago.
Fisher said Irving’s “The Crayon Papers,” written about The Great Mississippi Bubble of 1719, is the most insightful description written about what the country has just been through.
Irving, perhaps best known for his “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” was said to have written “The Crayon Papers” under the pseudonym of Geoffrey Crayon, concerning the financial crash of 1837. The 19th-century author talked of the credit system expanding to full luxuriance with everybody trusting everybody.
Irving wrote, “A bad debt is a thing unheard of; the broad way to certain and sudden wealth lies plain and open; and men are tempted to dash forward boldly, from facility of borrowing.
“Promissory notes, interchanged between scheming individuals, are liberally discounted at the banks, which become so many mints to coin works into cash; and as the supply of words is inexhaustible, it may readily be supposed what a vast amount of promissory capital is soon in circulation. Every one now talks in thousands; nothing is heard but gigantic operations in trade; great purchases and sales of real property, and immense sums made at every transfer. All, to be sure, as yet exists in promise; but the believer in promises calculates the aggregate as solid capital, and falls back in amazement at the amount of public wealth, the ‘unexampled state of public prosperity.’”
Irving talked of speculation and bubbles rising.
“Speculation is the romance of trade,” he wrote.
But when the promissory capital begins to vanish into smoke, a panic succeeds, and the whole superstructure, built upon credit and reared by speculation, crumbles to the ground, leaving scarce a wreck behind, Irving wrote.
“I’m pretty confident that Washington Irving never heard of a subprime mortgage or Countrywide Financial or a credit default swap or of Lehman Brothers or of multisector collateralized debt obligation or AIG or of any of the modern financial innovation agents that have proven so vexing to credit markets,” Fisher said. “But Washington Irving understood booms, greed and tomfoolery and what happens when the ‘animal spirits’ of the market are allowed to run amok.”
Speaking to the Texas Cattle Feeders convention here this month, Fisher said he thinks the financial crisis will be resolved, but it will take time.
He said he thinks the Fed has put the right sprockets in place and he hopes the gear from the fiscal side of the equation, the U.S. Treasury, will begin to mesh.
Still, Fisher admitted that he sees no economic growth in 2009.
“None,” Fisher said. “It’s going to take a while. I wish I could give you a happier message than that.”
He said there are limits to what a central bank can do.
“Our efforts must be complemented by a fiscal policy and by initiatives undertaken by other regulators,” Fisher said.
It will take time for confidence to be restored, he said.
In Virgil’s epic poem “Aeneid,” Fisher said Aeneas is tested by all kinds of temptations and torment.
“One of the great tests of Aeneas comes when he attempts to cross the Tuscan Sea,” Fisher said.
Juno, the queen of the gods, asks Aeolus, the god of the winds, to whip up the mother of all storms to stop his fleet. Neptune, the god of the sea, rises up and saves Aeneas.
Neptune calms the heaving seas. He puts the clouds to rout and brings back the sun.
“If only it were so easy to turn around the economy,” Fisher says, “that is now geared to the downside with the kind of turbulent ferocity that seems to equal if not better the powerful tailwinds that drove both the United States economy and the rest of the world on its upward slope of growth.”
That growth was the product of exuberant markets running amok in pursuit of ever greater returns, he says.
But in Virgil’s poem, Fisher says, Aeneas puts into port with only seven warships saved from his entire fleet.
Unfortunately, Fisher says, there is no modern counterpart to Neptune .
“The task of restoring the credit markets, instilling confidence and righting our economy,” he says, “takes many hands.”
Fisher said the Federal Reserve has taken steps to calm the tempest, but it is now up to the fiscal authorities, the U.S. Treasury and Congress and the new president, Barack Obama.
“Despite the efforts of the Fed, the hope that comes with a new presidency,” Fisher said, “and what will hopefully be responsible and carefully calibrated fiscal initiatives for the Congress, I believe we have an epic challenge ahead of us. We are navigating the mother of all financial storms. We will certainly come out of it with a lesser number of ships than we entered it with.”
He said the country cannot and should not relieve imprudent decision makers who have brought ruin on themselves.
“We know that the reduced fleet will face many challenges before it reaches the safe harbor of prosperous economic growth,” Fisher said. “But this much I know: We have been here before and we have overcome our problems.”
One characteristic about America, he said, is that it is a nation of risk takers.
“Often we confront storms,” Fisher said, “of our own making. We falter. We get blown off course. We lose some of our ships. But we never give up. We are a resilient people. We always come roaring back, recovering from our setbacks. ... You don’t have to be irrationally exuberant to know that that is what makes America unique. And always will.”