Repeated changes in the the National Nuclear Security Administration’s strategy for producing new plutonium pits, plus the agency’s admission in 2021 that it cannot make a legal production deadline, is grounds for forcing the government to conduct an extensive environmental review of its two planned pit factories and other sites, a coalition of environmental groups said this week in an amended lawsuit.
The amended suit is an attempt by the groups to strengthen their standing to sue the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which previously asked a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for South Carolina in Aiken to toss the case.
In the amended filing, the groups argued that NNSA’s plan to produce pits at two sites “is a substantial change from the Defendants’ long-standing approach of producing a limited number of pits at only one facility,” the plaintiffs wrote in Tuesday in their amended complaint, alleging the plan violates the National Environmental Protection Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.
Also, the plaintiffs wrote, the NNSA “failed to take the necessary ‘hard look’ at the programmatic decision to divide pit production across two facilities,” after disclosing in 2021 that the agency could not produce at least 80 pits a year by 2030, as Congress had ordered in National Defense Authorization Acts signed into law during the Donald Trump administration.
The NNSA had not replied to the amended filing as of Thursday afternoon.
Previously, the agency argued that environmental reviews dating back to 2008 had already covered the complaints the activist groups raised in 2021 and that Congress had in any case ordered the agency to produce pits beginning in the mid-2020s — a directive the executive branch cannot legally ignore.
The plaintiffs in the case are: Savannah River Site Watch of South Carolina; Tom Clements, director of Savannah River Site Watch; The Gullah Geechee Sea Island Coalition, representing the interests of some descendents of enslaved Africans dwelling on the lower Atlantic coast; Nuclear Watch New Mexico of Santa Fe, N.M.; and the Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, of Livermore, Calif.
The groups sued the NNSA in June 2021, some three years after the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency officially decided to manufacture new pits, fissure nuclear weapon cores, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
In the years since 2018, the agency completed a series of piecemeal environmental reviews that supplemented earlier, more comprehensive reviews at Los Alamos, Savannah River and other sites that would, or might, participate in a mission to manufacture new pits — something the DOE, and later the NNSA, has been largely unable to do since the Rocky Flats plant in Colorado closed in 1992 following allegations of serious environmental crimes there.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory was supposed to produce at least 30 pits annually by 2026 in the PF-4 Plutonium Facility, which the NNSA is overhauling and upgrading in hopes of boosting the plant’s pit output beyond the low single digits of which it was capable before. The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, to be built from the partially completed Mixed Oxide Facility, was supposed to produce at least 50 pits annually by 2030.
In the summer of 2021, the NNSA acknowledged that, due to unspecified difficulties identified in 2021 during the preliminary design review for the Savannah River Facility, the plant likely would not begin casting pits until as late as 2035.
