Timeless spring; "no significant impact" of key pit facility; end the RCLC

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August 10, 2018

Dear friends on our New Mexico "short list" --

• "Atomic summer" is over; "nuclear winter" still averted; a "timeless spring" of resistance and constructive action continues
  

With yesterday's anniversary of the horrific and cruel Nagasaki bombing and last night's informal potluck in Albuquerque, our 2018 "Atomic Summer" has come to a close.

We were generally pleased with the summer's events, or most of them. Like all events, they represented considerable effort, investment, and opportunity cost.

As previously mentioned the Taos public meeting was quite successful (full audio, reportage), as were Monday's Hiroshima Day (August 6) events in Los Alamos. 

We had an excellent lineup of speakers and very good audience participation in Los Alamos. Some 40-50 people were in attendance, mostly activists, many of whom traveled long distances to be there. For all those who made the trek up the Hill -- thank you very much. We must now build on this and present our collective opposition to LANL's main mission, which has done so much economic and political harm to New Mexico.

(The environmental harm is still building, for example through the strategic silence of our elected Democrats about the horrific Holtec proposal for southern NM. Some of the most powerful lawmakers who fund the nuclear labs, like Senator Feinstein, want a site to send their states' spent nuclear fuel. Hence the relative lack of opposition from the NM delegation to this worst of all possible nuclear waste plans.) 

Earlier Monday afternoon, eleven of us met with Los Alamos County Manager Harry Burgess, who was gracious enough to meet and field questions without prior notice. Given the sordid Regional Coalition of LANL Communities (RCLC) situation (see below), that human contact was not wasted time.

We aim to make this past Monday's discussion the beginning of a new era of activism against nuclear weapons in New Mexico based on the need for dramatically different priorities, without which our country, civilization, and species may not survive. We don't have much time. The crisis isn't just coming soon. It's here. There is no new normal -- it's downhill from here, until and unless we can stop it. The New York Times even seems to get it -- finally.

The Los Alamos Monitor editors decided to combine coverage of Monday's meeting with that of last Saturday's Pace e Bene protest, which does make editorial sense for them despite the resulting sacrifice of depth.

• Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) for changing the Radiological Laboratory, Utility, and Office Building (RLUOB) into a Nuclear Laboratory, Utility, and Office Building (NLUOB)

This was expected but a blow nonetheless. This "bait-and-switch" caper (as a senior staff member in one federal agency described it to us) is central to establishing industrial pit production in Los Alamos. It is not necessary for any other purpose. The original plan for RLUOB was for a light analytical chemistry (AC) facility; by greatly increasing the amount of plutonium that can be handled in the building the number of samples can be increased to handle higher production rates, and some of the operations now taking place in LANL's main plutonium facility (PF-4) can be moved there, making room for more production equipment in that heavier (Hazard Category II) facility.

I sent these comments to a few reporters yesterday:

Quite a number of good comments [see Appendix C in the Final Environment Assessment] were provided by citizens and organizations. NNSA's responses are far less impressive.

NNSA is stonewalling. NNSA's ideas about national security apparently do not include protecting the environment, obviously a trend across the whole of this administration. NNSA has abandoned true National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) compliance in favor of a post-hoc "CYA" substitute. The Pentagon is calling most of the shots now, and proper environmental review is a low priority. True independent civilian management of the nation's nuclear weapons complex is being eroded. 

NNSA admits its proposed modification is central to a planned multibillion-dollar expansion of plutonium operations at LANL, yet its environmental analysis deals just with a small part of this. It is to be the most expensive building in the history of New Mexico and will handle substances fatal at microgram levels, yet NNSA does not consider the project a major federal action with significant effects on the environment. The project is tightly interwoven with major decisions affecting sites in South Carolina, Texas, and southern New Mexico across multiple DOE programs, yet no programmatic environmental impact statement is planned.

NNSA and LANL are lying. That is the essence of what is wrong with this process. They say one thing and do another. They will say anything in order to do what they want to do. It is a bad faith effort. Citizens mistake what is going on for the actions of a democratic form of government.

Back in the 1940s the AEC's Herbert Marks, later the AEC's first general counsel, remarked after visiting Los Alamos that the Manhattan Project had 'a peculiar sovereignty, one which could bring about the end, peacefully or violently, all other sovereignties.'

Here in the US, it has.

That is all we have time to say about this right now, but suffice it to say this is not the end of the story.

• Now is the time: please help us close down the RCLC

Today's episode of "As the World (of LANL corruption) Turns" is a blockbuster: Report: Los Alamos County possibly tried to hide misspending (Daniel Chacon, Aug. 9, Santa Fe New Mexican).

Be sure and read the comments. Mine:

This is great reporting -- a real breath of fresh air, in a situation that has been sordid ever since RCLC was created.

The problem is not the specifics what RCLC does or does not do. Ask yourself, what is the purpose of this entity, which was set up from the beginning with a highly problematic structure (not strictly government, not strictly nonprofit, not privately corporate), apparently in order to sidestep laws that were designed to avoid the very problems we see. Why was it created like that? What was its original purpose? To lobby, and if so on behalf of what? Certainly that is part of the issue. RCLC lobbies on behalf of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), which is run by private contractors. And that's a big problem: using taxpayer funds to lobby on behalf of private contractors. Will there be an investigation of this at the federal level? We'll see.

But it's more than that. The purpose of the RCLC was also, as Mayor Coss said at the very first RCLC meeting [we were there], to create an institution to carry the idea that the interests of Los Alamos County, LANL, and northern New Mexico local governments and tribes, were identical. That these separate, civil communities and sovereign tribes were all "LANL communities," as Coss put it. (Of course he later knuckled under big-time, becoming RCLC chair.)

