|
For immediate release: January 9, 2025
Contact: Greg Mello: 505-265-1200 office, 505-577-8563 cell
Permalink * Prior press releases
Albuquerque, NM -- Tomorrow (January 10, 2025) the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will release its Draft Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement for Continued Operation of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (Draft LANL SWEIS) to these Department of Energy (DOE) web pages https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/nnsa-nepa-reading-room and https://www.energy.gov/nepa/listings/latest-documents-and-notices.
Generally speaking, NNSA is undertaking this analysis and public comment process under the auspices of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
As the Federal Register notice says, the draft LANL SWEIS will analyze the environmental impacts of three alternatives: "No Action," "Modernized Operations," and "Expanded Operations."
There are to be four public hearings to take oral comments (details are in the notice), two of which will have a virtual component for those wishing to provide comment from afar. There will be a 60-day comment period, through March 11, 2025.
There have been three prior SWEISs at LANL: 1979 (EIS-0018); 1999 (EIS-0238, Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3); and 2008 (EIS-0380, this page). The second two, at least, were occasions of notable public involvement and comment.
On October 7, 2020, the Los Alamos Study Group hosted a citizens' public hearing at the New Mexico State Capitol to take comments on the scope of the future LANL SWEIS, which were transmitted in full to NNSA and other agencies later that month. Our comments in early 2022 anticipating this SWEIS are here.
The present SWEIS process, beginning with two virtual scoping hearings, was officially announced on August 19, 2022. Our scoping comments are here.
In 2019 and 2020, NNSA studied whether to write a new SWEIS that could analyze alternatives to constructing a plutonium warhead core ("pit") production capability at LANL. That process was formalized in a draft (our comments) and then a final "Supplement Analysis," (our comments), which concluded that no new SWEIS need be written to analyze alternatives for the new LANL pit mission. A formal decision to not analyze pit production at LANL further was made on Sept. 2, 2020.
Because of that decision, NNSA believes the present draft SWEIS need not re-examine the decision to manufacture "a minimum of 30 war reserve pits per year" at LANL, with "surge efforts to exceed 30 pits per year up to the analyzed limit to meet NPR [Nuclear Posture Review] and national policy."
The Draft SWEIS may however -- we will find out tomorrow -- analyze increases in LANL's pit production mission. It will certainly analyze additional infrastructure construction and facility upgrades.
The three alternatives in the draft SWEIS are described in the current announcement as follows (emphasis added):
The No-Action Alternative includes 87 new projects, totaling almost 1.5 million square feet, that would be implemented between 2024 and 2038. Also, under No-Action, NNSA would implement 11 projects involving facility upgrades, utilities, and infrastructure affecting about 216 acres of the LANL site. About 1.6 million square feet of excess or aging facilities would undergo DD&D under the No-Action Alternative. The No-Action Alternative also includes changes in operations, examples of which include increased plutonium pit production and the remediation of a chromium plume in Mortandad Canyon (which was the subject of a recent environmental assessment).
The Modernized Operations Alternative includes the scope of the No-Action Alternative plus additional modernization activities, including (1) construction of replacement facilities; (2) upgrades to existing facilities, utilities, and infrastructure; and (3) DD&D projects. Under the Modernized Operations Alternative, NNSA would replace facilities that are approaching their end of life, upgrade facilities to extend their lifetimes, and improve work environments to enable NNSA to meet operational requirements. The Modernized Operations Alternative also includes proposed projects to reduce greenhouse gases and other emissions. The Modernized Operations Alternative includes 139 new projects, totaling over 3.4 million square feet, that would be implemented between 2025 and 2038. Under Modernized Operations, NNSA would implement 27 projects involving facility upgrades, utilities, and infrastructure affecting about 925 acres of the LANL site. Of these 925 acres, up to 795 acres are proposed for installation of up to 159 megawatts of solar photovoltaic arrays across the site. An additional 1.2 million square feet of excess or aging facilities would undergo DD&D under the Modernized Operations Alternative.
The Expanded Operations Alternative includes the actions proposed under the Modernized Operations Alternative, plus actions that would expand operations and missions to respond to future national security challenges and meet increasing requirements. This alternative includes construction and operation of new facilities that would expand capabilities at LANL beyond those that currently exist. The Expanded Operations Alternative includes 18 additional new projects, totaling about 947,000 square feet, that would be implemented between 2025 and 2038. Under Expanded Operations, NNSA would implement 4 additional projects involving utilities and infrastructure affecting about 46 acres of the LANL site. Most of the utilities and infrastructure projects would be directly related to proposed projects under the Expanded Operations Alternative. The Expanded Operations Alternative also includes changes in operations, examples of which include revised wildland fire risk reduction treatments and management of feral cattle.
Study Group director Greg Mello:
"NNSA's present NEPA efforts at LANL are being undertaken to create a veneer of legitimacy for decisions that were taken prior to environmental analysis, and in direct violation of NEPA.
"Not only have many of these decisions already been taken, analyses of the cumulative impacts of individual projects are being swept into a big garbage bag called the "No-Action" alternative. The impacts of these connected actions, and alternatives to these actions, were never analyzed.
"Some of these projects have already been built. But as today's announcement says, the "No-Action" alternative also includes 87 brand-new projects and 11 facility and infrastructure upgrades. This SWEIS is designed to allow NNSA to avoid analysis of alternatives to these projects.
"The SWEIS will also be handy to insulate future projects and decisions, such as those enumerated in the two "action" alternatives, from detailed environmental analysis. What NNSA typically does is to simply say, years later, that this or that new project has less impact than what was analyzed in the SWEIS, so alternatives need not be examined.
"All this is the exact opposite of NEPA's intent. NNSA has just powered ahead with its plans regardless of the law, hiring 5,000 additional people just in the past five years and almost doubling LANL's budget with no prior NEPA analysis. All that and much, much more, NNSA calls "No Action."
"If NNSA were actually following NEPA, LANL's huge pit production efforts would be paused pending environmental analysis. There has never been an environmental analysis of alternatives to LANL's pit production mission. For that matter there has also never been even a business-case analysis supporting LANL's pit mission -- although there has been one which doesn't support it!
"Using NEPA to greenwash LANL's anti-environmental agenda is important to NNSA. LANL, with its 10,000 commuters and energy-hungry facilities, is the biggest climate-destroyer in the region. Any actual use of LANL's products would most likely result in the end of civilization, and possibly humankind altogether. Even one nuclear explosion would dwarf by many, many times the destruction we now see from the Los Angeles wildfires.
"LANL's big new mission is actually manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, not just its historic mission of telling others how to do it. LANL is now tasked with making pits for a new warhead, the purpose of which is to allow the numerical growth of the nuclear arsenal. This is something quite new, and it is legally questionable under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
"All this is tremendously controversial. By guiding concerns into the "safe" channels of NNSA's Alice-in-Wonderland approach to NEPA, the nuclear powers-that-be hope to bumfuzzzle and paralyze resistance. We don't intend to let that happen.
"The present spectacle is all about who's in charge, not "environmental analysis." It's about sovereignty -- who has it and who doesn't. It's about how much nuclear colonization people can be made to accept."
***ENDS***
|
