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February 9, 2024 Bulletin 356: LANL SWEIS presentation, talking points Permalink for this bulletin (please forward!). Bulletins like this one go to our main mailing list. If you missed our most recent emails, they come in three forms and here they are:
If you live in New Mexico, we urge you to attend the upcoming LANL SWEIS hearings if you can. Learn a little or a lot, bring friends and signs, prepare a 2 minute speech if you wish. You can look forward to seeing friends old and new, as we do. These fora will be times of fellowship, healthy debate, and freedom of speech. Don't expect NNSA to listen. That's not what these "hearings" are for. Dear friends and colleagues: This past week we held two public training sessions regarding the upcoming Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) hearings, first in Santa Fe and then in Albuquerque. The updated slide deck from Greg's part of those trainings, which incorporates answers to some of the background questions we got, is here: Brave New World: the LANL Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS): Talking points, key issues, Feb 6, 2025. We urge you to look it over. In Albuquerque we were joined by former Study Group president Peter Neils as well as by our part-time organizer/research assistant Bex Hampton. Peter led off with a performance of his "New Mexico Nuclear Waltz" (recommended). You can see a video of that meeting here. (The slides were washed out in the video but you have them at the link above; also some of the audience questions may be faint.) The slides contain linked references to prior background about this SWEIS process as well as everything else you need. If you live nearby, we urge you to attend one or more of these hearings. Virtual attendance is far less valuable. As we have emphasized in local letters, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is conducting these hearings and accepting written comments to "check a box." They aren't interested in what you say or write, which will make no difference to them, and they aren't required to respond in good faith in their final SWEIS, and they won't (except as it pleases them.) Most people aren't mentally prepared for that kind of large-scale deception and can hardly credence it. We're in a brave new world and have been there for some time, so get used to it. Willy-nilly, these hearings are fora regarding the future of LANL and regarding nuclear weapons in all their aspects -- their legality, the utility or lack thereof, their cost, their impacts, their morality. These hearings are also about the justifications for the new weapons LANL would create, and whether the appropriate framework for national security is one of peace through hegemony (aka "strength") -- a failing paradigm if there ever was one -- or peace through mutual security and partnership. All the pits LANL would make, as you will know if you reading these Bulletins, are for the gigantic, ill-starred Sentinel missile program -- which already has enough warheads for every missile! (The Air Force wants an option to have three warheads per missile.) These hearings are occasions when the public can speak to each other, a "public square" that is not, for just a moment, controlled by the powerful voices that guide and control public discourse on this topic. There are a lot of censorious people out there who are horrified that different organizations and people have different views. They want -- no, they demand -- that everybody be in the same herd, which is more comfortable than having to think. Their world is very simple, indeed binary: "anti-nuclear" groups, and "pro-nuclear" forces. To any who think like that: please get real. Regarding the future of LANL, this organization is not at all on the same side as, say, the Union of Concerned Scientists, who believe LANL should be the only pit factory, or Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, which agrees with them. We are not on the same page as Archbishop Wester, who -- following his Pope -- is willing to criticize nuclear weapons in general terms, but is unwilling to speak out against the policy of building a nuclear weapons factory near the seat of his Archdiocese. The official U.S. government position is actually much the same: "we deplore nuclear weapons, and have ratified the NPT which requires us to negotiate an end to them, but realities being what they are...." You will also notice that few so-called "anti-nuclear groups" are willing to criticize the policymakers, who are responsible for bringing this factory to New Mexico in the first place and for increasing nuclear weapons spending and procurements. We are not on that page, thank you very much. As you will see in our talking points, we believe the main issue, and the main political question, in these LANL hearings is whether plutonium warhead core ("pit") production at LANL should be accepted (either as a "done deal," or as a good idea in any case), or in a fantasy variation championed by people who should know better, whether LANL should be the sole and only pit production facility in the U.S. We also note that the variation in environmental impacts of LANL is to a very great extent (~90%, I would say) determined by the overall scale of operations. The Draft SWEIS is riddled with data and "data", with technical omissions and errors, but it will do little good to spend time pointing those out. It's very simple, really: a huge nuclear weapons lab with an added plutonium processing and production plant will have greater impacts. As you will also see, we think the whole SWEIS effort is illegitimate without, at a minimum, first pausing implementation of all the projects and programs underway prior to proper NEPA analysis, including pit production. There is a lot of hand-wringing going on about environmental impacts, which "are what they are" when LANL is doubling in size and adding a pit manufacturing complex. Yes, the impacts are already vast and will increase. Telling NNSA about it won't accomplish anything. The problems with the SWEIS aren't errors of omission or commission, although there are plenty of those. They aren't errors in framing of the alternatives, although that gets closer to the real problem. The real problem is that this SWEIS is happening five years too late, and NNSA has zero intention of actually using NEPA to revisit any of its besetting decisions. The contextual problem is that New Mexico has by many measures now relapsed into a territory. Our social indicators have fallen to the very bottom of all the states (we were just named the worst state for education, again -- see this updated table of rankings). That is because New Mexico is hardly even a state any more. This SWEIS, coming 5 years after the decision to make LANL a pit factory, is just another slap in the face, a symptom of what little regard with which New Mexico decisionmakers and public officials are held. This is a colony, and they will get in line. They have no other choice, goes the thinking in DC. Indeed that is also the thinking in elite political circles in Santa Fe. A week ago, a Santa Fe New Mexican editorial began,"[i]t’s hardly a secret that New Mexico depends on federal largesse to function, from funding for its national laboratories and military bases to dollars that support social welfare programs or pay for necessary infrastructure repairs and construction." With that as an operating assumption, political and social failure are guaranteed. Thank you for your attention and best wishes, Greg Mello, for the Study Group |
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