The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) on Oct. 4 formalized its decision to continue building the Uranium Processing Facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., even as the agency complies with a federal court order to conduct an additional environmental review of the plant.
The Department of Energy branch made the move official in an amended record of decision dated Sept. 27, but published last Friday in the Federal Register. That was just three days after the U.S. District Court for Eastern Tennessee ordered the semiautonomous nuclear-weapon agency to update the Uranium Processing Facility’s (UPF) environmental-compliance paperwork to include federal data on earthquake hazards that were not available when the agency decided to build the plant in 2011.
Only a day after Judge Pamela Reeves handed down her decision in a 2016 lawsuit against the agency, the NNSA told Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor that UPF construction would continue. The amended record of decision reveals the legal maneuvers the agency has taken to keep construction contractor Bechtel National on the job during the court-mandated redo of the UPF’s environmental review.
“NNSA has decided to continue to operate Y–12 to meet the stockpile stewardship mission critical activities assigned to the site on an interim basis, pending further review of seismic risks at Y–12,” the agency stated. “Such continued operations are consistent with the court’s ruling and will continue to implement safety improvements under previously approved contracts.”
The Y-12 National Security Complex, which will house the UPF, is the NNSA’s uranium processing hub. The site purifies highly enriched uranium and inserts it into the secondary stages of nuclear weapons.
The NNSA has not said exactly how long it might take to finish the additional review of regional earthquake hazards. In the amended record of decision, the agency said the review would be “develped on an expedited basis.”
“Once further seismic analysis has been performed, NNSA will issue a new ROD describing, what, if any, changes it has decided to make in light of that analysis,” according to the amended record of decision.
In their federal lawsuit, three citizen-run environmentalist groups complained the NNSA flouted federal environmental law because it did not completely redo the UPF’s 2011 environmental impact statement after deciding in 2016 to build the planned processing hub in three small buildings instead of one large building.
Among other things, the groups said the agency ignored seismic hazard data published in 2014 by the U.S. Geological Survey. The updated earthquake-hazard data was vital to consider, the environmentalists said, because scrapping the single, large UPF meant continuing reliance on Cold War-era buildings whose functions could not be incorporated into the three small buildings now planned.
The plaintiffs argued that such a drastic design change, from one building to three, plus keeping old buildings in service longer, should have forced the agency to redo its environmental review of the site, and in the interim postpone construction on UPF until it completed that review.