LANL, Savannah River Site Activists petition for environmental review of New Mexico, South Carolina labs

By Scott Wyland swyland@sfnewmexican

Mar 10, 2020

New Mexico’s congressional delegates received a petition Tuesday signed by more than 700 people who want the U.S. Department of Energy to conduct a comprehensive environmental review of the two sites it selected to produce 80 nuclear weapons cores by 2030.

Anti-nuclear advocates submitted the petition to Democratic U.S. Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich and U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, urging them to demand the agency thoroughly review the potential impacts of having Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina make plutonium pits for a new generation of nuclear warheads.

The petition comes as the Energy Department begins a 45-day public comment period for a proposed supplement to the 2008 sitewide environmental review of the Los Alamos lab.

The agency says supplementing the 2008 review is enough and that a new environmental study isn’t needed because little has changed at the lab in the past 12 years. It aims to conduct a sitewide review of Savannah River Site because the facility has never made pits, the softball-sized, explosive centers in warheads.

Critics contend the agency should conduct a new sitewide review of the lab and a full environmental analysis of the two facilities working together — for instance, the possible impacts of Savannah River Site shipping its radioactive waste cross-country to an underground storage site in New Mexico.

“Everyone, including LANL employees and Los Alamos residents, should want these studies for their own safety,” said Suzie Schwartz, a Taos anti-nuclear advocate. “Expanded plutonium pit production will exponentially increase the radioactive waste stream and further compromise the already stagnant and weak efforts to clean up Area G, where 75 years worth of radioactive, toxic and hazardous waste are buried on site.”

Udall expressed support for the lab conducting the required studies under the National Environmental Protection Act but stopped short of saying the lab should do a more thorough review than what the Energy Department has proposed.

“The [National Environmental Policy Act] process is important to ensuring worker, community and environmental safety,” Udall said in an emailed statement. “It should be carried out as the law intends, and LANL needs to explain its NEPA analysis and decisions to the public to ensure public confidence — and take the public input they have received seriously.”

While a NEPA review has been done for the Los Alamos lab, there has been no NEPA analysis conducted for pit production at the Savannah River Site, Udall said. He added he’ll continue to fight for independent oversight of Energy Department facilities and against the proposed $100 million cut in LANL’s long-term waste cleanup.

Watchdogs also say a 1998 court order requires a full environmental study when two or more sites are involved in pit production or when the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous branch of the Energy Department, plans to produce more than 80 pits yearly.

The Trump administration and officials overseeing the country’s nuclear programs have said they want the labs to make at least 80 pits yearly by 2030 with the ability to produce more, said Joni Arends, executive director of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety. That clearly triggers the need for a comprehensive environmental study, she said.

It’s erroneous for the Energy Department to claim not enough has changed since 2008 to call for new studies, Arends said. She cited the 2011 Las Conchas Fire, the ruptured waste container from Los Alamos that shut down the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad for three years, the discovery of a toxic chromium plume under nearby canyons and continued seismic instability because of faults around the lab. “They think they can put a Band-Aid on the 2008” study, Arends said.