“Justice Prevails: A Grassroots Victory in the Fight against Nuclear Weapons Proliferation”
By Aspen Coriz-Romero, on National Priorities Project website, March 12, 2025
About our federal lawsuit victory against plutonium “pit” production – cores of nuclear warheads – at Savannah River Site (SRS) and Los Alamos, without required environmental-impact review. Stay tuned for news about “Programmatic EIS” hearings around the country.
In January 2025, a grassroots collaborative spanning four states reached a historic settlement with the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) requiring transparency and accountability in the production of nuclear weapons parts.
The grassroots collaborative – which includes South Carolina Environmental Law Project, Savannah River Site Watch, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment (CAREs), and the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition – first filed a landmark case against the NNSA in June 2021.
In September 2024 a Federal District Court of South Carolina ruled NNSA’s two-site plutonium pit production plans were in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
The judge ruled that NNSA failed to complete an environmental impact statement detailing the social and environmental repercussions of plutonium pit production at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The NNSA had previously moved to have the case dismissed, a move the judge rejected, saying the ruling was “not a close call.”