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February 29, 2020 Permalink for this letter (give us a few minutes). PLEASE FORWARD! Other Letters SANTA FE, NORTHERN NEW MEXICO UNDER NUCLEAR ASSAULT
Dear New Mexico friends – We have resorted to literally purple prose but we are not exaggerating. Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico truly are under nuclear assault. 1. Emergency demonstration As the Santa Fe New Mexican has written, the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA's) "[p]roposed budget would almost triple plutonium spending" (Feb 24, 2020). Our press release of the day before had further shocking details. (More have come to light since then, which will be summarized by us elsewhere). At Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the 5-year proposed spending for building up a plutonium warhead core ("pit") factory is $5.4 billion -- more than a billion per year for the foreseeable future. Even this does not include a billion or so in other related construction over these 5 years. Thousands of new workers are being hired to support the growing "Rocky Flats" mission, about 1,000 people per year for the next 5 years. The new mission will be housed in an old, unsafe facility. How do we know it is unsafe? The highest independent defense nuclear safety authority in the U.S. says so ("Safety Board: The Los Alamos plutonium facility does not adequately protect the public," Dec 2, 2019). Where, you might ask, is the environmental impact analysis for building a new "Rocky Flats South"? After all, an environmental impact statement (EIS) for the proposed pit factory at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina, which will handle much less plutonium and have less environmental impact than the surplus plutonium mission it is replacing in the same facility, has been underway since last year. So South Carolina, that paragon of environmental consciousness represented by ultra-green Senator Lindsay Graham and his colleagues (LOL), gets a new EIS. New Mexico, represented by senators Udall and Heinrich, does not get any EIS -- despite the reality that LANL plans to build dozens of new facilities and a second campus altogether, all as part of the greatest contemplated LANL expansion since the early 1950s. (Even more strange, our "liberal" or "progressive" congressional delegation and governor have been hyperactive in promoting LANL as the sole and only site to make plutonium pits, while "pretty hawkish" (his words) Lindsay Graham and colleagues have been quite diffident about pit production at SRS. In the words of one highly-engaged person in South Carolina, they are "missing in action" as far as pit production is concerned. By contrast, every single one of our Democratic delegation, and our Governor, are gung-ho for pits at LANL.) Udall supposedly believes in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Just not when it might expose environmental and safety problems that might delay plutonium pit production. We need to stop this nonsense. We need to wake people up. All it would take for NNSA to decide to write a desperately-needed Site-Wide EIS (SWEIS) encompassing all these contemplated changes, alternatives to them, and mitigation strategies, would be a letter from the New Mexico delegation. NNSA fears the openness of a SWEIS. They fear possible delays. They fear having to commit to limits of any kind of enforceable Record of Decision involving a Mitigation Plan. They fear having to bring up modern solutions to their commuting problem that might inconvenience their precious new hires. (It is so very difficult to hire, indoctrinate, and retain thousands of new scientists and engineers to work on nuclear weapons when the world is crying out for their help in other fields.) So please come to theemergency demonstration, first at Sen. Udall's office (map) in Santa Fe, at noon on Wednesday, March 4, and then at Senator Heinrich's office on Marcy Street. 2. Discussion and workshop The proposed Trump nuclear buildup just gets bigger and bigger. As we have explained, the initiative in doing this is coming from NNSA and the labs. Even the Pentagon, which was caught flat-footed by NNSA's Christmastime power play (ask us Wednesday), was appalled, according to multiple sources. For New Mexico this is already a political disaster. Do you think our leading politicians will pay sufficient attention to any other essential issue bearing on the material, public health, and environmental health of the state, especially northern New Mexico, while they believe its future lies in nuclear weapons, the Space Force, pit production, and all the wonderful things the labs can do for the state? Ben Ray Lujan has even introduced a package of legislation that would use the labs to replace even more functions of government (or "to spur growth, innovation, and opportunities for New Mexicans", as he put it). The fact is, we live in an age of disruption. Going back to the priorities of the Cold War would cement New Mexico's position at the bottom of every scale, and ensure that collapse, not transformation and renewal, would be the outcome for the US as a whole. The decade is only two months old, but its fundamental character should already be clear. Dorothy said it, in The Wizard of Oz: "We are not in Kansas any more." Most people don't understand this yet. Without being a lot clearer about where we are in the larger scheme of things, no policy prescriptions will "work." No matter what issue is the main one for you, if you live in New Mexico you are either working against nuclear weapons and war or you are being sold on Capitol Hill as a nuclear weapons supporter by the people you probably voted for. Please come on Wednesday evening as well as to the demonstration if you can. We are virtually certain it will be a valuable discussion and a kind of comfort, if we may say that, in these troubled times. We have a pretty good community of people standing with us, people whom we admire. We don't have to agree about everything. The main thing is, we want to work with you and we need your help. We are all in this situation together. Among the things we will discuss is the City's Midtown process and how you can keep NNSA and LANL out of it. 3. Midtown: Please help us bar NNSA and LANL participation We have made this web page to capture recent developments and resources on this project. New talking points are being added to the above web page, so you may want to check those out. To those who came to the last City Council meeting this past Wednesday -- thank you. We gave two draft resolutions to the City Council for their consideration:
We need your help in promoting these to the Council. Please call or write your councilors! LANL's (and NNSA's, but let's keep it simple) participation in this project appears to be driven or pulled from three directions -- from LANL, from the City, and some of the developers. Regarding the first, Los Alamos -- the lab, the town, and the county -- are out of room. There is literally no place for all these people in existing facilities and in nearby housing. What to do? Move some non-plutonium LANL functions off The Hill. Where? So far the answer seems to be into a second LANL campus in Santa Fe, via secret Midtown Project negotiations between carefully-selected City staff, developers, and their backers. Every single thing about this process is secret: the changing evaluation criteria, the identities of the project teams and their investors, the names of all the people on the evaluation committee (the composition of which can be changed or augmented without notice), the development proposals, whether the City will sell or lease the land, the price being negotiated -- everything. Everything is fluid, and everything is secret. The contractor in charge of the whole process reports to the Mayor and the City's Economic Development office. Everything about this process is being hidden from the public and the City Council. The one thing that is clear is that the City requires that developers have access to a lot of money up front, which more or less rules out nonprofit educational uses -- the historic propose of this site. Developer Affeldt told his listeners in December that this would be a circa $400 million project. This is all about money and private profits -- not people, values, or real economic development. It's about privatization. It's an enclosure. It's colonial. There is nothing democratic about it. Affordable housing? The goal of this project is to gentrify, not just all but the bare legal minimum of the project itself but the large Opportunity Zones surrounding it. And if LANL gets in, they will control. LANL's grip on the City will increase dramatically. Why the secrecy? Because the City is doing something very ugly, and the Mayor and others involved want to keep the public from having any voice. In words that assistant city attorney Marcos Martinez wrote to us, even the supposedly-rejected (but as it turns out, not really rejected) development proposals have to be kept from public eyes, lest they be "used inappropriately to sway negotiations through public pressures that are not based on the objective [sic] criteria set out in the [Request for Expressions of Interest]." Secrecy is not a legal requirement ("Keeping campus proposals secret was the city’s own choice, Albuquerque Journal Editorial, Feb 9, 2020). We can discuss this further on Wednesday. Greg, Trish, Lydia, and Michelle for the Study Group |
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