Environmentalist groups from California, New Mexico and South Carolina are fighting to keep their lawsuit to slow plutonium-pit production from being thrown out of court and claimed this week that Congress’ mandate to produce pits does not prevent further environmental review of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s planned pit complex.
“[T]his lawsuit involves more than a mere increase in the number of pits and the production at two locations contemporaneously,” the defendants wrote in a Tuesday filing. “additional concerns about storage capacity and safety issues at the Savannah River Site (“SRS”) and the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory [sic] (“LANL”), as well as the impacts to sites in California and other locations throughout the country, were glossed over by the Federal Defendants and the clear environmental risk of these aspects of the plan have never been evaluated.”
The plaintiffs 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 descendants of some 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 filed suit in June, alleging that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) needed to complete a longer environmental review of its planned pit production complex at the Los Alamos NAtional Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The NNSA, in a Sept. 27 motion that was their first substantial filing in the case, said that the lawsuit should be thrown out because the court lacked jurisdiction to hear it.
“[T]he Decision to produce more pits was made by Congress, not an agency,” the NNSA wrote in its motion to dismiss the suit, adding that “the agency lacks discretion when implementing a congressional mandate.”
Some lawmakers want Congress to repeal the mandate, part of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, which requires NNSA sites be able to produce at least 10 war-reserve plutonium pits annually in fiscal year 2024, at least 20 pits annually by 2025, at least 30 a year by 2026 and at least 80 annually by 2030. NNSA has said it will likely miss the 2030 goal because the planned Savannah River Plutonium Production Facility will take longer than expected to start up.
At deadline Wednesday, the court had not ruled on the NNSA’s motion to dismiss.
