For immediate release: August 12, 2025

Los Alamos Lab to build new power line through culturally-significant recreation area to power nuclear bomb factory, computers

NNSA says it needs more reliable, redundant power sources for new national security missions; secret agreement made with tribes, agencies

Previously: Gigantic Department of Energy program to make plutonium warhead cores ("pits") has overshot its budget and is being re-evaluated; NNSA has no analysis of alternatives supportive of its present pit plans. Los Alamos Study Group: it needs one, Jul 12, 2025

Contact: Greg Mello: 505-577-8563 cell

Permalink * Prior press releases

Albuquerque, NM -- Today, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) issued a Decision Notice and Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) for Los Alamos National Laboratory's Electrical Power Capacity Upgrade Project (EPCU). This FONSI is the conclusion of an Environment Assessment (EA) process (Final EA) that began in April 2021. Further project information is available from the U.S. Forest Service.

Further background and context can be found in our April 19, 2021 press release: "Third power line proposed for Los Alamos; environmental assessment process starting 12.5 mile 115 kV line would cross the relatively-unspoiled Caja del Rio portion of the Santa Fe National Forest, then the scenic Rio Grande canyon south of White Rock, NM, largely parallel to existing 115 kV line."

Detailed financial history and projections for the $368 million project can be found at pp. 430-435 here.

Construction activities are expected to begin this year and conclude in 2027 or 2028.

As the FONSI states (p. 3), [t]he transmission line can transport energy from different sources...to allow LANL to obtain the redundancy needed for mission success."

This project has been extremely controversial since it was first proposed, possibly more controversial than any other single project in recent LANL history. There have been three public hearings; a virtual initial scoping hearing and two in-person hearings. Tens of thousands of comments opposing this project were made, and the project was strenuously opposed by multiple Indian pueblos.

Subsequent to our scoping comments of May 2021, our own comments were made orally in those two on-person hearings and at a July 22, 2024 NNSA town hall in Pojoaque.

NNSA completed its EA a year ago (FONSI, p. 10), but did not issue its decision until today. The decision cites Trump administration executive orders (EOs) rescinding the 1994 environmental justice EO and disbanding the Interagency Working Group on the social cost of greenhouse gases (Ibid).

After completion of the final EA, "additional time was needed to complete the Forest Service process for changes to the Santa Fe National Forest Land Management Plan and to develop and finalize a Memorandum of Agreement [MOA] addressing how cultural and historical resources would be managed related to the project implementation under the [National Historic Preservation Act]" (Ibid.). This MOA includes agreements with at least some if not all the Indian pueblos that were opposing the project. The documents released today do not include the MOA.

Study Group director Greg Mello: 

"This project, as much as or more than any other single LANL project, exemplifies LANL's seemingly unlimited greed for New Mexico's scarce resources. In this case, it is not just electrical energy but also the relatively untrammeled vistas, ecological richness, and the living link with the past that is embodied in the Caja del Rio. 

"The Caja is an important landscape providing relative solitude and spiritual renewal for New Mexicans and visitors alike, one that is accessible in all seasons. Yes, there are management problems, but the addition of yet another electrical transmission line, carrying the power needed for the expansion of LANL, is an insult and an injury. 

"Peggy Pond Church, a friend of mine, quoted Edith Warner, 

My friend was wrong who said that this country was so old it does not matter what we Anglos do here. What we do anywhere matters but especially here. lt matters very much. Mesas and mountains, rivers and trees, winds and rains are as sensitive to the actions and thought of humans as we are to their forces. They take into themselves what we give off and give it out again.

Peggy continues, 

What the former inhabitants of the plateau had given off was now part of the essence of this land. She was beginning to learn what it means to live at the center of a sacred world. (House at Otowi Bridge, pp. 18-19)

"As Peggy told me in so many words, this is what LANL has destroyed and is still destroying. LANL, she said to me, was the worst thing that ever happened to New Mexico. 

"This project is poorly justified. It is also intimately "connected," in the sense of the National Environmental Policy Act, to a huge program of construction and expansion that dwarfs all prior expansions at LANL. The centerpiece of this expansion is LANL's $30 billion bid to become a nuclear bomb factory, making the cores of new warheads for an arms race that has not yet started, but will if the momentum that began under Obama and has continued under every president since him is not stopped. 

"This vast expansion is draining skilled labor, housing, and as we see here electricity from the region. These go into the black hole that is LANL. There it produces danger. The intention is to focus this danger on other countries as part of a comprehensive array of force, so as to compel those countries to do what the U.S. wants. The reality is that the danger is primarily to us here and now, as our resources and ultimately very souls are required for this mission. 

"No one should think that this process of theft can continue and succeed indefinitely. Even now its end can be seen, though the details remain vague. We must put an end to it, or it will put an end to us." 

***ENDS***