A Tennessee environmental group is not planning to sue the National Nuclear Security Administration again over the Uranium Processing Facility, despite reserving the right to do so in a recent court filing.
“[W]e have no plans at the current time to file additional litigation,” Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, wrote in an email this week to Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. “[W]e did consider it, but the fact is we won the first lawsuit and it made no difference to [National Nuclear Security Administration].”
On Feb. 12, Hutchison’s group, with co-plaintiffs Nuclear Watch New Mexico and the Natural Resources Defense Council, formally withdrew a motion asking a U.S. District Court judge to halt construction of the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The groups said they could revisit the issue “in a new lawsuit.”
But for now, the filing spells the end of the groups’ bid to construe Judge Pamela Reeves’ 2019 order for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to revisit the environmental impact of UPF on east Tennessee the region as an order to halt construction on the next-generation manufacturing facility for nuclear-weapon secondary stages.
The almost three year-old lawsuit that began in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia before bouncing into the Tennessee Eastern District Court and then to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Reeves ruled in 2019 that the NNSA should have incorporated earthquake data provided in 2014 by the Department of Interior’s U.S. Geological Survey into UPF’s environmental reviews. The data showed that eastern Tennessee was more seismically after than thought when the NNSA published its initial environmental review in 2011.
In his email Tuesday, Hutchison rehashed the arguments he and his colleagues made in court: that by deciding in 2016 to split UPF into three buildings instead of one as earlier planned, the agency would continue relying on several Cold War-vintage facilities to process uranium for weapons.
[T]he bottom line is they are determined to continue enriched uranium operations for thirty more years in dangerous facilities which they acknowledge fail to meet environmental and safety standards,” Hutchison said.
The NNSA hopes to finish building UPF by December 2025 at a cost of no more than $6.5 billion. Bechtel National is building UPF under a subcontract to Consolidated Nuclear Security, the outgoing prime for Y-12 and the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. The NNSA could announce the next prime contractor for the sites in March or April, with a transition effective Oct. 1. Consolidated Nuclear Security will stay on site to build UPF after the transition.
