A trio of nuclear watchdogs on Thursday filed suit in federal court to force the Department of Energy to conduct a new environmental evaluation before building the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, claims the National Environmental Policy Act requires that a supplemental environmental impact statement be issued in the wake of the significant reconfiguration of the planned facility: from one large structure to multiple buildings, including some in use for decades at the nuclear weapons site.
Plaintiffs in the case are the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, plus four individuals who live near Y-12. The defendants are Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Frank Klotz, administrator of DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees Y-12 and UPF.
The Uranium Processing Facility will house will house enriched uranium processing operations in support of the nuclear deterrent. Design operations are expected to be 90 percent complete this fall, after which construction can begin. The NNSA has pledged to complete the plant by 2025 at a cost of no more than $6.5 billion.
In a press release announcing the lawsuit, the organizations lashed the “long tale of outrageous waste and mismanagement, false starts and re-dos” in planning the UPF, along with the NNSA and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) for his continued support for “this piece of prime nuclear pork for his home state.”
“[W]hen the NNSA made dramatic changes to the UPF, and admitted that it intends to continue to operate dangerous, already contaminated facilities for another twenty or thirty years, they ran afoul of the National Environmental Policy Act,” Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, said in the release.
An NNSA spokesperson said Friday the agency does not comment on ongoing litigation. Alexander’s office did not respond by deadline to the lawsuit.
The nuclear agency in 2011 issued a record of decision to proceed with a single-structure Uranium Processing Facility that would replace a number of aging plants at Y-12, the lawsuit says. That same year it issued a site-wide environmental impact statement for Y-12 that acknowledged the necessity of building new facilities that could withstand earthquakes and other natural phenomena, or updating existing structures to that same end.
The facility was initially estimated to cost about $1.1 billion, but subsequent projections from different government entities placed the cost as high as $19 billion. Costs were driven up, in part, by a number of design issues, including the 2012 finding that the facility as originally planned was not large enough to incorporate the necessary uranium processing equipment.
To reduce expenses, the DOE branch in 2014 changed tack in favor of a design that would involve building three smaller buildings and continuing to use some existing structures for uranium processing.
The NNSA has already rejected a 2016 petition from the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance and Nuclear Watch New Mexico for a new environmental impact statement for Y-12, the suit adds.
The plaintiffs are asking the court to find the defendants in breach of the National Environmental Policy Act and Administrative Procedure Act, and to direct them to produce a supplemental environmental impact statement or a site-wide environmental impact statement on the updated design for the UPF.
