Not that it ever stopped, but the National Nuclear Security Administration on Wednesday officially reaffirmed its decision to continue building the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
The long-expected news, delivered in an amended record of decision filed in the Federal Register, was pressaged in June, when the agency completed a court-ordered environmental review of earthquake hazards at the planned site of its next-generation manufacturing hub for nuclear-weapon secondary stages.
The National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) supplement analysis from the summer folded earthquake data published in 2014 by the Department of Interior’s U.S. Geological Service into an earlier environmental review of the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF).
That earthquake data was not available when the agency completed the initial environmental analysis for UPF in 2011, and a host of environmental groups used that fact as one pillar of a federal lawsuit aimed at halting construction of the factory.
In the 2017 suit filed in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Tennessee, the plaintiffs — the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, and the Natural Resources Defense Council — argued that the NNSA needed to redo its environmental review to include the 2014 earthquake data. They also argued that the NNSA needed to pause construction of UPF to do that.
In the end, the trial court disagreed, prompting the plaintiffs to file an appeal that was still live in the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court, at deadline. The environmental groups will have to press their appeal, if they want a shot at slowing down UPF.
While the NNSA rejiggered UPF’s environmental paperwork this year, crews at the site — where the agency broke ground in 2018 — started working in staggered shifts to help slow the spread of COVID-19. Measure to check the disease caused by the novel coronavirus closed down parts of Y-12 earlier this year for a little over a month, but with summer in the rearview mirror, the site has now been open more often than not during the pandemic response.
The NNSA has committed to finish building UPF by 2025 for no more than $6.5 billion. Consolidated Nuclear Security, which is losing its Y-12 management contract on Oct. 1, 2021, will remain on site after that to finish building UPF. The NNSA has said that keeping the company on the job, under a new prime’s watch, is the best way to avoid delaying the project.
