The U.S. Department of Energy and anti-nuclear activists seeking to stop construction of the Uranium Processing Facility in Tennessee could find themselves in an appeals court in January to argue about a lower court’s September decision that forced a partial federal redo of the facilty’s environmental review.
The public won’t know until 2020 exactly what DOE’s issue is with Judge Pamela Reeves’ Sept. 24 decision in U.S. District Court for Eastern Tennessee. The agency must file its appellant brief by Jan. 15, while the environmental groups that sued in 2016 to halt work on the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) have until Feb. 24 to file their appellee brief, according to a notice filed this week with the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
In a bit of pre-emptive legal maneuvering, the Energy Department and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) docketed their appeal on Nov. 26 after announcng their intent to appeal on Nov. 22.
Reeves ordered the NNSA to incorporate federal earthquake hazard data into the Uranium Processing Facility’s environmental documentation. However, the judge did not explicitly tell the NNSA to stop building the facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge — so the agency did not.
That riled the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance and its fellow plaintiffs, which in October petitioned Reeves to enforce what they viewed as her decision that the NNSA had to stop construction while it rewrote a pair of supplement analyses about UPF from 2016 and 2018 that do not, as yet, include the Interior Department’s earthquake data. The analyses expand upon UPF’s main environmental impact statement from 2011.
“We believe we have an excellent chance of prevailing, especially since they conceded our main arguments by failing to refute them at all,” Ralph Hutchinson, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, wrote in an email on Tuesday.
According to the 2014 report from Interior’s U.S. Geological Survey, eastern Tennessee is more seismically hazardous than thought when the NNSA published its original environmental impact statement on the UPF in 2011.
The Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance and its fellow plaintiffs last week filed a notice with the District Court that DOE’s appeal would not necessarily prevent Reeves from ordering a halt to construction of the Uranium Processing Facility. The other plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Nuclear Watch New Mexico and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The groups filed suit in 2016, saying that the NNSA should have incorporated the Interior Department’s 2014 seismic hazard data into the UPF’s environmental documentation after the agency decided to split the plant into three main buildings instead of one.
The NNSA said in October that it could take “months” to complete a new supplement analysis for the plant. The agency has committed to completing the plant by 2025 at a cost of no more than $6.5 billion. The facility will purify uranium for use in the secondary stages of nuclear warheads and manufacture those secondary stages.
The UPF is entering peak spending years and is already facing pressure from a pair of continuing resolutions that have held its current funding at prior-year levels – the annualized equivalent of about $700 million: some $30 million less than requested for fiscal 2020. The federal budget year began on Oct. 1, but Congress has yet to approve any full-year appropriations bills.
Bechtel National is building the UPF under a subcontract to Y-12 prime Consolidated Nuclear Security, which Bechtel also leads.
