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Agency to hold public comment on Los Alamos National Lab sitewide review By Scott Wyland swyland@sfnewmexican.com The federal agency that oversees nuclear weapons will hold two hearings this week to give the public a chance to comment about the first full sitewide environmental review of Los Alamos National Laboratory since 2008. The National Nuclear Security Administration is conducting the sitewide review of the lab under the National Environmental Protection Act — breaking from its past resistance to doing fresh analysis of possible impacts as the lab gears up to annually produce 30 plutonium bomb pits by 2026. The virtual hearings, known as scoping sessions, will take place Tuesday and Wednesday. Two years ago, the agency, a branch of the U.S. Department of Energy, said there was no need for a new sitewide study because little had changed overall since 2008 and a “supplement analysis” of the earlier study would suffice. The agency now plans to do a comprehensive review of the lab’s operations, programs, technology, infrastructure and construction projects to determine if they must be improved or even overhauled to carry the lab through the next 15 years, including the planned pit manufacturing. Agency officials have said their decision to do the analysis after balking as recently as last year was based on changing circumstances. Watchdog groups have bashed what they say is a belated review designed to rubber stamp the lab’s skyrocketing budget for pit production and to help shield itself against legal challenges. In an email, Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, expressed concerns about the agency indicating it saw no need to assess expanded pit production itself in the review. “NNSA’s dubious argument is that it performed the legally required NEPA analysis for expanded plutonium pit production” in past assessments, Coghlan wrote. Those are the 2008 review and the “woefully inadequate” 2020 supplemental analysis, he added. The new sitewide study comes as the agency is proposing a bigger budget in the coming year for Los Alamos and other national labs. Los Alamos lab’s plutonium modernization funding would climb to $1.56 billion from this year’s $1 billion, a more than 50 percent increase. It’s all to help the lab meet goals from the administration of former President Donald Trump — which the administration of President Joe Biden is carrying on — of producing 30 pits a year, with the ability to surge to 80 pits for short periods. The study will be multi-layered, with various options. They include taking no action, continuing current operations, modernizing operations and expanding operations. Those actions, such as modernizing and expanding, would cover not only the facilities and infrastructure but also programs related to the structures, such as decontamination and demolition. The expansion alternative would make significant upgrades to facilities and would boost the lab’s capabilities. Greg Mello comment: This article portrays the shiny object that is NNSA's non-compliant "NEPA analysis" but does not really explain what's all about or why it is little more than an "attractive nuisance," to borrow a legal concept. Interested parties might look here for starters: Bulletin 308: NNSA "scoping" process at LANL designed to legitimate nuclear weapons, mislead, and distract; best to steer clear, step up real resistance and constructive actions. Follow the links for more. Neither does Jay explain why he has supported pit production at LANL for going on 20 years now, as the supposed lesser evil. Jay and the wider Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA) and its deep-pocketed, out-of-state funders have promoted LANL as the sole pit production site in the hopes that it could be a "Goldilocks-sized" plant making 30 pits per year, as the ANA president has repeatedly told me and others here in Washington, DC, where I now am, working to undo this madness. That stance has supported the New Mexico delegation in their successful work to bring the industrial pit mission to LANL in spite of NNSA's own recommendations against doing so in 2017. The problems with that Goldilocks strategy, or bringing pit production here so that LANL "screw-ups" would doom it (as Jay put it), is that it opens the door to endless investment and expansion. The out-of-touch assumption that the U.S. military will allow pit production to fall flat or be inadequate is wrong. "When will they every learn?" as the old Pete Seeger song put it. And the assumption that LANL had a pit facility in place that could be brought on line, to avoid investing in a larger, modern, safer facility in South Carolina, was a factual error -- a categorical error. LANL has an old, small, unsafe facility that can make a few pits, but as ought to be clear to all by now, LANL never has had a reliable pit factory, and NNSA is investing about $14 billion to try and build and operate one (FY19-FY28) at LANL. That's more than NNSA had estimated it would cost to build a new factory from scratch. As to the SWEIS and scoping process, as you can read at the link above we worked very hard to bring this about, but now it comes only AFTER the main decision to build a pit factory at LANL. Those who complain about expansion only now should have seen this coming but all such voices are welcome, whatever has come before. Meanwhile, citizens should not allow themselves to be gulled into thinking that this is some kind of legal, democratic process, or [that] what they say will matter. It won't. That's the bigger danger here. We are in very deep waters and are facing a rogue agency that has, in many ways, overcome most of constitutional restraints, as many parties have observed up close and personal back here in DC. Far too many people are naive about the neo-colonial agenda for New Mexico that is being written by military-nuclear bureaucrats and corporate leaders, with full support from our very hawkish congressional delegation. They only represent the people of the state in small matters. They go along with the nuclear cabal on the big things. Pit production is the largest investment in the history of New Mexico. The longer it goes on, the more it will hurt this state. It can be stopped, because it is stupid, and a lot of people know that. Raise your voice please. |
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