The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has decided it will not further extend the public comment period for an environmental review of the planned pit production plant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Last month, at the request of constituents organized by the Santa Fe advocacy organization Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich (both D-N.M.) asked NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty to extend the public comment period to June 19 from May 8.
Gordon-Hagerty turned the lawmakers down last week, citing encroaching deadlines and the fact that her agency had already once lengthened the comment period, to May 8 from late April, in part because of the ongoing response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“But critical national security missions must move forward in spite of this difficult situation,” Gordon-Hagerty wrote in an April 30 letter to Udall, a copy of which Nuclear Watch New Mexico blasted out to the public by email. “We must press forward with this project in order to meet Department of Defense deliverables.”
Gordon-Hagerty also pointed out that, legally, the NNSA did not even have to arrange a public comment period for the draft supplement analysis of pit production at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and that Nuclear Watch New Mexico and other critics “were heavily involved in the development” of an earlier site-wide environmental impact statement for the lab that covered the mission. The NNSA has said it will consider comments it receives on the draft document while it writes the final analysis, publication of which was not scheduled at deadline.
In the draft supplement analysis, the NNSA essentially found that the existing 2008 Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement for the Continued Operation of Los Alamos National Laboratory for Plutonium Operations adequately addressed the environmental concerns about making war-reserve pits there.
The NNSA wants to make at least 80 plutonium nuclear-warhead cores per year by 2030 using an upgraded Plutonium Facility at Los Alamos and the planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility — a larger pit factory to be built from the remains of the partially completed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
Either facility will be able to hit at least 80 pits a year on its own, the NNSA has said in multiple environmental reviews published this year. The agency admits it will be challenged to hit its target throughput with just under a decade left to build the redundant pit complex and was pedal-to-the-metal at Los Alamos, which is supposed to start casting 10 war-reserve pits annually by 2024.
Since late March, however, the lab’s COVID-19 safety measures have some 75% of the Los Alamos workforce working from home, with some Plutonium Facility workers only slowly trickling back on-site late last month. It is one more snag NNSA will have to try to undo as it races against a deadline that multiple agency-funded assessments have said the NNSA is unlikely to meet.
The pits made at Los Alamos and Savannah River will initially be used for W87-1 style warheads intended for future Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent missiles: the silo-based replacement for the Air Force’s Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles. Some of the new missiles might first go into the ground, around 2030, with W87 warheads harvested from currently deployed Minuteman III missiles, the NNSA has said.
