For immediate release
January 7, 2022

Is the Department of Energy (DOE) going to conduct a new Site Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) for Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and if so what would it mean?

Reference: Los Alamos Reporter, "DOE/NNSA To Start New LANL Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement," 1/6/2022

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

Permalink * Prior press releases

Albuquerque, NM -- Apparently DOE has has just received funding to prepare a SWEIS for LANL. This news, if it is news, was conveyed orally last night (see Maire's article above).

The short answers to the above two questions are, respectively: maybe; and no one can tell at this time.

More concrete answers will begin to be available only with an official Federal Register announcement, if and when it happens. That however would only be the beginning of the process. It is unwise to say more until then.

Background

This organization began to press for a new SWEIS under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) at LANL in early 2019 ("Legal concerns regarding NNSA’s pit production plans," Memo to NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, Feb 5, 2019) building on prior notice and background provided in April 2018 (here and in more detail here).

Many subsequent meetings with officials from local, state, tribal, and federal government, a citizens SWEIS scoping hearing, and many other activities followed over the subsequent year and a half (see this page for some of them). For easy reference, many (not all) pertinent environmental analyses and Records of Decisions (RODs) can be found here.

Our letters to the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) of June 27 and 29, 2020 may be of particular interest.

A summary of the importance of NEPA in pit production decisions was provided to the Congressional Research Service (CRS); see pp. 27-29 here.

On September 2, 2020, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA, a subset of DOE) issued two amended RODs, the SWEIS-AROD, and the CTSPEIS-AROD (Complex Transformation Supplemental Programmatic EIS). These were shortly followed by this presentation to the New Mexico Legislature's Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee, explaining the inadequacy of NNSA's "analysis" and decisions.

In these decisions NNSA and DOE decided that a new SWEIS for LANL, and a new CTSPEIS, would not be needed to implement NNSA's pit production plans -- at LANL, production of a minimum of 30 pits per year (ppy), with surge production of up to 80 ppy. (Nota bene: these production levels are a "code" implicitly referencing a classified program requirements document and subsequent modeling studies indicating that "30 ppy" as a minimum really means about 41 ppy on average; "80 ppy" really means 103 ppy on average; see p. 13. In practice it is never clear what actual production level is being referenced without further information.)

There is absolutely no indication that NNSA has decided to pause any preparations for pit production, or pause any other activities, at LANL for the sake of NEPA compliance, and every indication to the contrary. So it is not clear what meaning the present announcement has. NEPA requires analysis before decisions to proceed with federal projects.

In late 2021 a senior local DOE official remarked that perhaps a new SWEIS would be prepared for LANL. No schedule or other indication of seriousness was provided. Certainly a new SWEIS is indeed inevitable sooner or later.

This raises the specter of a completely meaningless show of so-called "NEPA compliance," which is now normal NNSA practice, as we have said in some of the above memoranda as well as in extensive previous litigation.

In recent legislative testimony we therefore offered these comments and recommendations ("Unprecedented weapons production mission at LANL threatens regional decline, loss of autonomy: what can this committee do?," slide deck for NM Radioactive & Hazardous Materials Committee, Nov 12, 2021, slides 6-7):

Recommendations

• Demand transparency for the State, tribes, local governments and citizens. Go around NNSA and LANL, which have never been and will never be candid. For example, request the:

• LANL Integrated Strategy (annual iterations? FY20 is available);
• LANL Site Plan (annual iterations?);
• Independent Assessment of the Plutonium Strategy of the NNSA (Institute for Defense Analyses, 2019);
• Critical Decision Zero (CD-0) documents for the “Pit Disassembly and Processing Project;”
• CD-1 documents for the Los Alamos Plutonium Pit Production Project (LAP4);  
• LANL “Master Asset Deep Dive” planning documents; and
• LANL transportation, utilities, and housing plans; records of LANL’s and NNSA’s engagement with private parties to realize these plans.

• Some of these documents can be requested from the White House as well as congressional committees. Unclassified plans should be supplied in full and in redacted form for public release.

• Request a pause to authorizations and appropriations pending release, to the State, of these and any other plans pertaining to the future of northern and central New Mexico, and pending subsequent public meetings regarding these plans

• Demand that NNSA conduct public meetings once these plans are available to interested parties, engaging with the White House and congressional committees for leverage to make this happen.

• Send a delegation from this committee to Washington to meet with President Biden to demand a pause in current plans until democratic processes are in place to publicly review whether these plans are in the best interests of tribes and New Mexico citizens and governments.

• Obviously, this committee cannot conduct any oversight or conduct any other function relative to this huge project unless it has these plans. Oral presentations and vague slide presentations, especially if conducted in secret, are entirely inadequate for a project of such historic magnitude.

• Do not settle for offers to conduct a new Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) as long as progress continues on this project. DOE NEPA practice is to offer project “scenarios” which obscure what is actually going on while providing legal cover for new projects later. Proceeding with projects during NEPA analysis is fundamentally contrary to NEPA in any case.

• There may be other ways to acquire transparency as regards these programs but I do not see them right now.* I recommend choosing the most straightforward and open actions, those which bring as much of the truth of the situation into the full light of day as possible, as soon as possible, prior to irreversible federal commitments.

• What’s key is to realize that you do have ample political power, and you could use it.

*We subsequently wrote the committee with another idea: request the Attorney General to litigate under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for these documents.

Do you see? NEPA is used by DOE and NNSA to obscure, rather than provide transparency, and as a tool to provide carte blanche for many possible future decisions, rather than well-defined, realistic alternatives.

Big nuclear weapons programs definitely affect jurisprudence, so NNSA generally gets away with this.

Comments

We are very concerned about the misuse of "public involvement" as a substitute for legally-required, democratic processes, not just in this case but across government. Much of what passes for good-faith process isn't. The goal is rather to use the public to legitimate decisions which have already been made.

Usually -- almost certainly in this case -- the public and other governments are being "socially engineered," their attention directed in the desired direction, a direction devoid of agency. Usually, DOE processes are political scams.

We have filed four lawsuits under NEPA against DOE, all successful to one degree or another. From this experience and subsequent observation it is possible to confidently say: NEPA has been gutted at DOE. Whether it can realistically be rescued in any particular case is another question.

***ENDS***