For immediate release February 24, 2021

LANL releases 2021 "Site Sustainability Plan" for "rapidly changing and growing mission"

Teleworking "the approach going forward" to handle the increased staff necessary to accommodate plutonium "pit" production

Large increases in energy & resources use foreseen; risk of missing key efficiency targets "high"

Despite legal requirements, site plans, pit production plans not released to public or local governments

Largest project in NM history proceeds in near-total secrecy, local and state governments effectively silent

Contact: Greg Mello, 505-577-8563 cell
Permalink * Prior press releases

Albuquerque -- Among the insights available to careful readers of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) "Fiscal Year 2021 Site Sustainability Plan" (SSP), released yesterday, are the following:

• To support LANL's "rapidly changing and growing mission," including and specifically plutonium warhead core ("pit") production, an unspecified but significant fraction of the few thousand additional staff LANL expects to hire in the next few years will not be provided actual working space at LANL and will instead be "telecommuting" from either their homes or from other locations which do not yet exist and are nowhere fully described. Telecommuting is explicitly "the approach going forward" to handle the 2,000 additional staff necessary to accommodate round-the-clock plutonium "pit" production, which the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) anticipates (pp. 12, 15) will be needed for even a low production level of 20 pits per year (for background see below.)
  

• LANL will be doubling its energy use over the coming decade but despite -- or because of -- hundreds of millions of dollars in planned electrical upgrades LANL will fail to meet Department of Energy (DOE) goals for energy efficiency. DOE goals for water use will also not be met.
  

• LANL will "consider" conducting a climate change vulnerability assessment in response to explicit DOE guidance to plan for climate resilience in LANL's operations, workforce, and emergency response and is at "high risk" of not responding to this guidance at all. LANL is blowing this off this guidance, in other words.  
  

• LANL will fail to meet -- i.e. is planning to fail to meet -- DOE vehicle fleet energy efficiency guidance.
  

• LANL currently has several thousand employees who commute to work from considerable distances, three-fourths of whom travel in single-occupancy vehicles. There is no plan to change this commuting pattern, besides continuation of some teleworking. in fact it could get worse because of the large numbers of hires planned and the shortage of nearby housing.
  

• LANL may build an on-site 10 megawatt (MW) solar field but this will only provide 4% of LANL's electrical needs by 2031.
  

• Currently more than half of LANL's electricity is sourced to coal-fired generation sources. There are no clear commitments to more renewable forms of energy, only to power purchase agreements subject to a number of vague criteria (including "innovative"). LANL currently consumes 80% of the energy supplied to the Los Alamos Power Pool (LAPP), which is contracted to receive nuclear power generated by a cluster of small modular reactors (SMRs) to be built in Idaho.
  

• The greatest increases in electrical demand are expected to come from ambitious, not-yet-approved high-performance computing projects and a new accelerator-based facility LANL has been trying to sell unsuccessfully for many years called MaRIE ("Matter-Radiation Interactions in Extremes").

The SSP was brought to our attention by the Los Alamos Reporter, which published an excellent article on the SSP this morning ("Future Of Telework, Significant Increase In Energy Needs Discussed in LANL Site Sustainability Plan Released Tuesday").

The key paragraph is on p. 48, here bolded:

Although COVID-19 safety measures forced LANL staff to telework, management has emphasized the importance of teleworking to support the plutonium pit mission. To achieve the mission’s targets, LANL management is planning to increase the LANL workforce. LANL does not have sufficient space to bring on all these new hires, nor have federal funds been earmarked for enough new facilities. The telework strategy thus appears the approach going forward. Shifting a significant number of staff to work off-site will open up office space. In FY2020, LANL conducted a telework pilot project with 1,336 staff to gage telework feasibility. For FY 2021, telework will be utilized in a combined strategy to reduce COVID-19 spread at LANL and to increase the workforce.

