Days after the Department of Energy (DOE) gave the go-ahead to start building key parts of a $6.5 billion facility to process uranium for U.S. defense programs, a federal judge ordered a venue change in a lawsuit aimed at stopping the plant’s construction.
Three environmental groups and four individuals filed suit in July 2017 in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, claiming DOE violated federal laws by changing the design for the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) to include three smaller buildings instead of one large building, then failing to a produce environmental reviews for the updated design. The alleged corner-cutting imperiled the health and safety of communities near the facility, and posed a risk to national security, the groups said.
The Energy Department denied it had to conduct additional environmental reviews and further said the lawsuit should be argued in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee: the district geographically closest to the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., where UPF will be built.
On March 23, two days after DOE signed off on construction on UPF’s three main buildings, a federal judge agreed and ordered the lawsuit moved to the Tennessee district.
In his order, District Judge Dabney Friedrich said the lawsuit is “primarily local in nature,” and that DOE’s decision to modernize the UPF design did not rise to the level of a national security threat — particularly because the update originated with local DOE officials at Y-12, and not from agency headquarters in Washington.
Bechtel National is building the UPF under a subcontract to Consolidated Nuclear Security, management and operations contractor at Y-12. Bechtel is the lead partner on the prime contractor.
The environmental groups behind the lawsuit — the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, and the Natural Resources Defense Council — maintain DOE should not build the facility until the agency produces a supplemental environmental impact statement or a site-wide environmental impact statement about the three UPF buildings. Such reviews can take years to produce and require public comment.
