Nukes to NM

According to our old buddy Ian Hoffman*, the federal nukemeisters have begun shipping Lawrence Livermore National Laborator's stockpile of plutonium to Los Alamos :

After insisting that doubling Livermore's maximum plutonium storage was necessary for national security, the nuclear weapons arm of the U.S. Department of Energy has done an about-face and ordered the removal of all but tiny amounts of weapons fuels from Livermore by 2014.

The reversal was driven partly by soaring security costs. Keeping paramilitary forcesarmed and on full-time watch against potential terrorist attacks has been the fastest-growing expense in the nuclear weapons budget since 2001, amounting to $100 million per year at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory alone.

Congress has pressured three energy secretaries to limit the number of weapons sites with plutonium and highly enriched uranium, and watchdog groups have argued that keeping bomb ingredients in multiple locations is too risky, especially at Livermore, the nation's largest store of raw weapons materials close to major U.S. cities.

*former Journal Los Alamos beat reporter