While the National Nuclear Security Administration expects a final record of decision for pit production analysis should be complete by 2027, some stakeholders said this week they are “deeply concerned” about the “human cost” of plutonium pits.
“This is very dangerous material,” one commenter said Wednesday during an online forum, speaking tearfully of how her daughters contracted cancer and of a neighbor’s daughter who died of cancer near Los Alamos.” I don’t want more plutonium pit production… We do not want to be exposed to cancer.”
Wednesday’s forum was the second of a series of public comment forums to provide interest groups, businesses, Native American tribes and other stakeholders input into the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) draft programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) on planned plutonium pit production. The PEIS environmental resource areas for review include waste management, ecological resources such as land and water, socioeconomics and reasonably foreseeable accidents.
“None of this pit production… is to maintain the safety and reliability,” Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico and one of the plaintiffs in the pit case responsible for the PEIS, said in the call, echoing sentiments of an article by the Union of Concerned Scientists published the same day. “It’s all for new nuclear weapons designs for the new nuclear arms race.”
The comment period will last until July 14, which one participant called “insufficient time.” Following the scoping and comment period, a draft PEIS would be ready by February 2026, NNSA said on the call.
Due to a judge’s ruling in September, NNSA announced it is conducting the PEIS to ensure large-scale pit production will comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), since the judge ruled last fall that DOE and NNSA did not adequately analyze the environmental effects of producing the radioactive cores that trigger nuclear weapons in two different states.
Until a record of decision is issued from the environmental review, NNSA is enjoined from installing classified equipment or introducing nuclear material at the Savannah River plant, according to a press release from the citizen groups. NNSA agreed to leave Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico as the sole pit factory until NNSA completes a nationwide, NEPA-compliant programmatic EIS.
Los Alamos would initially make cores for the first stages of W87-1 warheads, which are to top the Air Force’s planned silo-based Sentinel missiles some time next decade. The Savannah River Site in South Carolina will make cores for the W93 warheads, which would top the nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile and begin production in the mid-2030s, according to acting NNSA administrator Teresa Robbins in a recent hearing.
