Letter to New Mexico Environment Department re: Need for Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) at LANL, June 29

Dear Maddy [Maddy Hayden, NMED Public Information Officer, maddy.hayden@state.nm.us, mobile (505) 231-8800, office (505) 827-0314] --

Good afternoon. ...

Currently, LANL's annual budget is poised to expand by a full $1 billion, come October 1, driven largely by industrial plutonium investments. To repeat what is said below, LANL's planned capital investment over this decade, considered as a single project, is the most costly capital project in the history of state, including all the interstate highways put together. LANL has repeatedly stated that its "site planning" must now embrace the entire region.

And yet there is no site plan, no signed program plan, no environmental impact analysis, no environmental, social, and economic vetting of alternatives, no record of decision between these alternatives, and no binding mitigation plans.

As you know NEPA is a "good government" law, neutral as to policy. It is truth-revealing.

Just let us know how we can best help.

Best wishes, stay safe,

Greg

[From Mello letter to NMED Deputy Secretary Jennifer Pruett, June 27]

I read with interest the New Mexico Environment Department's (NMED's) good comments on recent National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) efforts at LANL and the Savannah River Site (SRS).

To my eye, NMED's comments on the draft LANL Supplement Analysis (SA), in the breadth and depth of analyses they request, imply that a new or supplemented LANL SWEIS is needed. The comments stop short of requesting that, however.

Of note, NMED's comments erroneously call the LANL SA a "supplemental analysis," a different and far more thorough set of analyses than a mere supplement analysis, which is only an assessment of whether or not to conduct a supplemental or de novo analysis. See the definitions at 10 CFR § 1021.10. It is an important difference. NMED may mistake the nature and limited purpose of the draft LANL SA.

LANL, the region, and the state -- the latter two represented by your department -- need a new LANL SWEIS, not just a supplemented SWEIS (let alone an supplement analysis, the thing currently in draft) for many reasons. We have provided some of those reasons to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) (this year), Governor Grisham (last year), Senator Udall (last year), and various other parties.

It seems that every week there are additional revelations, giving rise to more reasons why the 2008 SWEIS is inadequate to today's federal decisions.

...

If I were to make a de novo outline of reasons why a new SWEIS is needed, it might look like this (omitting references for now, for the sake of brevity):

• NNSA seeks to hire thousands (net) of new staff at LANL over the coming five years. LANL is poised to dramatically change into something never seen before. Triad, NNSA's management and operating contractor, has publicly discussed the fact that impacts of these expansion decisions will be regional and significant -- in terms of traffic congestion, housing, possible new roads and bridges, and possible secondary LANL campuses.

• The road network and housing markets are already stressed. A powerful factor not present or foreseen in 2008 is the fact that many LANL retirees are staying in the Los Alamos community and so a much larger fraction of the LANL workforce now commutes. In other words, the retiring Cold War demographic bulge is consuming much of the available housing, with regional effects.

• A common phenomena across several kinds of environmental impacts is that the Pajarito Plateau is in many ways "full": increases in environmental pressures result in greater-than-linear impacts. Examples are traffic slow-downs stretching miles every day near White Rock; the relatively abrupt need for 5,000 additional housing units (according to Los Alamos County's latest housing report), greatly expanding the County's total housing stock and population; contemplated urban development in wildlife corridors and open space areas; planned construction almost adjacent to the Tsankawi portion of Bandelier National Monument, and much more). Qualitative changes in impact, and kinds of impacts, are reasonably expected to occur.

• LANL has described a $13 billion dollar construction program over the coming 10 years, which would nearly double the replacement value of LANL as a whole. This program is more than six times the size of the Manhattan Project in New Mexico, in constant dollars. Some $5.5 billion is already programmed over the coming five years. LANL's public presentations have shown dozens of new buildings. In constant dollars, planned LANL construction over the decade exceeds the original cost of the interstate highway system in New Mexico. Just one building now being outfitted as a nuclear facility -- formerly the Radiological Laboratory, Utility, and Office Building (RLUOB) -- will be more costly than any single construction project in the state. It is almost incomprehensible that a brand-new program on such a scale -- involving processing, transporting, storing, and disposing tons of some the most dangerous materials known to humanity -- could proceed without an full environmental impact statement.

• The plutonium warhead core ("pit") mission is particularly impactful. Yet as we heard again Thursday from a senior analyst for Congress, there has been no final (signed) agency decision as to what the plan for this mission actually is, in detail (despite a long-past statutory deadline requiring one). (This a theme of our comments on the DSA, as noted above.)

• In the 2008 SWEIS, NNSA assumed LANL's plutonium missions would have access to a large, brand-new, safer plutonium facility at Technical Area (TA-) 55. That building was never constructed. No firm plan for constructing any such building has been revealed since then.

• Despite this we believe, and sources in government also said to us this week, that there are plans for new nuclear facilities at TA-55, despite their conspicuous absence from the DSA. All options for pit production at LANL examined in NNSA's pit production Engineering Assessment involved new nuclear facilities at TA-55.

• As revealed in LANL's DSA, NNSA proposes to operate its plutonium facility on a 24/7 basis. This has important safety and indirect environmental implications, not discussed anywhere.

