Judge tells NNSA, environmentalists to figure out review of pit program before Christmas

The federal government and environmental groups have until Dec. 12 to figure out how to review the environmental effects of plutonium pit production without stopping development of a pit factory in South Carolina, a judge said Friday.

It was more than a month ago that Judge Mary Lewis ruled, in a lawsuit filed in 2021 by the environmental groups in the U.S. District Court for South Carolina, that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) skirted federal environmental law by starting development in two states of factories to produce pits, fissile first-stage nuclear weapon cores, without adequate environmental review. 

The environmentalists said their victory in court should require the NNSA to stop development of the larger pit plant, the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., while the agency does its environmental review. The NNSA said putting design and construction on hold could delay pit production at the site by five years.

Lewis ordered the parties to compromise, but the parties have said they have been unable to find the middle ground the court ordered them to find: a way to conduct a meaningful environmental review that neither holds up the pit factory nor becomes a post-facto rubber stamp for the facility.

On Friday, Lewis put down her foot, writing that the parties have another 30 days “to abide by [the court’s] September 30, 2024, mandatory, not aspirational, Order, and … fully resolve the question of an appropriate remedy and submit their joint proposal to the Court.”

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.