Environmental groups that sued to stop construction of the Department of Energy’s new uranium hub in Tennessee want a federal judge to cut to the chase and rule in their favor, court papers filed this week show.
The anti-nuke coalition on Monday asked for a summary judgment in the nearly 3-year-old lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Tennessee. The groups stuck to their argument, initially filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, that DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) violated federal law in 2016 by changing the design for the now-under-construction Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) to three buildings from one larger building.
The plaintiffs in the suit are the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The plaintiffs say the Department of Energy unofficially decided to change the UPF’s design in 2012, only about a year after deciding to modernize the aging uranium-handling infrastructure at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge. The groups said they petitioned the NNSA to perform more detailed environmental reviews of the three-building UPF in 2014, a couple years before the agency made the design change official in an amended record of decision published in 2016.
The groups are particularly concerned that the redesigned facility might be compromised by seismic events, and that abandoning the old one-building approach to consolidate all the site’s uranium work means operating some old uranium infrastructure — which is even more vulnerable to earthquakes — through the 2050s.
The NNSA had not filed a response to the groups’ motion for summary judgement at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. In previous court filings, the agency said it has done all the environmental reviews necessary to build UPF.
However, NNSA’s parent agency, the Department of Energy, is working with the congressionally chartered nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to study seismic data published by the U.S. Geological Survey in 2014. That report, the environmental groups complained in their suit, was released after the NNSA started planning to split UPF into three buildings and keep some old uranium infrastructure running longer than once planned.
The Department of Energy’s seismic study should be finished in 2019, but “it is not expected that this new seismic information will increase the accident consequences or risks associated with the continued operation of existing facilities,” the NNSA said in a supplemental analysis of UPF published in September.
If U.S. District Judge Pamela Reeves opts not to issue a summary judgment based on briefings filed so far in the Tennessee lawsuit, the case is scheduled to go to trial on Nov. 5, according to the court.
The Uranium Processing Facility will shape uranium for use in nuclear weapons and naval reactors. Congress required the NNSA to complete the plant by 2025 at a cost of no more than $6.5 billion. Under those conditions, the agency authorized primary construction to begin in March 2018. Congress followed suit in September 2018 with a $700 million UPF appropriation for fiscal 2019.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a friend of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and neighboring Y-12, is the chair of the Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee that writes the first drafts of the NNSA’s annual budget bill in the upper chamber.
The UPF will replace the World War II-era 9212 complex. Bechtel National is building the facility under a subcontract to Y-12 site operations contractor Consolidated Nuclear Security. Bechtel is also the lead partner on the prime. Last year, in its annual budget request to Congress, the NNSA forecast that 2019 would be the peak spending year for UPF construction.
The NNSA tweeted a picture of UPF construction progress on Tuesday, sharing a photograph of the facility’s centerpiece, the Main Process Building.
It’s #TransformationTuesday, and we’re looking at the heart of #BuildingUPF, the 252,000 square foot Main Process Building (MPB). Crews have installed rebar in the MPB and now start work on pouring concrete. pic.twitter.com/9jQqZNIXrD
— Y-12 NSC (@y12nsc) February 19, 2019
The NNSA expects to spend some $2.9 billion from 2016 to 2025 on the Main Process Building alone, according to the agency’s 2019 budget request. The building, which will house most of the UPF’s hands-on defense uranium work, was expected to chew up most of the project’s 2019 construction budget at just under $580 million, according to the budget request.
The detailed bill report appended to Congress’ 2019 NNSA spending bill did not break out the construction budgets for the three main UPF subprojects, which besides the Main Process Building are: the Salvage and Accountability Building that will house waste-handling space and equipment to recover usable uranium from waste generated in the Main Process Building; and the Process Support Facilities that will contain water, chilled air, and specialty chemicals and gases needed for uranium work in the Main Process Building.
