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Energy officials grant more time to comment on LANL power line plan By Scott Wyland swyland@sfnewmexican.com
Federal energy officials are giving the public an additional 30 days to comment about an environmental assessment of a planned 14-mile power line that will stretch through forests and the Caja del Rio to Los Alamos National Laboratory. The U.S. Energy Department originally offered a 30-day comment period set to end Jan. 17 but is now adding a second 30-day period in response to residents, activists and congressional delegates calling for more time to peruse the study and weigh in with their concerns. The U.S. Energy Department and its nuclear security agency also will hold a public hearing on the transmission line Jan. 11 at Santa Fe Community College. Conservationists, Indigenous advocates, residents and four New Mexico congressional delegates were among those who complained the agencies were giving people too little time to comment during the holiday season when they’re busy with festivities and traveling. Their criticisms swayed the department. “The cooperating agencies determined a second 30-day comment period is warranted based on multiple factors, including community concerns recently raised about the timing of the current comment period,” the agency said in a news release. The environmental study was done to gauge the effects the high-voltage power line, first announced in 2021, might have on the landscape, wildlife, ecosystems, Indigenous cultural sites and recreation areas. It was required for the U.S. Energy Department to obtain a special-use permit to install the 20,000-volt line on public land. The power line will have transmission towers and a 100-foot-wide swath along its path from the lab through White Rock Canyon, south across the Caja del Rio area and then east through the Santa Fe National Forest to a substation. Lab officials say the transmission line is needed because the two lines that now power the lab are becoming strained and will reach their capacity by 2027. The third line also would provide the lab a redundant or backup power source, which is especially important for its supercomputers, officials say. Greg Mello published comment: Federal and LANL (i.e. contractor) managers are nervously eyeing this issue, which has quite rightly stuck in the craw of so many people. The congressional delegation has suggested that all will be well, and concerns sufficiently smoothed, if the comment period is extended and a meeting held to provide a place for people to blow off steam. These officials -- the truly powerful, unelected ones in the nuclear cartel and the "elected" (selected) officials who serve them -- aren't suggesting any changes in their plans, just a sham "democratic" process to keep the natives from being too restless. That is not just a figure of speech. The natives, and we settlers, everybody, should all be nervous. LANL has doubled its projected electricity needs. What for? To design nuclear weapons, mainly, and for other military purposes. A bit of civilian work can be done from time to time, for public relations and to cultivate self-deception at LANL. So how much computing power is enough? How much waste heat, fueled by coal and lignite primarily in the case of LANL, are enough? Years ago I asked one of the top U.S. nuclear weapons designers how much data would be enough for him (to assure that U.S. nuclear weapons would keep working under a test ban regime). His frank answer was: "As much data [and computational power] as I can get -- that is how much I need." Nothing has changed. That is also today's imperative, as far as NNSA and LANL are concerned. Yesterday's ultra-fast computers aren't good enough for tomorrow's needs, which centrally involve new nuclear explosives to be mated onto new missiles in new applications, as LANL's own agenda states. The heavy power usage of LANL is symbolic of its role in our economy: so much going in -- labor, resources, money, more and more of all these -- and what do we get? Weapons which, if they are ever used, would usher in the worst day in human history. Returning to the nuclear weapons industry itself, I am describing a situation that has no internal brakes of any kind, no sense of reasonable proportion. The brakes have to be applied from the outside, by people who have not lost their reason, who are not caught up in institutional imperatives. There is a famous passage from Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida" that was cited by retired diplomat George Kennan, the original author of the "containment" policy toward the Soviet Union, in his desperate opposition to the development and stockpiling of hydrogen bombs, back in the day. It goes like this: "Take but degree away, untune that string, / And, hark, what discord follows! .../ Then every thing includes itself in power, / Power into will, will into appetite; / And appetite, an universal wolf, / So doubly seconded with will and power, / Must make perforce an universal prey, / And last eat up himself." |
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