To avoid delaying construction of a plutonium pit factory in South Carolina and still comply with a judicial order in an antinuclear coalition’s lawsuit, the federal government could cancel a companion pit plant in New Mexico, an antinuclear activist said Wednesday.
In September, the National Nuclear Security Administration lost a lawsuit against a group of five antinuclear plaintiffs who argued that the agency had not fully studied the environmental effects of building plutonium pits, the fissile cores of nuclear weapon first stages, in two states.
The U.S. District Court for South Carolina has given the parties until Nov. 12, according to the latest court document made public Thursday, to find some “middle ground” for the agency to complete that review without halting construction of the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF).
“We believe there is a ‘middle ground’ available to the Court and the Parties in this case,” Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group in Albuquerque, wrote in a proposed amicus brief filed Wednesday. “NNSA should revert to the single-site production strategy.”
That single site, Mello said in his 18-page declaration, could be the Savannah River Site.
In his 18-page declaration, Mello grinds a well-ground ax, writing that NNSA’s existing body of environmental reviews for pit production, dating to 2008, do not support or contemplate the agency’s current plans to manufacture warhead cores at both the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site.
If the NNSA reverts to a single-site pit manufactury, it “would be neither necessary nor equitable to halt SRPPF activities,” Mello wrote in his declaration.
Meanwhile, the Los Alamos pit plant on Oct. 1 produced its first war-usable pit for a W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile warhead, the NNSA said. In February at the ExchangeMonitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit, lab staff said they would start making more W87-1 pits as soon as the first was built.
The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility could cost as much as $25 billion to build and might take until 2035 to complete, the NNSA said in its 2025 budget request, published in March. In legal filings in the case, the NNSA has said that stopping construction at Savannah River could delay the pit program by five years.
The plaintiffs in the South Carolina 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.
