Environmentalists this week sued to stop the National Nuclear Security Administration from building a plutonium pit plant at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., alleging violation of environmental law.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) should have to reopen the environmental record for the planned Savannah River Plutonium Pit Production Facility (SRPPF) and a federal judge should “ensure that Defendants take no further actions toward proceeding with their plutonium pit production plans” until completing a programmatic environmental impact statement for SRPPF, four groups and one individual wrote in the suit filed in the U.S. District Court for South Carolina.
The plaintiffs are: Savannah River Site Watch of South Carolina; Tom Clements, director of Savannah River Site Watch; The Gullah Geechee Sea Island Coalition, representing the interests of some descendants of enslaved Africans dwelling on the lower Atlantic coast; Nuclear Watch New Mexico of Santa Fe, N.M.; and the Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, of Livermore, Calif.
The defendants are Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm and acting NNSA Administrator Charles Verdon. Pits are the fissile cores of nuclear-weapon primary stages.
Attorneys for the DOE and the NNSA had not filed responses to the complaint at deadline for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
The NNSA disclosed this month in congressional testimony that SRPPF would cost up to $11.1 billion to complete by 2035. That is the high end of a cost range developed for the facility’s critical decision 1 review, which the agency officially approved on Monday. The critical decision one top-end is more than twice the cost of an estimate from 2018, with a construction end-date five years later than projected in 2018.
Some of the environmentalists who sued on Tuesday had previously urged the NNSA to complete a programmatic environmental impact statement prior to the critical decision one review. A DOE order requires an environmental review before proceeding to critical decision one on certain projects.
The NNSA has said it satisfied its environmental obligations for SRPPF by conducting a site-specific review about the facility, which examined only the effects of the proposed pit plant on the Savannah River Site itself.
A full programmatic environmental impact statement, which could take years, would include the environmental effects not only at Savannah River, but in each state involved with DOE’s plan to produce at least 80 pits annually, starting in the 2030s, for nuclear-weapon refurbishments as far away as the 2080s or so.
NNSA said it did not need to conduct a programmatic environmental impact statement because it already assessed the effects of a two-state plutonium production complex, most of which are the same as what the agency studied in 2008, when it was considering a one-state pit operation at Los Alamos.
