The National Nuclear Security Administration on Thursday formalized a decision to make at least 50 nuclear-weapon cores a year at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., and environmental groups immediately raised the prospects of a lawsuit if the agency does not review the plan again.
The semi-autonomous Department of Energy agency made its long-expected move official in a record of decision published Thursday in the federal register. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plans to turn the cancelled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility into the Savannah River Plutonium Production Facility (SRPPF) which will then cast between 50 and 80 pits a year.
In a statement Thursday morning, the oft-allied groups Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Santa Few, N.M., Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, Livermore, Calif., and Savannah River Site Watch, Columbia, S.C., claimed that the NNSA legally has to do a separate programmatic environmental impact statement for the entire nationwide pit mission, and that failure to do so “could result in a lawsuit.”
The NNSA says its plan does consider the nationwide ramifications of SRPPF, and on Thursday, the agency formally asserted as much by also amending a 2008 decision about pit production that was based on a multi-state environmental review performed about a decade before the NNSA decided to cancel the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility and turn it into a pit factory. The agency says its current plan is not all that different, from an environmental perspective.
Democrats in Congress have tried to slow the expansion of the NNSA’s pit-production complex — and if Joe Biden wins the still-under-review presidential election, they may gain the means to do more than try — but for now, federal law requires the agency to make at least 80 pits a year by 2030. NNSA plans to start casting pits at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2024, ramp up to 30 a year there in 2026, then add 50 a year at SRPPF in 2030. NNSA has admitted it will be tough to hit that throughput on time at SRPPF.
Making their number would be tougher still if the NNSA had to begin a new programmatic environmental impact statement about the two-state pit plan, which is what the environmental coalition that spoke out Thursday morning want.