Overall, the SSP aims to describe LANL's "progress toward achieving a more efficient and resilient Laboratory," but it does so without providing any site plan, program plan, budget, or schedule -- that is, without any meaningful context. Very little information on actual current and projected energy and resource use is provided. The focus of the document is primarily to portray measures of the recent past and projected intensity of energy and resource use, for example in terms of energy per square foot of "covered" facilities (the distinction is not explained), or in other cases energy and resource use per on-site staff member, as these are the form in which DOE guidance and goals are generically expressed.

Despite the fact that LANL's construction plans to support these new missions comprise the largest project in the history of New Mexico (slide 21), rivaling the cost of all three interstate highways put together, no pertinent, reliable, comprehensive information regarding the future of LANL is available to the public, to local and state governments, or to the immediately affected tribes.

Apart from Los Alamos County government, there is also no evidence that any of these parties have even requested this background, although they would be greatly affected by LANL's plans. For its part, Los Alamos County has never received the LANL site plan it directly requested in October, 2019, which Dr. Kelly Beierschmidt of LANL promised to provide "soon," as the Los Alamos Reporter notes.

From recent conversations we are aware that key congressional committees and agencies also lack this information.

(LANL's plans, and NNSA's plans for LANL, have been in noticeable flux since Triad, LLC took over management. We have obtained a few dated, incomplete elements of the missing context from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and other sources, including: the LANL Comprehensive Site Plan (slides, redacted); LANL Future Land Acquistion & Development (slides, redacted); LANL Vision for Future Campus (slides, redacted); LANL Future Campus, video, Aug 27, 2019. There are important details we have not posted, in part because pertinent information is finely fragmented and in flux, with no apparent overall coherence. Fragmentation, secrecy, and continued evolution ought to be a strong warning signal for LANL and NNSA managers and oversight bodies.)

The SSP states that "LANL will enable future missions by replacing aging electrical infrastructures to meet growing demands for electricity." (p. 5). Among the changes foreseen and underway are:

• A doubling of electrical usage by 2031 (p. 12);


• Replacement of a 20 megawatt (MW) steam plant with a natural gas turbine generator of roughly the same size;


• Installation of a 10 MW photovoltaic array on the LANL site with battery backup, to supply 4% of LANL's power demand by 2031 (p. 13); and


• A new gas pipeline, not described.

The SSP does not however include for example any mention or description of the "$300 million" (M) "Electrical Power Capacity Upgrade" project at LANL (see p. 365 in the current budget request). Many other relevant projects and issues are also not mentioned in this evidently-abridged document, written less for actual planning than to satisfy a bureaucratic requirement.

Study Group director Greg Mello: "With no slight intended to the honest authors, this is not a site sustainability plan. It is a site unsustainability non-plan. This is not a "plan" at all, let alone one for sustainability, which is an oxymoron considering the facility and missions in question.

"What this document describes is not just a failure to plan, but rather an explicit refusal to plan using DOE guidance.

"At the highest levels, LANL inhabits a space disconnected from current environmental realities, not to mention accountability. LANL's 'faith-based' approach to the limitations of its site, location, and workforce issues is truly breathtaking to behold."

"One might think that a fresh Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) could provide accurate projections after a year or two of work but this has not proven to be the case. Such documents are invariably written to encompass a span of possible futures, "covering all the bases" as it were. In this case, the crucial decisions about LANL's future would be made before such a document could be completed, unless construction and hiring were meanwhile brought to a halt.

"As we have explained elsewhere in detail, LANL's proposed expansion, including and especially its proposed industrial pit mission, serves neither true national security nor any worthwhile regional goals. As we see here, LANL's plans also do not meet DOE's quite modest energy goals either. They do not even pass the feasibility 'smell test.'"

Further background on pit production can be found in the third portion of https://www.lasg.org/press/2021/press_release_3Feb2021.html. Interested readers can follow the links provided there to references and underlying federal and Study Group analysis.

*****ENDS*****