The Department of Energy can annually produce 80 nuclear weapon cores in two states without beginning an all-new environmental review of the full program, according to an already-contested review of the issue released on Wednesday.
Instead, DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) concluded that the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) requires the agency only to perform site-specific environmental impact statements (EIS) for proposed pit facilities at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The agency drew that conclusion in its draft supplemental analysis of the Complex Transformation Supplemental Programmatic EIS, a 2008 document that also evaluated pit production. The document formalizes prior NNSA statements that it can proceed with the pit mission after a limited environmental review.
A site-specific EIS examines environmental ramifications at a single site, such as Savannah River or Los Alamos. Such a review can take less time to complete than a programmatic EIS, which studies the environmental consequences of every action at every location that affects a program such as the NNSA’s planned pit complex.
Critics say the pit project is being rushed and that the NNSA needs to create NEPA documentation on the risks and feasibility of the mission.
“It appears that DOE is following its proven recipe for failure, which Congress must act to prevent by not allowing ‘plutonium sustainment’ funds to be spent on the SRS Plutonium Bomb Plant,” said Tom Clements, director of environmental watchdog SRS Watch, in a prepared statement.
The draft analysis was officially released on Wednesday, just one day before an NNSA public forum on the pit mission at Savannah River. The four-hour event in North Augusta, S.C., about 25 miles from the Savannah River Site, included a presentation from agency officials and an opportunity for public comment on pit production.
The mission would generate the fissile cores for nuclear warheads. By 2030, the NNSA wants to produce 80 pits a year: 50 at SRS and another 30 at Los Alamos. Preparing the sites to reach that level of production could cost $9 billion over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
A NNSA-chartered study in 2018 estimated the two-state pit complex would cost about $30 billion to build and operate over several decades.
The detailed analysis released this week recaps about 20 other NEPA documents, from 1980 to 2018, that are all in some way related to the proposed pit mission. These documents range from environmental impact statements dealing with surplus plutonium to analyses that support continued operations of DOE facilities. For example, a 1996 site-wide EIS evaluated the feasibility of expanding the Pantex Plant in Texas for the storage of nuclear-weapon components.
The NNSA said these existing NEPA documents cover its pit proposal, meaning there would be no need to double-down with more analysis.
“NNSA has preliminarily determined that the proposed action does not constitute a substantial change from actions analyzed previously and there are no significant new circumstances or information relevant to environmental concerns,” the agency said in Wednesday’s document.
Instead of crafting new documents, the agency plans to modify the 11-year-old Complex Transformation Supplemental Programmatic EIS. That document considered pit production at five possible sites: Savannah River, Los Alamos, the Pantex Plant, the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee, and the Nevada National Security Site.
Since the 2008 review already considers pit production, the NNSA says minor tweaks to the EIS, along with site-specific environmental impact statements for Savannah River and Los Alamos, should cover any questions on risks and safety concerns on how it would build facilities and generate plutonium pits for the Department of Defense.
Modifying the 2008 document will include a proposal for pit production at a plant converted from the SRS Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF). The facility was supposed to convert weapon-usable plutonium into commercial nuclear fuel. But it was never completed after the NNSA spent about $5 billion over 11 years before officially termination construction in October 2018.
Supporters and opponents of pit production at Savannah River attended the Thursday meeting.
Backers say the mission is vital to the nation’s defense program and that it will bring much-needed jobs to the 310-square-mile Savannah River Site.
Clements and other detractors argue that the Energy Department is trying to hurry the mission along without considering the consequences of producing plutonium at a nuclear facility that already houses millions of gallons of unwanted radioactive waste.
The North Augusta and Aiken Chambers of Commerce voiced their support for the pit production mission, as did the Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness (CNTA), which works with the site, local schools, and other stakeholders to influence job opportunities and provide information on current SRS missions.
CNTA Executive Director Jim Marra, who worked at the Savannah River National Laboratory for more than 25 years, said SRS is the safest place in the DOE complex for the pit mission. And for those who believe the program will generate unwanted waste, Marra said the site has a long history of treating various waste streams.
“SRS has been the leader in the DOE complex in environmental remediation and waste management,” Marra said in comments prepared for the meeting. “No one can argue with the successes that SRS has achieved in waste treatment and processing.”
The South Carolina chapter of the Sierra Club and the League of Women Voters of South Carolina spoke against the pit mission.
South Carolina Sierra Club Chairman Bob Guild said one of his main concerns is that pit production could pull resources from the most important mission at SRS: ridding the site and the state of that liquid waste.
“We fundamentally oppose the production of nuclear weapons,” Guild said Thursday. “And at SRS, there’s an overlapping concern of what impact more waste will have on the environment.”
