For immediate release October 5, 2020

Permalink * Prior press releases

Citizens hearing on LANL expansion, nuclear weapons manufacturing, and alternatives for the region to be held Wednesday, October 7, at the State Capitol, 1-6 pm

Contact: Greg Mello, 505-265-1200 (office) 505-577-8563 (cell)

Albuquerque and Santa Fe -- The Los Alamos Study Group will be holding an open-air citizens hearing on the planned expansion of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), including the new mission of industrial plutonium warhead core ("pit") manufacturing, and alternatives for the region on Wednesday, October 7, at the State Capitol in Santa Fe, from 1-6 pm.

The hearing will be an outdoor, socially-distanced, masked, covid-safe event.

In the absence of any federal, state, or local fora for discussion of these issues, testimony will be recorded and provided to federal officials and other interested parties in a manner analogous to the scoping process that would take place at the beginning of an environmental impact statement (EIS) process -- if either the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) or its parent organization the Department of Energy (DOE) were conducting such an EIS.

Background

LANL is proposing to spend some $13 billion (B) on its facilities over the current decade, by far the largest capital project in the history of New Mexico ("LANL officials detail potential building boom," Albuquerque Journal, Aug 9, 2019; “Waking the Wolf,” 9/9/20 testimony to Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee, s. 21)

A large part of this expansion is for pit manufacturing. NNSA is proposing to spend $7.6 B to jump-start industrial pit production at LANL over fiscal years (FYs) 2019-2025 (slide 23). Extrapolating LANL's figures through 2030, when a larger pit factory is officially slated to come on line in South Carolina, LANL's FY2023-2030 pit production will cost roughly $14 B (s. 29).

Of national interest, these costs imply that pits made at LANL will be far more expensive than heretofore realized, in the neighborhood of $40-60 million apiece [ss. 28-31]. There is no current need for pit production to increase safety of U.S. nuclear weapons [ss. 2, 7, 8]; instead, the only purpose for industrial pit production at LANL is not just to maintain but increase the present posture of a threatened possible increase in the potential number of nuclear weapons deployed on U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Meanwhile, a majority of U.S. citizens, along with some retired former defense officials, prefer to retire ICBMs altogether. The life-cycle cost for replacing existing ICBMs was recently revealed to be in excess of a quarter-trillion dollars, much of it to be spent in a sole-source contract.

On September 2, NNSA fully committed to pit production at LANL (here and here). Yet no EIS is planned, either for pit production or for LANL expansion overall ("DOE concludes no EIS needed for vast expansion of Los Alamos nuclear missions, including plutonium bomb core factory," Sep 1, 2020).

By contrast, an EIS process for pit production in South Carolina has been completed, and a site-wide EIS (SWEIS) for LANL's sister laboratory in California is underway.

Despite many promises and despite legal requirements to do so, no plan for this expansion has been released (s. 10). Neither is there any resourced schedule or budget ("NNSA Should Further Develop Cost, Schedule, and Risk Information for the W87-1 Warhead Program," GAO, Sep 2020)

The regional impacts will be large (Letter to NM Environment Department re: Need for SWEIS at LANL, Jun 29, 2020). Other LANL campuses are contemplated ("NNSA seeks to lease office, light lab, and warehouse space within 50 miles of LANL on urgent basis," Jul 23, 2020.

Comments

Study Group Director Greg Mello:

"In the face of this tremendous planned expansion of investments in nuclear weaponry in our own back yards, government at all levels is 'missing in action.' No elected official or official in state or local government knows what NNSA's plans are, or what impacts they will have on their constituents and citizens. Congress itself doesn't know.

"Citizens must therefore step up and lead. We can start by asking questions and expressing concerns, and by listening to one another,  which is what our governments are not doing. We need to ask the questions government officials are afraid to ask. We don't have to have all -- or even any -- of the answers. That is the essence of scoping an EIS: asking relevant questions. What are the questions we need to be asking about this project? Above all, what are the alternatives to this project?

"Especially this question: what are the alternatives for New Mexico? Are we to be a nuclear weapons and waste colony? Because that is where this leads. Will our schools be subverted into training centers for plutonium manufacturing? Will our democracy and sovereignty be shunted aside for a few peoples' bizarre notion of 'national security,' really more like 'welfare for warfare,' while a third of our population rightly wonders where their rent or the mortgage will come from, or how their medical bills will be paid?

"The absurd priorities behind this project, so twisted as to be incredible, are not being advanced in a 'normal' time. Our national economy is in a profound recession, the state's economy is worse. Neither trend is entirely due to the present pandemic. Rather, the pandemic has laid bare profound problems we already had. Our economy and society are breaking along long-existing fault lines. There is no end to economic woe in sight -- quite the reverse. A large fraction of our population is unemployed, with no prospect for productive employment on the horizon. The pandemic and our halfway responses to it are deeply undermining our children's' education and well-being, as well as the mental health of our population generally.

"Yet our elected leaders have no plan overall, except to hope that our economy and society will rapidly return to 'normal,' while they stand aside to let billions upon billions -- two trillion, over the next 30 years -- pour into doomsday weapons.

"It's not so bad that government doesn't have all the answers, but to be almost entirely MIA, not to be even be asking how our society and environment are going to halt their slides downward, is unacceptable.

"Our country and our state are heading for a dead end. We have to turn around. If the US has not set itself on a firm disarmament path by 2030, this country will be doomed, from climate catastrophe and social and economic collapse. There is no need for any new pits, at any time whatsoever. What we need is the courage to face our problems and correct our mistakes, while we can and to the extent we can."

***ENDS***