|
|
|
For immediate release: October 30, 2024
Study Group files "friend of the court" motion in South Carolina plutonium "pit" lawsuit One pit factory instead of two would fully resolve this lawsuit while preserving strong environmental law (For further background see the press advisory of October 22, 2024, "Darkling Plain: whither the legal fight in South Carolina over plutonium "pit" environmental analysis? What does it mean? What will happen?") Contact: Greg Mello 505-265-1200 office, 505-577-8563 cell
Mark your calendars!
Albuquerque, NM -- Today the Los Alamos Study Group, a peace-oriented policy and education organization based in Albuquerque NM, filed an amicus curiae ("friend of the court") Motion and Declaration in the U.S. District Court for South Carolina in a lawsuit there seeking National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) compliance for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA's) two-factory pit production program.
The Study Group is represented by John W. Fletcher and M. Dawes Cooke at the Barnwell Whaley firm in South Carolina.
We had previously written the parties in the case requesting that they consent to, or at least not oppose, our appearance. We have not heard back from any of them.
The three-year-old lawsuit's main issues were argued this spring and summer. On September 30, Judge Mary Geiger Lewis ruled for the Plaintiffs on their main NEPA claim, dismissing the other four without prejudice ("Memorandum Opinion and Order," Sep 30, 2024).
Judge Lewis ruled that NNSA's 2019 determination (p. 67 here) to not undertake a NEPA alternatives analysis for the two-site plutonium pit production plan first recommended on May 10, 2018 was arbitrary, capricious, and unlawful. In our previous press release we praised the judge's decision in this regard, noting that we had repeatedly apprised NNSA of this illegality beginning six years ago.
Judge Lewis has thrown the thorny problem of what to do about this illegality back to the parties, with a joint settlement proposal due this coming Monday, Nov. 4.
Today's Declaration seeks, first of all, to correct important legal and factual errors introduced into the record by Plaintiffs and not opposed by Defendants, claiming the pit production program at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) can proceed as planned even if the Court were to vacate the NEPA decision upon which NNSA's two-factory pit program is based.
Plaintiffs seek to pause preparations for pit production in South Carolina while NNSA prepares a supplementary national ("programmatic") NEPA analysis. Should the Plaintiffs fully prevail, all pit production preparations in South Carolina would be paused while all pit production preparations in New Mexico would proceed unimpeded.
Judge Lewis's opinion largely turns on NNSA's ill-fated decision to abandon its previous single-site pit production plans without NEPA alternatives analysis.
LANL's circa $22 billion portion of the dual-site production mission has never been studied, or even referenced, in any environmental impact statement (EIS), of any kind. And to make a long story short, single-site pit production at LANL, at any level, has never at any time been compared to production at other sites in an even remotely realistic manner. Going back 28 years, the Stockpile Stewardship and Management programmatic EIS in 1996 was based on assumptions we now know to be, and others which since became, wildly fallacious.
NNSA did prepare a nationwide EIS in 2008, but that EIS, like the LANL Site-Wide EIS prepared at roughly the same time, assumed completion of the huge $6 billion-and-rising Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF) at LANL, which was to be an essential part of any pit production mission at LANL.
Work at the CMRR-NF site was halted in October 2010 due to litigation by the Los Alamos Study Group and the project was subsequently canceled after the additional NEPA analysis impelled by our lawsuit. So that EIS is also categorically counterfactual.
Today's declaration points out that the easiest and simplest way to resolve this case, and so in a manner which fully meets the requirements of NEPA for objective, pre-decisional analysis and decisionmaking while also avoiding "pausing" (realistically: ending) the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF), would be for NNSA to return to the single-site pit production practice and plan which NNSA and its predecessor agencies had from 1965 until April, 2018. In fact in 2017 NNSA explicitly ruled out every aspect of the present plan -- except for production at what is now called SRPPF.
Two of the present plaintiffs, Nuclear Watch of New Mexico and Tri-Valley CAREs of Livermore, CA, were also part of a 2009 effort to transfer all NNSA nuclear materials (plutonium, uranium, and tritium) processing and production work to LANL, as part of a well-funded effort to consolidate NNSA's entire nuclear warhead production complex into the two New Mexico laboratories (LANL and Sandia National Laboratories) and the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, TX.
Today's Declaration concludes:
Study Group director Mello adds,
***ENDS*** |
|||
|
|
|||
|