Public interest groups are ready to sue the Department of Energy and its semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration over what they claim is insufficient review of plans for expanded plutonium pit production in South Carolina and New Mexico.
The coalition claims the government failed to adequately review plans to “vastly ramp up production” of nuclear bomb cores at the DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, according to a press release Wednesday by the South Carolina Environmental Law Project. The firm represents the coalition that includes groups such as Savannah River Site Watch and Nuclear Watch New Mexico, among others.
The groups intend to file suit within 60 days unless DOE and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) agree to a programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) under the National Environmental Policy Act, Leslie S. Lenhardt, an attorney with the South Carolina Environmental Law Project, said in a Tuesday letter to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm and NNSA officials.
The coalition received a March 22 letter from NNSA General Counsel Timothy Fischer saying “NNSA has no plans to revisit its review of plutonium pit production,” Lenhardt said in the Tuesday letter. The coalition said a detailed environmental review is especially merited given President Joe Biden’s Jan. 27 executive order saying federal agencies should make “environmental justice” a priority for disadvantaged communities traditionally “overburdened by pollution,” according to the letter.
In the March letter from Fischer, the NNSA attorney said “your clients submitted comments during four different National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) comment periods regarding NNSA’s pit mission” between June 2019 and November 2020.
As for this week’s intent to sue, “NNSA does not comment on proposed or pending litigation,” a spokesperson for the nuclear agency via email Wednesday.
The South Carolina Environmental Law Project said it is aware that Fluor-led operations contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions has submitted a conceptual plan for a multibillion-dollar re-purposing of the now-cancelled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the DOE site in South Carolina. Likewise, the law firm wrote it is also aware that NNSA “is beginning to invest irretrievable resources into upgrading plutonium facilities” at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for expanded pit production. “Time is therefore of the essence that your agencies act,” Lenhardt wrote.
“The driver for the program is a novel warhead, called the W87-1, under development at California’s Livermore Lab that requires wholly new components including pits,” said Marylia Kelley, the director of California-based Tri-Valley CAREs. The W87-1 and a new Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent missile to carry the warhead “are both under scrutiny in Congress and within the Administration, which is just beginning its nuclear posture review,” Kelley added.
Commander Dubs Pit Production Vital Weapons Modernization Issue
In testimony Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Admiral Charles Richard, Commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, called new pit production the nation’s biggest modernization need for the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
The NNSA wants to set up the plutonium-pit factories and start casting nuclear-weapon cores for future intercontinental ballistic missile warheads at the Los Alamos facility in the mid-2020s, with Savannah River to follow by 2030.
The NNSA has said it hopes to make 80 pits per year by 2030. The federal government’s last big pit production facility at the Rocky Flats plant in Colorado closed in 1989 and since then Los Alamos has made no more than a handful in a given year, according to a 2020 analysis by the Arms Control Association.
U.S. adversaries are already making more than 80 pits per year, Richard said in his written testimony. “We cannot study our way out of this problem.”
“If we fail to recapitalize plutonium pit production now, we risk catastrophic failures given an infrastructure incapable of responding in a timely manner,” Richard said. “Bottom line, re-establishing plutonium pit production is a “must do” and is foundational to stockpile modernization,” the commander added.
