Judge rules for antis in lawsuit over environmental study of plutonium pit production

The Department of Energy did not adequately study the environmental effects of producing nuclear-weapon cores in two states, a federal judge ruled Monday in a three year-old lawsuit.

But the judge in the case declined to halt construction of the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., as requested by the plaintiffs, a broad coalition of environmental groups.

Instead, Judge Mary Lewis gave the groups and the Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) two weeks to hash out a compromise: a “middle ground” between what the plaintiffs want and the NNSA’s preferred solution of letting construction continue while the agency performs a new environmental review.

Excluding weekends and federal holidays, that leaves Oct. 21 as the deadline for whatever compromise the environmentalists and the NNSA can come up with.

So far, the parties have shown no willingness to compromise.

In a joint filing in March, lawyers for the NNSA and the environmentalists said that “an amicable resolution of this dispute is unlikely.”

“We’re reviewing the Court’s ruling and will be consulting with the Department of Justice,” an NNSA spokesperson wrote Monday evening in an email to the Exchange Monitor. “At this point in the judicial process work on the program continues. Because the matter is ongoing, we have no further comment.”

The Savannah River pit plant is not scheduled to open until at least the early 2030s, NNSA has said. A smaller companion plant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was to start making pits this year and ramp up to 30 a year by 2028. Both plants would intuitively make cores for the first stages of W87-1 warheads, which are to top the Air Force’s planned silo-based Sentinel missiles some time next decade.

The plaintiffs in the suit include environmental watch group Savannah River Site Watch of South Carolina; Tom Clements, director of Savannah River Site Watch; The Gullah Geechee Sea Island Coalition, a group representing the interests of some descendants 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.