China and Russia are or have modernized their weapons. A central issue with nuclear weapons is that they decay over time, their nuclear yield falls, inexorably,

China and Russia are or have modernized their weapons. A central issue with nuclear weapons is that they decay over time, their nuclear yield falls, inexorably, year after year. The US needs to build a new generation of warheads in order to remain a credible nuclear power, which is critical for a stable world order in the nuclear age. There are some interesting issues though: prior generations of nuclear weapons production involved massive release of highly toxic byproducts. In addition to better control and containment, one would reason that processes with less toxic byproducts would also be desirable. So how do you purify the plutonium cleanly? How do you cut and weld the plutonium to manufacture the parts, cleanly? And how much of this can you tolerate and still produce weapons-grade materials, and weapons-grade parts? Given some modifications in design to accommodate the environmental restrictions, you need to model the reactions to make sure the new designs work. But even if you model everything, you need to validate the models. So you have to test something. So you need to produce high energy plasma for primary and secondary designers to validate their models and their designs. The NIF is a weapons lab instrument for studying fusion reactions. The current hollraum is plutonium, designed to irradiate a deuterium-tritium target. If that doesn't sound like a primary acting on a secondary, I don't know what does. All that is just a high-level counterargument. The real argument though is quite straight forward: LLNL (home of NIF) is a weapons lab. They are not in the nuclear power business.