To avoid delaying construction of a plutonium pit factory in South Carolina and still comply with a judicialorder in an antinuclear coalition’s lawsuit, the federal government could cancel a companion pit plant in NewMexico, an antinuclear activist said Wednesday.
In September, the National Nuclear Security Administration lost a lawsuit against a group of five antinuclearplaintiffs who argued that the agency had not fully studied the environmental effects of building plutonium pits,the fissile cores of nuclear weapon first stages, in two states.
The U.S. District Court for South Carolina has given the parties until Nov. 4 to find some “middle ground” forthe agency to complete that review without halting construction of the Savannah River Plutonium ProcessingFacility (SRPPF).
“We believe there is a ‘middle ground’ available to the Court and the Parties in this case,” Greg Mello, executivedirector of the Los Alamos Study Group in Albuquerque, wrote in a proposed amicus brief filed Wednesday.“NNSA should revert to the single-site production strategy.”
That single site, Mello said in his 18-page declaration, could be the Savannah River Site.
In his 18-page declaration, Mello grinds a well-ground ax, writing that NNSA’s existing body of environmentalreviews for pit production, dating to 2008, do not support or contemplate the agency’s current plans tomanufacture warhead cores at both the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site.
If the NNSA reverts to a single-site pit manufactury, it “would be neither necessary nor equitable to halt SRPPFactivities,” Mello wrote in his declaration.
Meanwhile, the Los Alamos pit plant on Oct. 1 produced its first war-usable pit for a W87-1 intercontinentalballistic missile warhead, the NNSA said. In February at the ExchangeMonitor’s annual Nuclear DeterrenceSummit, lab staff said they would start making more W87-1 pits as soon as the first was built.
The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility could cost as much as $25 billion to build and might takeuntil 2035 to complete, the NNSA said in its 2025 budget request, published in March. In legal filings in the case, the NNSA has said that stopping construction at Savannah River could delay the pit program by five years.
The plaintiffs in the South Carolina suit include environmental watch group Savannah River Site Watch ofSouth Carolina; Tom Clements, director of Savannah River Site Watch; The Gullah Geechee Sea IslandCoalition, a group representing the interests of some descendants of enslaved Africans dwelling on the lowerAtlantic coast; Nuclear Watch New Mexico of Santa Fe, N.M.; and the Tri-Valley Communities Against aRadioactive Environment, of Livermore, Calif.
