The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has decided it will not further extend the public comment period for an environmental review of the planned pit production plant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Last month, at the request of constituents organized by the Santa Fe advocacy organization Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich (both D-N.M.) asked NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty to extend the public comment period to June 19 from May 8.
Gordon-Hagerty turned the lawmakers down last week, citing encroaching deadlines and the fact that her agency had already once lengthened the comment period, in part because of the ongoing response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“But critical national security missions must move forward in spite of this difficult situation,” Gordon-Hagerty wrote in an April 30 letter to Udall, a copy of which Nuclear Watch New Mexico blasted out to the public by email. “We must press forward with this project in order to meet Department of Defense deliverables.”
Gordon-Hagerty also pointed out that, legally, the NNSA did not even have to arrange a public comment period for the draft supplement analysis of pit production at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and that Nuclear Watch New Mexico and others opposed to the pit mission “were heavily involved in the development” of an earlier site-wide environmental impact statement for the lab that covered pit production. The NNSA has said it will consider comments it receives on the draft analysis while it writes the final analysis, publication of which was not scheduled at deadline.
The NNSA wants to make at least 80 plutonium nuclear-warhead cores per year by 2030 using an upgraded Plutonium Facility at Los Alamos and the planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
Either facility will be able to hit at least 80 pits a year on its own, the NNSA has said in multiple environmental reviews published this year. The agency admits it will be challenged to hit its target throughput with just under a decade left to build the redundant pit complex and was pedal-to-the-metal at Los Alamos, which is supposed to start casting 10 war-reserve pits annually by 2024.
