The NNSA’s preferred option for continuing operations at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory involves building more than three million square feet of new facilities at various sites in California through 2035.
Two options for future operations at the lab, and their potential environmental impacts, are laid out in a new site-wide environmental impact statement covering the next 15 years.
Aside from the preferred option, NNSA studied only one other: a “no-action” plan that is essentially a continuation of the status quo to give some scale to the agency’s future plans at the younger of the two U.S. nuclear-weapon design laboratories.
The second, officially the “proposed action” plan, “addresses aging infrastructure concerns and includes … construction of new facilities, modification of existing facilities, operational changes, and decontamination, decommissioning, and demolition of excess facilities,” the NNSA said. The environmental impact statement also analyzes the new hybrid work environment due to an increase in telework at Livermore under both alternatives.
That proposed action includes about 75 new projects totaling 3.3 million square feet to be built through 2035. Of those, 61 projects, totaling approximately 2.9 million square feet, are proposed at the Livermore Site. Another 14 projects, totaling approximately 385,000 square feet, are proposed at Site 300 Experimental Test Site, used for developing explosive materials, hydrodynamic testing and diagnostics.
The NNSA also proposes 20 modernization, upgrade and utility projects at various Livermore facilities.
About 150 facilities, totaling approximately 1.2 million square feet are slated for decontamination, decommissioning, and demolition under the proposed plan.
NNSA also proposes operational changes to increase the tritium emissions limits in the National Ignition Facility and the Tritium Facility, decrease the administrative limit for fuels-grade-equivalent plutonium in the Superblock, increase the administrative limits for plutonium-239 at Building 235, and revise the National Ignition Facility radioactive materials administrative limits to be consistent with DOE’s Facility Hazard Categorization Standard.
The final Livermore sitewide environmental impact statement is available here. The Department of Energy planned to publish a record of decision based on the study after Dec. 3, 2023.
