The National Nuclear Security Administration plans to prepare an environmental impact statement for plutonium pit production at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., according to a notice filed this week in the Federal Register.
The public will have 45 days to comment on the agency’s proposed environmental impact statement (EIS) regarding its contentious plan to repurpose the partially built, now-canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility into a factory that could annually produce 50 fissile warhead cores by 2030. NNSA said it would not release the draft environmental impact statement until 2020. A record of decision would not follow until at least 30 days after the Environmental Protection Agency posts a notice of availability of a final EIS for Savannah River pits.
In addition to a site-specific environmental impact statement for the planned Savannah River Site facility, NNSA plans to prepare two other pit-related environmental documents.
The first is “site specific documentation” about expanding existing, small-scale pit facilities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Mexico. That will come in the form of a supplement analysis to a 2008 site-specific EIS on Los Alamos pit production, the agency said in its Federal Register notice.
The second is a supplement analysis to the agency’s Final Complex Transformation Supplemental Programmatic EIS. The Final Complex Transformation Supplemental Programmatic EIS started life in 2006 as an NNSA plan to examine the environmental affects of right-sizing a nuclear weapons production complex that had rapidly shrunk after the end of the Cold War. The agency has added to the Final Complex EIS over the last decade-plus and now plans to supplement the document yet again in an attempt to capture the environmental effects of making pits in two states instead of one, as previously planned.
Environmental impact statements examine the hazards of proposed actions by the federal government. Such documents are also an agency’s way of showing how planned activities will comply with the National Environmental Protection Act.
The National Nuclear Security Administration wants to make at least 80 pits a year by 2030 at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Savannah River. NNSA- and DOD-chartered reports dating to 2018 at least have cast doubt on whether the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency can reach that goal with the projected budgets.
The Democrat-controlled House wants the National Nuclear Security Administration to tap the brakes on the plutonium program and focus on making 30 a year at Los Alamos by 2026.
Appropriations and authorizations bills debated this week in the lower chamber proposed limiting funding for pit production in 2020 as a way to force the National Nuclear Security Administration to focus on Los Alamos pit production.
The White House sought some $710 million for pit-plant work in Los Alamos and Savannah River. The House Appropriations and Armed Services committees would provide only $410 million or so for 2020. The Senate Armed Services Committee has authorized the requested spending, but the upper chamber’s Appropriations Committee had yet to write a 2020 NNSA spending bill at deadline Friday.
