The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will have to prepare at least one more environmental review of earthquake hazards to the Uranium Processing Facility under construction at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., a federal judge tuled Tuesday.
A spokesperson for the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapon agency said “construction of UPF will proceed,” following the court ruling.
The court’s decision, pending a potential appeal, caps a lawsuit filed in 2016 by three anti-nuclear groups that argued the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapon agency violated the National Environmental Protection Act by rushing required environmental reviews of the next-generation hub for processing uranium for use in nuclear weapons.
The NNSA did catch a break in the case, however, as Chief Judge Pamela Reeves for the U.S. District Court in Eastern Tennessee also decided Tuesday the agency does not have to prepare a supplemental environmental impact statement to support a 2016 decision to split the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) into three main buildings instead of constructing one large building.
But the NNSA will “at minimum” have to write “a supplement analysis—that includes an unbounded accident analysis of earthquake consequences at the Y-12 site,” Reeves wrote. The analysis should consider data published in 2014 by the U.S. Geological Survey, which said then the threat of earthquakes in the seismically active Oak Ridge area is greater than previously believed.
The NNSA tried to address those concerns in a pair of supplement analyses produced in 2016 and 2018, in which the federal government essentially said the original 2011 site-wide environmental impact statement for UPF adequately accounted for the danger of earthquakes in east Tennessee.
“[W]ith the court agreeing that there was inadequate consideration of new information concerning seismic hazards at Y-12, NNSA will review the seismic analysis while conferring with the Department of Justice on the possibility of appeal,” the NNSA spokesperson wrote Wednesday.
The Uranium Processing Facility, which the NNSA plans to complete by December 2025 at a cost of no more than $6.5 billion, will process uranium into forms suitable for use in the secondary stages of nuclear weapons, along with the secondaries themselves.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, and the Natural Resources Defense Council: a group of anti-nuclear citizen watchdogs that sued the NNSA and DOE in 2016, seeking to send the government back to the drawing board to write a supplemental environmental impact statement that would have required the agency to solicit public comment about its plan to split UPF into three buildings.
A supplement analysis, which does not necessarily include public comments, can take less time to complete than an environmental impact statement. In a separate lawsuit involving weapon-usable plutonium stored at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, a federal judge in December 2017 ordered the NNSA to remove 1 metric ton of that fissile material from the Aiken, S.C., by Jan. 1, 2020, but not until the agency reviewed the possible environmental consequences of doing so.
A little more than six months later, in July 2018, the NNSA completed a supplement analysis that concluded it could safely move the metric ton of plutonium out of the Palmetto State by the court-ordered deadline.
In the Oak Ridge case, however, Reeves did not set any deadline for NNSA to complete at least a supplemental analysis on seismic hazards at Y-12.
