May 9, 2020

NNSA Los Alamos Field Office

Comments: LANL SWEIS SA

3747 West Jemez Road

Los Alamos, NM 87544

By email to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Subject line: LANL SWEIS SA

Dear LANL SWEIS SA Document Manager,

            Citizen Action New Mexico submits these comments for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA’s) Draft Supplement Analysis of the 2008 Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement for the Continued Operation of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) for Plutonium Operations (DOE/EIS-0380-SA-06, March 2020).

It is clear that the NNSA and DOE intend to go forward with more nuclear weapons production no matter what public comments, rational thinking or valid legal arguments may be presented against such a monumental waste of resources, finances, public health and safety and continuing threat to world environment, peace and security. 

The individuals in the NNSA and DOE that are involved in this effort have no moral or ethical scruples and are part of a nuclear mafia.  The last round of pit production brought cancer, generational genetic disorders, disease and the flash annihilation of more than 250,000 people. One questions why there needs to be “modernization” of nuclear weapons when there are already some 5,000 deployable such weapons in the US arsenal and with more than 15,000 plutonium pits that still exist in addition with a long lifetime.

The unsafe location of LANL and its facilities for producing more pits has long been criticized to no avail for:

• Poisoned workers dying early deaths from cancer and disease,
• birth defects for children,
• Above ground test of its nuclear weapons spreading radiation in New Mexico and creation of a large class of uncompensated downwinders,
• Illegal seizure of tribal land,
• seismic vulnerability,
• contamination of groundwater with hexavalent chromium,
• defective ground water monitoring,
• spread of laboratory radiation by fire,
• contamination of the Rio Grande with alpha radiation,
• accidents contaminating workers and giving them cancer,
• ongoing plan to dump tritium into the airspace of New Mexico,
• creation of long-lived radionuclides that will remain toxic for millions of years,
• Increased need for disposal of radioactive and hazardous waste that has resulted in Area G and the Sandia National Laboratories Mixed Waste Landfill without cleanup.

There is a need for a Programmatic EIS, but even if such a document were produced it cannot bring about a reckoning with the absolute, abysmal idea that there should be further nuclear weapons production.  The problem lies in the first instance with the Atomic Energy Act that gives one man the power to decide that the production of nuclear weapons should go forward.  Clearly, the U.S. should consider that the President alone should not be granted such extensive power for production or use. 

Public comment cannot suffice to deter the DOE or the NNSA from its injurious, ruinous plans for New Mexico and their threat to stimulate greater proliferation of worldwide nuclear weapons production. 

We say to the individuals in the DOE and the NNSA, you should leave your jobs and refuse to be participants in further planetary oppression of the world’s peoplesandenvironment.

No matter how you choose to rationalize what you are doing for a living it is ethically and morally wrong and counter to life to continue nuclear weapons production. 

David B. McCoy, Executive Director

Citizen Action New Mexico

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