My View: Suzanne Schwartz

Feb 15, 2020

Environmental review for LANL expansion needed

As many of your readers know, the National Nuclear Security Administration, a stovepipe agency within the Department of Energy, is planning a massive expansion at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina to increase its unnecessary plutonium pit production mission to 30-80 pits per year.

Plutonium “pits” are the fissile cores for detonating nuclear warheads. Plutonium is a heavy metal and radioactive, lasting more than 240,000 years. Plutonium pits have been described by DOE officials as the “linchpin” of the United States nuclear weapons stockpile.

LANL was the original pit factory, creating the original plutonium atomic bomb tested at the Trinity site, the uranium bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and the plutonium bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, which, essentially, was a plutonium pit.

Subsequently, the DOE established the Rocky Flats Plant west of Denver. It became the DOE’s site of mass production of pits in order to fuel the Cold War. Seventy-thousand pits were produced there.

After Rocky Flats was raided and shut down by the FBI for environmental crimes circa 1989, the pit mission was transferred back to LANL. In the late 1990s, LANL was instructed to make 20 pits per year by DOE mandate. However, since then, LANL has been able to produce only a handful of pits due to cleanup, nuclear criticality safety and seismic issues, and corporate mismanagement.

Fast-forward to the present mandate for 30-80 pits per year to be built at the LANL and Savannah River sites, concurrently with transporting and dismantling the thousands of perfectly “usable” pits we have stockpiled.

The NNSA has stated it will not conduct a programmatic environmental impact statement, typically required by National Environmental Policy Act for projects involving two or more locations.

It also appears the NNSA will not conduct a site-wide environmental impact statement for the huge LANL expansion. It plans to move forward with what is called a supplement analysis, which is not an environmental study but assesses whether any environmental review is necessary. A supplement analysis has no enforceable requirements for public review and comment or impact mitigation.

The existing site-wide environmental impact statement for LANL was completed in 2008 and analyzed the production of up to 80 plutonium pits per year in a new facility. It analyzed a limited number of alternatives, now obsolete, and depended on a variety of assumptions now known to be false.

NNSA’s new plan is for the production of a minimum of 30 plutonium pits per year, in what is already a 42-year-old facility with serious ongoing unresolved problems.

LANL’s massive plutonium pit expansion plans and associated infrastructure will affect Northern New Mexico’s people, cultures, health, safety, economy, environment and climate. Yet New Mexico U.S. Sens. Martin Heinrich and Tom Udall and Congressman Ben Ray Luján have stated they fully support NNSA’s plutonium operations expansion for LANL, with only a supplement analysis, as opposed to any sort of nationwide programmatic environmental review, followed by a site-specific environmental review for LANL.

Our Democratic delegation tends to be fairly progressive on a number of important issues facing our country and the planet, but in regard to this, the seldom-mentioned nuclear weapons industry, it is failing us.

It is imperative that our New Mexico delegation leads Congress on behalf of its own constituents and the whole country, stands up to the DOE/NNSA, changes its stated position and acts now to demand a programmatic environmental impact statement for the two sites, followed by a new site-wide environmental impact statement for LANL to address all of the potential impacts of expansion. New Mexico needs a fresh look.

Suzanne Schwartz is a 35-year resident of Taos County.