The Department of Energy and anti-nuclear activists seeking to stop construction of the Uranium Processing Facility could find themselves in an appeals court in January to argue about a lower court’s September decision that forced a partial federal redo of the facilty’s environmental review.
The public won’t know until 2020 exactly what DOE’s issue is with Judge Pamela Reeves’ Sept. 24 decision in U.S. District Court for Eastern Tennessee. The agency must file its appellant brief by Jan. 15, while the environmental groups that sued in 2016 to halt work on the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) have until Feb. 24 to file their appellee brief, according to a notice filed Monday with the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
In a bit of preemptive legal maneuvering, the Energy Department and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) docketed their appeal on Nov. 26 after announcng their intent to appeal on Nov. 22.
Reeves ordered the NNSA to incorporate federal earthquake hazard data into the Uranium Processing Facility’s environmental documentation. However, the judge did not explicitly tell the NNSA to stop building the facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex — so the agency did not.
That riled the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance and its fellow plaintiffs, which in October petitioned Reeves to enforce what they viewed as her decision that the NNSA had to stop building UPF while it revised environmental studies from 2016 and 2018 that do not, as yet, include the Interior Department’s earthquake data.
“We believe we have an excellent chance of prevailing, especially since they conceded our main arguments by failing to refute them at all,” Ralph Hutchinson, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, wrote in an email on Tuesday.
According to the 2014 Interior report, eastern Tennessee is more seismically hazardous than thought when the NNSA published its original environmental impact statement on UPF in 2011.
The Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance last week filed a notice with the District Court that DOE’s appeal would not necessarily prevent Reeves from ordering a halt to construction of the Uranium Processing Facility.
The NNSA said in October that it could take “months” to complete a new supplement analysis for UPF. The agency has committed to completing the plant by 2025 at a cost of no more than $6.5 billion. The facility will purify uranium for use in the secondary stages of nuclear warheads and manufacture those secondary stages.
