By Exchange Monitor

A 2019 law ordering production of pits at Los Alamos is not a substitute for a required environmental analysis of the program that, an antinuclear activist said this week in court, the National Nuclear Security Administration still has not done.

“There is no such exemption here, and Congress cannot order the Los Alamos National Laboratory to make 30 pits per year without proper NEPA analysis,” the Albuquerque-based Los Alamos Study Group said Wednesday in a Wednesday court filing.

Attorneys for the federal government maintain that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) fulfilled its environmental due diligence for pit production at Los Alamos when, in 2020, it supplemented a larger environmental review from 2008 of the entire NNSA nuclear weapons enterprise.

“The Proposed Amicus attempts to introduce a new NEPA claim by arguing that NNSA lacks preexisting, independent NEPA coverage for Los Alamos to produce thirty pits per year,” the federal government wrote Nov. 13. These “factual and legal assertions” by the third party are “simply wrong.”

Moreover, the federal government said, making at least 30 pits a year at Los Alamos is the law. Congress codified the requirement in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act.

The study group’s filing is part of a sort of side show that began a few weeks ago in a three year-old lawsuit filed by other antinuclear groups. In October, the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina, Aiken, handed the plaintiffs a partial victory by ruling that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) needed to conduct a full environmental review of its now-five-year-old plan to produce plutonium pits in two states.

The plaintiff antinuclear groups wanted the NNSA to stop development of a planned plutonium pit factory at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., while the agency conducted its review of the two-state pit plant. NNSA said holding up the Savannah River plant for another environmental review could delay production of pits in South Carolina by five years. NNSA now estimates that the plant will come online in 2032 or so.

Meanwhile, the judge in the lawsuit has ordered the antinuclear plaintiffs and the federal defendants to figure out how NNSA can conduct both a meaningful environmental review and continue development of the South Carolina pit plant. 

Subsequent to the judge’s order, the Los Alamos Study Group, and its executive director Greg Mello, appeared to recommend a solution: cancel the planned Los Alamos pit factory altogether and concentrate production of new fissile warhead cores at the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, which in Mello’s view had received sufficient environmental review.

The court has given the parties in the case, which officially Mello is not because the court has not yet accepted his request to make his declarations part of the record, until Dec. 12 to reach a “middle ground” between freezing development of the Savannah River pit plant and reviewing the environmental effects of building and operating the plant only after the plant is built.