NNSA Plans Big Environmental Review for 15 More Years of Livermore Operations

August 7, 2020

By ExchangeMonitor

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said this week it plans to conduct a new, broad environmental review of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Livermore’s last such review, officially known as a site-wide environmental impact statement, was in 2005. The new review will cover operations for the next 15 years. In that time, Livermore will oversee production of a refurbished W80 air-launched cruise-missile warhead and a newly minted W87-1 intercontinental ballistic warhead. The latter will essentially be a copy of an existing warhead, but with a new plutonium core.

The site-wide environmental impact statement will examine the environmental effects of continuing the operation the entire Lawrence Livermore site over the next 15 years.

Members of the public may submit comments on the scope of the planned site-wide environmental impact statement until Sept. 21, the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency stated in a Federal Register notice published Wednesday.

Among other things, Livermore performs high-explosive tests at its Site 300 annex. The facility also has some plutonium-handling capabilities in its on-campus superblock, though the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico will handle plutonium-production and analysis, going forward.

Throughout much of its 20-year history, the NNSA has relied on the environmental studies mandated in the National Environmental Protection Act to document the steps the agency has taken to ensure it can continue maintenance and refurbishment of U.S. nuclear weapons and nuclear-weapon production infrastructure.

This week’s notice chaffed one disarmament activist, who snipped at the NNSA for pulling out all the stops to review Livermore and not doing the same for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which soon will have a new mission to produce at least 30 plutonium pits a year.

“NNSA is making the right decision as regards the Livermore site-wide environmental impact statement, making the agency’s omission of a comparable announcement for Los Alamos all the more inexplicable,” Greg Mello of the Albuquerque-based Los Alamos Study Group wrote in an email. Los Alamos’ “mission is changing to include industrial plutonium pit manufacturing — the impacts of which are described by [the lab] as affecting the entire region.”

Mello complained that the NNSA is writing no environmental impact statement for the Los Alamos pit plant, but is writing one for a larger pit plant planned for the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.

The NNSA says it considered substantially all the effects of pit production at Los Alamos in a 2008 site-wide environmental impact statement for the Northern New Mexico laboratory, and so wrote a supplemental analysis this year of that document. The NNSA says that supplement will fulfill its legal obligation to examine environmental effect of Los Alamos pit production as now conceived: upgrading the PF-4 plutonium facility at the lab’s central interior.