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 Monday show.
The anti-nuke coalition this week 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 keeping old uranium infrastructure operational through the 2050s. The NNSA, in its own filings, said it has done all the environmental reviews necessary to build UPF.
If U.S. District Judge Pamela Reeves opts not to issue a summary judgment based on briefings filed so far, 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.
