NNSA opposes antis’ amicus brief last week, says NEPA review conducted at LANL

The National Nuclear Security Administration, in asking a court to deny an activist’s amicus brief in an ongoing lawsuit, said it conducted a review of producing warhead cores in New Mexico. 

At the end of October, Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group in Albuquerque, N.M., filed a proposed amicus brief saying that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) should “revert to the single-site production strategy,” with the single site being Savannah River Site, to satisfy a federal judge’s order that the agency and another group of environmentalists find a way to analyze the effects of a two state plutonium pit complex without stopping progress of a planned pit plant in South Carolina. 

Mello wrote that NNSA’s various reviews of pit production under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews did not support plans to build pits at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. 

“The Proposed Amicus attempts to introduce a new NEPA claim by arguing that NNSA lacks preexisting, independent NEPA coverage for Los Alamos to produce thirty pits per year,” the federal government wrote in the court document published Nov. 13. The defendants added that these “factual and legal assertions” by the third party are “simply wrong.”

The defendants also said that NNSA is bound by law, the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization for Fiscal Year 2019, to produce 30 pits yearly at Los Alamos. “And even if there was no statute mandating annual pit production at Los Alamos, there is, contrary to the Proposed Amicus’ assertion, preexisting NEPA coverage authorizing pit production at that single site,” defendants said.

In September, NNSA lost a lawsuit against a group of five environmentalist plaintiffs, who argued that the agency had not properly studied the environmental effects of building pits in both New Mexico and South Carolina. 

After several extensions, the U.S. District Court of South Carolina has now given the parties until just before Christmas to find a “middle ground,” wherein the NNSA can complete the review without halting design or construction of the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, which is supposed to make at least 50 pits a year. 

Federal law requires NNSA to make 80 pts annually.