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For immediate release: January 17, 2025
Contact: Greg Mello: 505-265-1200 office, 505-577-8563 cell
Permalink * Prior press releases
Albuquerque, NM -- Yesterday a three-and-a-half-year-long lawsuit challenging the adequacy of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) analysis supporting construction of a plutonium warhead core ("pit") factory at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina came to an end with the filing of a Settlement Agreement and its acceptance by Judge Mary Geiger Lewis in the U.S. District Court of South Carolina. Terms of the agreement can be read on pp. 6-10 at the link.
Plaintiffs were Savannah River Site Watch, Tom Clements, Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, Tri-Valley CAREs of Livermore, California, and The Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition. Defendants were the Department of Energy (DOE), Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm in her official capacity, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and Administrator Jill Hruby in her official capacity.
In their settlement, the parties agreed that DOE and NNSA would produce a new Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) examining the environmental impact of alternative approaches to pit production and reach a new Record of Decision (ROD) within 2.5 years, in the process holding initial hearings ("scoping hearings") and subsequent hearings on the draft PEIS in at least five locations: Aiken, SC, Kansas City, MO, Livermore, CA, Santa Fe or Los Alamos, NM, and Washington, DC.
Until the ROD is filed (i.e. until July 17, 2027, more or less), DOE and NNSA agreed not to introduce nuclear material into the main processing building of the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPFF), the pit factory at SRS now under construction, and to not install classified equipment into the SRPPF.
DOE and NNSA also agreed to not start construction on four ancillary projects supporting SRPPF operations during the pendency of the ROD, with minor variations. Construction on these relatively minor projects is not needed during this period.
The current schedule for SRPPF completion is by the end of fiscal year 2032; there are no plans to introduce nuclear materials before then. The anticipated first pit production at SRPPF is in 2035. The agreed conditions will not affect the SRPPF schedule.
The agreement may be superseded by future acts of Congress.
DOE and NNSA agreed to provide plaintiffs with up to two tours of SRPPF during the pendency of the ROD.
Study Group director Greg Mello:
"The plaintiffs got nothing of substance, policy-wise, from this litigation. NNSA agreed to write a new PEIS but not to slow or stop any part of the SRPPF project. At LANL, plaintiffs didn't even ask to stop either pit production or any of the related, necessary preparations now proceeding at great cost.
"The previous NEPA records of decision upon which the current two-site pit production plan rests were not vacated in this lawsuit. The previous decision to build two pit factories instead of one adequate factory stands.
"DOE and NNSA clearly violated NEPA in their current record of decision to build two factories, as the judge ruled. But this settlement, following plaintiffs' earlier statements, misstates the NEPA record regarding pit production at LANL, by wrongfully saying LANL pit production is fully authorized under NEPA. It was authorized assuming a big new plutonium facility was built at LANL, then in the late preconstruction phase. Thanks to the work of many people, that facility was canceled. Plaintiffs are trying to erase the 35-year successful history of popular and tribal resistance to pit production at LANL.
"Unlike plaintiffs, we believe there is no valid NEPA basis for enduring pit production at LANL, and we submitted a motion of amicus curiae to the court to explain this.
"Despite NNSA's 2017 decision to not use LANL's Building PF-4 for enduring pit production, plaintiffs endorse this very use -- which can only be temporary, as NNSA understands. This settlement normalizes LANL as a pit factory.
"The touchstone of this settlement has been to allow all parties to save face and declare some sort of victory. NNSA can say they aren't slowing down any part of any project, which is true, so they won. Plaintiffs can say they got a new PEIS and some informational privileges so they won. So, is it a win-win? No: the plaintiffs lost, because both projects are going full steam ahead. The plaintiffs got what amount to empty spectacles devoid of any legal agency.
"For some years now, foundation-funded fake nuclear resistance has been a minor industry in New Mexico. The problem is also national, as this lawsuit and its outcome demonstrate.
It didn't have to be this way, because pit production at LANL -- early-to-need, less safe, inadequate in scale, beset by logistical problems of all sorts, with higher operating costs and less security, and temporary, and less supported by NEPA to boot -- has always been the weaker site for pit production. This lawsuit was misconceived from the beginning.
The NEPA hearings required in this settlement will direct activist attention toward environmental impacts, which are a minor theme, when all is said and done, in the nuclear weapons policy field. The ironclad realities that require construction of the SRPPF in order to be sure that any realistically foreseeable future arsenal can be maintained will remain. LANL pit production, in the interim period before SRPPF comes on line, is a "bonus" for nuclear hawks.
There is no need for new pits, for now. We can and should work like hell on nuclear disarmament and arms control to remove the need for pits in the 2040s and after, but the U.S. government is not going to choose forced, unilateral nuclear disarmament.
"Weirdly, the supposed anti-nuclear plaintiffs are endorsing immediate pit production for the new Sentinel warhead, the W87-1, which gives Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) renewed purpose and funding as a big nuclear weapons design lab, which providing the warheads needed to deploy multiple warheads on the Sentinel silo-based missile. Only LANL will make pits for this warhead. There are, right now, enough modern, long-lived, highly-accurate warheads to equip every proposed Sentinel missile.
"No one in the Pentagon, NNSA, the White House, and no relevant Congress committee, will ever vote to depend entirely on the inadequate facilities at LANL for the decades ahead. Halting SRPPF would create that dependence. A decision to not build SRPPF locks in the U.S. to not having a viable pit facility in the 2040s, if not before. For this and many other reasons, this lawsuit was misguided.
***ENDS***
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