February 17, 2020

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This letter: LANL-wide EIS needed; Santa Fe doubles down on Midtown secrecy & possible weapons expansion; your help wanted

Dear New Mexico friends –

Many of you are rightly focused on the remaining few days of the 2020 legislative session. For those who are, and even more so for those who aren't, please consider the following.

1. A new Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) for Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is badly needed. There are four people who could make it happen. Many of you know them.

In prior letters and Bulletins we have explained why a new LANL SWEIS is desperately needed (follow the links for more details).

In a new editorial, the Albuquerque Journal explains why as well ("Delegation should support strong review of pit production," 2/16/20).

The four people who could make a new SWEIS happen are our two senators, our governor, and the congressman in whose district all this is happening. Here is how to contact them. You know how to write letters to editors (LTEs). You know how to contact us to help us with outreach. We are stretched very thinly indeed.

2. If you live in the Santa Fe area, please contact the city councilors and ask them to roll back the secrecy enveloping the huge Midtown project -- and to oppose all LANL involvement.

Here are their phone numbers and email addresses. We have explained in detail why this is important in past letters and we add new information below.

The Albuquerque Journal has editorialized against this secrecy and provided important legal and political background ("Keeping campus proposals secret was the city’s own choice," 2/9/20), including the interesting facts that three Santa Fe city councilors didn't want this level of secrecy, which was chosen by the City and is not a legal mandate under state law.

The Santa Fe New Mexican editorialized against a closed process as well ("A closed Midtown Campus process serves no one," 1/30/20)

We have been in correspondence with the City's attorneys about what we see as their illegal denial of public access to the four rejected Master Developer applications, including and especially that of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), to which none of the City's arguments for secrecy apply.

We have learned that the four rejected applications aren't really rejected at all, insofar as these applicants "could still be considered for collaborations at a later stage of the project."

What stage? Apparently any stage, including the financial interviews with the evaluation committee scheduled this coming Thursday. Subsequent to these interviews, the City will issue Requests for Clarification (RFCs) covering most of the key issues at the site, followed by discussions ("interviews") with whoever the applicants want to bring to the table with them.

What we see in this process is a fluid cabal of insiders meeting privately to discuss essentially all aspects of the largest real estate development within City limits we can remember, or perhaps in Santa Fe history, with initial investments in the $400 million range (as stated in a December 8 presentation by Alan Affeldt). Returns on investment would of course be greater than this, and the gentrification investment opportunities in the extensive surrounding Opportunity Zones would be extensive.

Some people are clearly planning on making tens of millions of dollars of profits with this project while re-making Santa Fe in ways decided solely by themselves, a small cabal of fellow developers who meet the City's financial requirements for a project of this magnitude, and the small group of City insiders who are deciding essentially everything about this project in total secrecy.

After providing generic "input" which may or may not be followed, citizens and their elected representatives are completely frozen out of this process until it is completed.

We aren't asking to see the proposals under consideration, but we are asking to see the rejected applications, which by definition are supposedly not being considered any more. And above all we want NNSA's application, because as explained below, we believe NNSA and LANL need Santa Fe to facilitate plutonium pit production, and they are trying to make this new identity for Santa Fe a reality before it can be effectively opposed.

The City is now offering weekly updates as to the progress of their secret deliberations in a sort of 1984 version of "transparency ."

Even without NNSA, great fortunes, massive egos, and vaulting political ambitions are involved in this development. These ambitions may need LANL as much as LANL needs them.

Please contact your councilors. The intense secrecy of this process smells very bad to us.

3. A bit of background

I have just returned from a busy week in Washington, DC, where I met with a number of parties on and around Capitol Hill as well as with directors of the nuclear warhead plants and labs at an annual nuclear weapons conference.

What is most important to relay first, in this letter, is that the transformation of LANL into its new role as a "production agency" involving "24/7 operations" at LANL's aging plutonium facility is not proceeding in any kind of "normal" government fashion. There is little or no oversight, not even by NNSA.

It is a crash program proceeding in an entirely unaccountable manner, more characteristic of wartime than peacetime governance. There are many other indicators of this which could be cited, even an ominous mention by NNSA of its government-wide leadership in "continuity of government" (COG) planning.

Despite statutory requirements that mandate detailed plans, as of last week no plans for pit production at LANL have been submitted to Congress. (By contrast we do have a snapshot of planning at the Savannah River Site (SRS), as well as an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) underway, as well as preliminary engineering analyses.)

Yet Congress fully funded the program at both LANL and at SRS. As noted in my last letter, House Democrats, supported by arms control and nearly all environmental NGOs, have made the LANL program -- a pig in a poke -- the centerpiece of their preferred policy.

When Congress has asked NNSA for plans, the answer has been, "We trust the contractor' [i.e. Triad, LLC].

The environmental and social impacts of pit production at LANL would be far greater than at SRS -- that much is clear. Is New Mexico too corrupt to care?

No details of the fiscal year (FY) 2021 budget request have been submitted to Congress so far, and reportedly none will be, for "weeks," raising the specter of Congress proceeding into budget markup with no budget to mark up.

We are hearing a rumor that the pit production budget request for FY21 has been increased by roughly $400 million from the level projected last year, to $1.4 billion, roughly double this year's amount (chart, to get a rough idea of the program growth that was projected last year). We shall see.

LANL is hiring roughly 1,000 new employees per year and expects to continue doing so for several more years. LANL is also planning some $13 billion in capital projects over the coming decade. Dozens of new buildings are planned.

The lab has outgrown its site, its nearby housing market, the regional road capacity, its electrical supply, its nuclear waste handling and shipping capacity, and the nearby labor force. The entire region has outgrown its water supply.

LANL must expand off-site to succeed in the new pit production mission, now "needed" not only for the Air Force's new W87-1 warhead, which would enable a new generation of land-based missiles (the fabulously-expensive Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, GBSD), but also for the proposed "W93" Navy warhead, which is planned for production starting in 2036.

LANL is unlikely to expand significantly in the Espanola Valley, given that region's poverty and drug problems. At the August 8 subcontractor forum, neither Espanola nor northern New Mexico were even mentioned.

LANL's greatest challenge is hiring, retaining, and training the nuclear weapons workforce of the future. LANL is therefore looking to Santa Fe for expansion. That is why NNSA and LANL are so interested in Santa Fe Midtown Project.

Greg Mello , for the Study Group