The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) stuck to its guns that it does not need to conduct further environmental reviews for its plan to perform bigger explosive tests nearby the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, a Thursday regulatory filing shows.
“[A]fter considering all comments received, DOE NNSA has determined that the Proposed Action does not constitute a major federal action significantly affecting the quality of the human environment,” the agency wrote in a finding of no significant impact dated Monday but published online Thursday.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a 65-year-old nuclear weapons research facility in Livermore, Calif., wants to increase the size of the non-nuclear explosive tests it is allowed to perform to a maximum of 1,000 pounds a day and 7,500 pounds a year from the current maximum of 100 pounds a day and 1,000 pounds a year.
The agency Meaning agency or lab?FIXED-dl issued a final environmental assessment about the proposed test Just one test? in January after publishing a draft last year and collecting comments from the public about the bigger explosive tests. The agency did not say in its latest filing when those tests will proceed.
The larger tests, like the current tests, will take place some 15 miles southwest of the lab near the town of Tracy, Calif., and support “research vital to stockpile stewardship program, counterterrorism and counterproliferation program missions,” according to NNSA’s environmental impact statement.
The NNSA uses conventional explosives to simulate the effect of a nuclear explosion on small amounts of materials. A properly modeled explosion will affect material at the core of an explosion in a similar way to a nuclear detonation, which the lab says eliminates the need for an actual nuclear explosive test.
The agency also needs larger explosives to simulate an expanding array of potential terrorist weapons, ranging from the sophisticated to the primitive, according to the draft assessment.
Since the 1992 U.S. suspension of explosive nuclear weapons tests, the Department of Energy has assessed the potency of the U.S. deterrent through a combination of of non-nuclear explosives tests, plutonium chemistry tests, high-energy physics experiments, and surveillance of existing weapons.
