The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) last week finalized environmental paperwork that completes a court-ordered re-review of earthquake risks at the Uranium Processing Facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn. — but environmental groups with a live lawsuit over the plan are complaining that the agency’s second look was not adequate.
The finalized supplement analysis, published July 15, affirms that, even with 2014 seismic data published after the initial environmental impact statement for the Y-12 National Security Complex facility hit the street in 2011, “the potential impacts associated with an earthquake accident at Y-12 would not be significantly different” than those assessed nine years ago.
The NNSA published the draft supplement analysis of the under-construction uranium hub in April, on order from the U.S. District Court for Eastern Tennessee in a lawsuit filed by environmental groups in 2017.
The lawsuit remains on appeal in the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. The plaintiffs wanted the NNSA to perform an entirely new site-wide environmental impact statement because the agency changed the UPF’s design last decade from one large building to three smaller structures. The environmental groups appealed their case to keep a legal avenue open for stopping construction of UPF, after the trial judge declined to do that.
The Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, railed against the draft supplement analysis in late May, complaining in a statement that the “NNSA admits it does not yet understand the risks posed by the aging facilities,” and that “ in-depth studies will not be completed until the end of 2021.”
The UPF will replace the Cold War-era Building 9212 as the main manufacturing site for nuclear-weapon secondary stages.
In the final supplement analysis, the NNSA said it was working on a probabilistic seismic hazard evaluation for the whole Y-12 site, plus an assessment of the seismic risks to older uranium-handling buildings that will remain alongside the Uranium Processing Facility.
“That work is underway, with the updated [Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis] anticipated by the end of 2020 and the updated facility evaluations by the end of 2021,” the NNSA stated.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit — the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, and the Natural Resources Defense Council — argued the agency should have prepared a supplemental environmental impact statement after formalizing in 2016 a decision to split the manufacturing hub for weapons second stages into three buildings from one.
A supplemental environmental impact statement involves a mandatory public comment period and could conceivably take years to prepare, compared with months for a supplement analysis.
The NNSA has promised to finishing building the UPF by December 2025 and has kept construction going during the COVID-19 pandemic, albeit with staggered shifts, plus added physical distancing and hygiene requirements at the job site.
