The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today released a final Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) for the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico. The SWEIS lays out several alternatives for the laboratory’s growth and operations through 2038 for nuclear weapons activities and identifies the agency’s preferred path forward.
The NNSA chose the option that would most drastically increase LANL’s ramifications for the community, environment and resources. It would also severely impact the cultural resources of neighboring Pueblos. The addition of a parking lot, bus transfer station, and several solar energy installations number among the NNSA’s priorities over the cultural heritage of local Pueblos.
Below is a statement from Dr. Dylan Spaulding, senior scientist in the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS):
“The NNSA’s selected plan has the biggest impacts on the site’s energy use including nearly doubling its consumption of petroleum fuel, electricity, and water, all the while the agency continues to struggle to remediate existing contamination to groundwater both on and offsite.”
“NNSA has made clear that it is prioritizing the creation of a new parking lot, for example, over safeguarding the cultural heritage sites of local Pueblo peoples. UCS has previously called for meaningful consideration and integration of Pueblos’ concerns into the laboratory’s plans, particularly around environmental justice issues. Not only were environmental justice topics removed from the plan due to a federal executive order, but as many as 33 cultural heritage sites could be impacted to make way for new construction.”
“Plutonium pit production remains a top driver of the lab’s expansion, but the assumptions and analyses in this document may already be out of date. The NNSA recently announced new quotas that double LANL’s requirements to 60 pits a year. That means the upper limit for pit production in this document may already be closer to the new baseline.”
In May, the NNSA is also supposed to release a broader draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for plutonium pit production across the U.S. nuclear complex. This is the result of a settlement following a 2024 court ruling that found DOE and NNSA had violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to complete a new and full PEIS to fully consider the effects of producing plutonium pits for nuclear weapons at Los Alamos and at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The release of the draft PEIS will begin a 90-day public comment period on the pit production efforts.