• The 2008 SWEIS failed to account for the incompetent lower horizon of Unit Three of the Tshirege Member of the Bandelier Tuff ("Qbt3L"), present across LANL and of signal importance in any plans to construct new or replacement nuclear facilities on the south portion of TA-55, the only portion available for construction. The geologic and seismic properties of this stratum necessitated a complete redesign of the then-proposed Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF) to meet the nuclear safety requirements of 10 CFR 830. The proposed underground production modules (inexplicably absent in the DSA) would not meet those standards, according to NNSA's Engineering Assessment. That is why they would be underground. We believe NNSA has not taken the geologic situation at TA-55 or indeed at LANL as a whole on board.

• According to a December 2019 report of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), Building PF-4 does not adequately protect the public. Existing environmental analyses (e.g. the 2008 SWEIS) assume it does. Is not adequately protecting the public an acceptable environmental standard?

• NNSA has formally applied to develop a 64-acre (or larger) parcel in central Santa Fe. While this proposal has seemingly been rejected, the City of Santa Fe says aspects of this proposal are still under active consideration (and hence cannot be revealed). It unclear whether parallel NNSA and LANL proposals for development off Hwy 599, or in Espanola, or elsewhere, are active. LANL and NNSA representatives are on record as considering them. If they are reasonable alternatives they need to be analyzed in a SWEIS.

• NNSA is formally considering giving approximately 3,500 acres of national park quality land in LANL, in a known wildlife migration corridor, for the purposes of mixed residential, commercial, and light industrial development. The purpose of this possible transfer and development is to facilitate LANL's overall expansion. As such, it needs to be examined in a SWEIS.

• It is not just pit production (the subject of the DSA) which is expanding at LANL; decisions to expand other programs are being made as well. It is impossible to judge the combined and cumulative impact of these decisions without a SWEIS.

• There are approximately 20,000 drums of transuranic (TRU) waste at LANL -- about 18,000 at Area G (buried and aboveground) and about 2,000 elsewhere. With the advent of pit production, there is no longer a clear disposal pathway for these drums. The indefinitely-continued presence of these drums adjacent to Indian sacred lands -- which drums are being managed with more than a 100-fold lower assumed accident release fraction than similar TRU drums elsewhere at LANL -- raises significant environmental justice concerns.

• The maximum electrical load at LANL has approximately doubled over that foreseen in the 2008 SWEIS, necessitating a planned $300 million capacity upgrade project, which began this year but is currently paused until the fall of 2023. The nature -- let alone impact -- of this project is nowhere publicly described. The relative environmental impacts of reasonable alternatives are nowhere discussed.

• LANL has pitched a new high bridge over White Rock Canyon, to be connected by roughly 25 miles of new highway, most of which would pass through the Caja del Rio lands of the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. At the moment, it appears that this project is on hold indefinitely, but the primary impetus for the project -- better tapping the Albuquerque-area labor market, especially for construction crafts, while also avoiding traffic congestion for Santa Fe area commuters -- is strong. At the moment, this audacious proposal stands as a reminder of the wide social and environmental impacts of LANL's proposed expansion. The proposed land transfer to Los Alamos County is part of an alternative solution to that same "mission need," in NEPA terms.

• The Senate Armed Services Committee and NNSA are now both contemplating a major change in plutonium missions housed in PF-4, namely to terminate surplus plutonium disposition activities there, in order to liberate the space those missions occupy to make room for additional pit production. (See: GAO: Surplus Plutonium Disposition: Processing of surplus plutonium warhead cores ("pits") at Los Alamos is uncertain, may conflict with production of new pits, Oct 28, 2019.) This and related transportation and storage of plutonium, and related TRU waste management, have significant environmental impacts. This set of decisions, involving multiple sites and states, merits examination under NEPA, including at LANL.

• In 2008, understanding of the climate crisis was far less mature than it is today. NNSA's plans -- far more extensive than considered in 2008 -- also have larger climate impacts than was known then.

What it boils down to is this: in scientific and management terms, the SWEIS is old. It is obsolete as to environmental context; the alternatives it examined are obsolete as well; the activities planned now will admittedly have widespread, permanent impacts that have never been examined; the federal actions being considered are mysterious and evolving; no alternatives are being considered; there has been no legally-required and -supported public process for soliciting comments from governments, tribes, and the public; and we believe all parties would strongly benefit from a clear, binding Record of Decision that includes a binding mitigation plan.

A new SWEIS, not a supplemented SWEIS, is needed because the scope of a) the analysis and b) the alternatives need public vetting. NNSA cannot do either on their own.

Needless to say, the purpose of NEPA is to foster better federal decisions. NNSA is currently proceeding largely in the dark as to the impacts of its proposed actions even on other Department of Energy (DOE) programs such as environmental cleanup, as NMED pointed out. I can assure you that the actual decisionmakers at NNSA (and the Department of Defense) are completely oblivious to environmental concerns. You can also be sure that the concerns raised in the NMED's comments will not be satisfactorily or truthfully answered in the absence of a new SWEIS.

I would be happy to answer your questions about any of this. ...

Very best wishes,

Greg