Three East Bay Members of Congress, John Garamendi, Eric Swalwell and Mark DeSaulnier, submitted a joint letter to the Administrator and Under Secretary for Nuclear Security, Jill Hruby, on February 9, 2023 requesting that the NNSA “make every effort to provide additional opportunity for public comment on the Draft Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement for Continued Operations of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.” (click here)

The Congressional letter was written at the urging of Tri-Valley CAREs members, who are also constituents. Tri-Valley CAREs had already asked the NNSA for at least a 30 day extension of the comment period because the initial period was scheduled during the busy end of the year holiday season. The Agency agreed to extend the comment period from January 3 by 15 days to January 18th. But this hardly gave many interested parties enough time to make meaningful comments on the highly technical documents that were more than 1800 pages long.

The Congressional letter does not provide specific direction to the NNSA of how long a newly opened public comment period might be, so Tri-Valley CAREs sent the SWEIS Document Manager, Fana Gebeyehu-Houston a follow up letter requesting March 1st-31st as the new period. (click here) Stay tuned for more…