This was an entirely new political idea, and it needed a new organization to embody it, which had to be funded somehow. How better than from the public trough? Direct contractor funding (as opposed to indirect, via GRT) would look bad, and would be illegal. Representatives from the various communities that would create legitimacy for the new idea and its institutional carrier had to be taken care of, provided with treats like trips to Washington, expensive meals with drinks, and generally made to feel important. The questionable expenses in question were not ancillary to the mission of the organization. They were essential and -- as the very confused (at a minimum) Ms. Romero has said in so many words -- they were normal. There was an "understanding." (Unfortunately for the reputations of all involved, there was also a paper trail. Perhaps some of them will be less corrupt in the future.) Why would cities, counties, and tribes contribute tens of thousands to join the RCLC, plus their leaders' valuable time and attention, if they and their representatives didn't get something tangible in return, such as the opportunity to meet with power brokers in Washington and a sense of belonging to something exclusive and prestigious? That requires some trappings! Bring on the fancy wine and whiskey and ball game tickets!

Over the years, congressional appropriations and authorization committee staff have expressed to me how unimpressed (in one case) and appalled (in another) they are by the way RCLC representatives have engaged with them in Washington. "What are all these public servants doing in Washington, on the public's dime?", one professional staff member said to me recently. "Do they imagine that they are somehow going to influence us?" That person describes the RCLC's antics as a form of "endemic corruption" in New Mexico. Administration officials have said as much to me as well. Other staff have spoken to me about the sense of entitlement these representatives bring to their offices -- as if they were somehow deserving of extra funding, just because they wanted it. As far as cleanup goes, the message from one professional staff member was, "If they want more money they must have a solid legal cleanup requirement [like many other sites have]."

It's time to lay this organization down. Its raison d'etre is corrupt. Even if this is denied its execution has been (and will remain, for foundational, permanent reasons) ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst.

What is most important for we activists to take on board is that the RCLC cannot be reformed. It is the existence of the organization that is the problem. From Kay Matthews' excellent La Jicarita article about our July 30 Taos meeting (thank you again, Kay -- and also again to Robin Collier, our host):

As I’ve been reporting in La Jicarita, activists in Taos and some of the other member groups have been calling for better accountability of the RCLC mission: lobbying strictly for cleanup funding, not nuclear weapons development; conflict of interest issues; and public participation opportunities. A group of Taos citizens has drawn up a list of demands for their representative on the RCLC that will hopefully be presented at the next Coalition meeting. But this question came up at the meeting with the Mellos: Why is there a Coalition in the first place if it’s unclear that it adheres to its mission of advocating for cleanup. Greg, who often travels to Washington D.C. to meet with government officials to discuss issues that pertain to LANL, said that he was told these kinds of lobbying groups were dismissed as unnecessary to the budgeting process. Most of those attending the meeting expressed the opinion that the RCLC should be dissolved—too much money was being funneled from the member communities into its coffers.

It can be difficult to for all of us to grasp how deeply a colonial mindset has penetrated into our consciousness out here in the wild west. Trying to reform the RCLC is just that. It is a waste of precious activist time -- and one that plays straight into the hands of the nuclear weapons industry.

Perhaps I did not make myself 100% clear in Taos. The RCLC would not be improved if it focused on "cleanup" only. It needs to be disbanded, period.

Neither do we think lobbying for "cleanup" contractor dollars at LANL something that is worth doing at all by citizens, especially by "antinuclear" activists. Why are antinuclear activists lobbying for Fluor, Bechtel, or any of these companies? They have plenty of their own lobbyists.

Is it for "cleanup" jobs? Look at the record. There have been essentially no new cleanup jobs created by these lobbying efforts, but opposition to LANL and its mission -- there is just one main mission at LANL -- has been considerably weakened and distracted. 

A few years ago, the Department of Energy (DOE) issued massive grants to some nuclear activist groups in New Mexico and elsewhere (via the New Mexico Community Foundation, further corruption of which was a "benefit" as well) for the purpose of promoting "public participation" in DOE cleanup. It was a classic exercise in redirection or misdirection.

Only a small minority of "cleanup" funds at LANL go to actual cleanup anyway. First, unless something has radically changed, these funds are taxed internally and used to fund LANL overhead as a whole, most of which is for the weapons program because that's the biggest program at LANL.

Second, and again unless this has changed recently, some of these funds end up managing brand-new wastes -- another weapons program subsidy.

Third, poor management and massive inefficiency eat up most of the rest. I have required, designed, and implemented soil and groundwater cleanup programs (for the state, for a private contractor, for a nonprofit) at industrial sites. That was my full-time job for a few years. Partly from this experience, LANL was and is egregiously inefficient. A retired DOE employee came to us one day a few years back to tell us that LANL's costs were about 3x what costs were elsewhere in the DOE complex. DOE in turn is more expensive than private industry.

Some still want to dig up Area G and truck it all somewhere else (where?). We disagree. We need to spend those and other vast sums on mitigation of, and deep adaptation to climate change. The future danger from Area G is trivial -- to the nth power -- in comparison. Focusing on relatively trivial issues is another form of climate change denial. 

This business of begging for money from our would-be nuclear colonial masters, in all its forms, is politically destructive. Once and for all we need to realize that LANL, Sandia, and the nuclear weapons industry have been destructive to our state -- especially to northern New Mexico. Let's not get bought off.

The way to disband RCLC is for local governments and tribes to get out of it. That should be our focus. If Los Alamos County wants to hire a lobby firm they can. They don't need help and legitimacy from all the other governments and tribes.

We need to bring a lot of pressure on our local governments and tribes to make this happen.

Thank you all,

Greg & Trish, for the Study Group