A draft site-wide environmental impact statement for the Los Alamos National Laboratory should appear in the summer or fall of 2023, the National Nuclear Security Administration said this week during public scoping meetings about the extensive environmental review of the nuclear weapons lab.
The semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapons agency took public comment on Tuesday and Wednesday. The next opportunity for public comment will be after the agency releases the draft review, according to slides prepared for the virtual meetings.
The scoping meetings were intended to give the public a chance to tell the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) what to include in its environmental review of the lab, which over the next few years will begin a new, multi-decade mission to manufacture plutonium pits: the fissile cores of nuclear weapon first stages.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory is turning its PF-4 Plutonium Facility into a factory to make at least 30 pits annually by fiscal year 2026. Manufacturing pits, initially for W87-1 warheads for use on Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missiles, will become one of the lab’s biggest missions.
Aside from new equipment for PF-4, the pit mission requires a substantial expansion of support facilities at the lab and construction of housing for the production workforce the NNSA hopes to bring to Los Alamos.
Following pressure from local environmental activists, the NNSA in August announced the new site-wide environmental impact statement. The review will examine the effects of the pit mission, and other missions, at the lab over 15 years.
Some activists had hoped for a complete environmental review of the entire pit program, which will also include a larger factory planned for the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The NNSA has so far not agreed to that, citing prior reviews that the agency said considered the environmental effects of a multi-state pit complex.
Meanwhile, NNSA said it is holding only virtual public scoping meetings for the planned environmental impact statement “to prevent the spread of COVID-19.”
Los Alamos county on Wednesday had a community transmission level of medium, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unless a county has high levels of community transmission the NNSA does not require employees of, or visitors to, government facilities in the area to wear masks. The agency, like the rest of the government, has also stopped collecting COVID-19 vaccine status information from employees, contractors and visitors to government properties.
