Lawsuit alleges NNSA ignored new information on seismic risks at Y-12.

A federal safety board called attention to the risks before.

The plaintiff organizations said continued UPF construction violates NEPA.

UPF construction plans, though guarded, remain under public and congressional scrutiny.

A lawsuit filed last week against the Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) alleges the government agencies ignored new information about seismic risks during a second environmental review on Y-12 National Security Complex's Uranium Processing Facility.

The Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance filed the lawsuit in Washington with Nuclear Watch New Mexico and the Natural Resources Defense Council to stop the building's construction until another environmental review is completed.

The plaintiff organizations asserted revised plans for the Uranium Processing Facility are significantly different from those the NNSA analyzed in 2011. They said NNSA's supplementary environmental review of the revised plans covered earthquake risks only at the new facility, and not the two legacy buildings Y-12 plans to continue using.

Earthquake safety a priority

Nuclear safety regulators and watchdogs place a high priority on earthquake safety at nuclear sites, and for good reason. A March 2011 earthquake triggered Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster, which displaced more than 156,000 people and cost at least $17.5 billion.

The Uranium Processing Facility is planned for completion in 2025. It will assist in the weapons complex mission to maintain the United States' nuclear stockpile. According to Y-12, all the weapons in the country's stockpile have components that are manufactured, maintained or ultimately dismantled at the Oak Ridge complex.

The $6.5 billion facility is one of the Energy Department's largest projects in Tennessee since the Manhattan Project, and one of the most embattled. Design and construction plans have changed several times. It was first designed to house all of Y-12's uranium processes under one roof.

New risks, same analysis

To save costs, Y-12 will continue to use two older facilities, Building 9215 and Beta-2E, rather than combine all their material processing activities into the new building.

In 2015, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board said the two facilities, which are more than 60 years old, do not meet structural design requirements to withstand an earthquake, increasing the risk that they could release dangerous contaminants under seismic stress.

NNSA prepared one supplemental assessment in April 2016, which reported seismic risks associated with the new plan were hardly different than those outlined in 2011.

"Our argument is that they did not look very hard, and they ignored new information on seismic risks from the 2014 Geological Survey," said Ralph Hutchison, Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance coordinator.

The geological survey significantly elevated East Tennessee's earthquake risk. But the NNSA’s April 2016 analysis said the new information did not change the data on Y-12 that informs building requirements for new facilities.

It made no mention, however, of how the two older buildings would fare under the same seismic stress.

"So they changed the plan, but they didn't really change the analysis," Hutchison said.

Another federal safety board letter sent to National Nuclear Security Administrator Frank Klotz on June 26 raised concerns that the safety designs for the new building may not sufficiently mitigate the effects of a seismic event either.

Alleged environmental policy violations

The organizations said continued construction on the Uranium Processing Facility violates the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires federal agencies to revisit environmental analyses when plans change or new information comes to light.

"The agency is putting the public at risk, and the public has a right to make sure that the government has taken the legally required hard look at those serious risks,” the three plaintiff organizations wrote in a statement.

“NEPA’s fundamental purposes are to ensure that agencies take a hard look at consequences before taking action and to ensure that the public has a voice in agency decisions,” said William Lawton, the attorney representing the organizations.

The lawsuit said the NNSA and the Department of Energy appear to deliberately exclude the public from input, citing declined Freedom of Information Act requests and other unsuccessful attempts to learn more about the tax-funded project.

"When we saw the final document, admitting that they were going to continue to use dangerous, risky facilities without bringing them up to code, we realized why the NNSA was so determined not to make its plan public," Hutchison said.

The NNSA has continually declined to comment on the designs for the project, without specifying why.

The agency again declined to comment regarding the alleged NEPA violations or the lawsuit, this time citing a policy against speaking on pending litigation.

Costly redesign

A track record of what Hutchison calls “false starts and re-dos” in the Uranium Processing Facility's design process has made the project an object of scrutiny.

Originally projected to cost $650 million, the project's budget spun quickly out of control as equipment and safety features were added on to the plans for a complex that was not big enough to hold them all. The Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance has complained that the NNSA did not hold its contractors responsible for the mistake.

After a 2014 red team review, Congress capped the facility's budget at $6.5 billion and mandated that site designs reach 90 percent completion before construction begins.

The project is expected to reach the 90 percent completion mark in September. The last update on the project’s progress was an April Office of Enterprise Assessments report, which estimated the designs were about 60 percent finished.

However, a July 6 House Energy and Water Development Appropriations Committee report cast doubt on the project’s progress, citing costs for the design, equipment and other construction activities that have again increased beyond their projected amounts.

According to the report, the NNSA had to reprogram $403 million of the Uranium Processing Facility’s $1.4 billion contingency fund to address the unforeseen issues at the site.

"That declared budget cap seems increasingly uncertain," Hutchison said.

The House report did not specify the exact reasons for the increases, but it did assert that the NNSA does not have a certified or compliant management system in place to track the project's performance.

NNSA spokesman Steve Wyatt said the project management system currently in use for the project was one the contractor, Consolidated Nuclear Security, inherited when it took over at Y-12 National Security Complex in 2013. Wyatt said it is normal for contractors to continue using an inherited system until they put their own in place. "(They) will have their own system certified this year," he said, adding that the system the House report referred to is one of several used to track the UPF performance.

He said according to their estimates, NNSA remains on track to deliver the Uranium Processing Facility on budget by 2025.