National Nuclear Security Administration Decision Circumvents Public Environmental Review, Increases Radiation Doses, and Must Be Retracted
On May 21, 2026, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) quietly posted a simultaneous Record of Decision (ROD) and Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) approving “Enhanced Plutonium Utilization” at the Lab, located in the San Francisco East Bay and one of two locations that designs all U.S. nuclear warheads and bombs. Plutonium is the radioactive core of nuclear bombs. No draft EIS was ever publicly circulated and no public hearing on the draft plan occurred.
The EIS and ROD, effective immediately, “green light” the most significant changes in plutonium work at Livermore Lab since 2008, when the Lab failed a force-on-force security drill and was compelled to downsize its plutonium usage, storage and transportation by 2012.
The new EIS and ROD reveal a major increase in plutonium work at the Lab. All figures, below, in the EIS and ROD are compared to the Livermore Lab’s present-day activities. Thus, the risks already associated with these activities will rise commensurately. Figures are annual. The new decision codifies that:
- There will be an 180% increase in the number of plutonium shipments into and out of Livermore Lab;
- There will be a 400% increase in transuranic nuclear waste (which designates a higher concentration of plutonium than “low level” plutonium-contaminated waste);
- There will be a 20% increase in “low level” radioactive waste generated at the Lab;
- There will be a 6.6% increase in the dose to transportation crews;
- There will be a 21% increase in latent cancer fatalities in the populations along the transportation routes; and,
- There will be a 27% increase in the collective worker dose from radiological emissions.
Further, the EIS and the ROD raise the amount of plutonium “throughput” at Livermore Lab by increasing its current status as a “Security Category III” facility, able to use small quantities of plutonium at work stations to a “Security Category II” facility, able to use larger quantities. The EIS notes that the government conducted a “Conceptual Security Vulnerability Assessment to determine mitigative features… but it is not publicly releasable.”
Scott Yundt, an environmental attorney who is the Executive Director at Tri-Valley CAREs, noted in media interviews, “It is unconscionable that the government is imposing serious, potentially devastating harms on its workers, the public, and the environment, all without a thoroughgoing and transparent process. Indeed, we never had any chance to review the plan while it was in draft form so that we could recommend changes in advance of the government’s final decision. Similarly, the public was deprived of the chance to propose safer alternatives. Instead, we are all faced with a dangerous fait accompli.”
Marylia Kelley, Tri-Valley CAREs’ Senior Advisor, who led the group in 2008 and obtained details of the failed force-on-force security test conducted by the Department of Energy Headquarters experts, noted: “The Lab failed an actual security drill and lost its ‘Security Category I/II’ status. The results of that drill were publicly released after Tri-Valley CAREs called for that. Now the government reinstated ‘Cat II’ to increase Livermore Lab’s plutonium on the basis of a ‘conceptual’ exercise that is ‘not publicly releasable’. That’s unacceptable. The public has no way of knowing how cursory the exercise may have been. Nor do we know what measures may have been adopted. Further, a table top exercise is no substitute for a force-on-force test. As a Livermore resident, there is nothing about this that makes me feel safe.”
Relevant Background and the Law
In 2024, the government finalized a Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement for Livermore Lab operations after a year-long public process, including a draft document and public hearings. Tri-Valley CAREs asked about possible plutonium increases and the final document promised that no additional plutonium was needed to accomplish its planned activities over the coming 15 years, which is the planning horizon for a Site Wide EIS.
Here, it is notable that this new, May 21, 2026, Final EIS for “Enhanced Plutonium Utilization” reveals that internal discussions to increase plutonium at the Lab were actually underway while the Site-Wide was still being completed. To put it bluntly, we were all lied to in 2024.
In early 2025, the government published a notice in the Federal Register for “Enhanced Plutonium Facility Utilization” at Livermore Lab to include a “Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement” (note the word “Draft” in the official government notice). While the Federal Register notice allowed for “public scoping comments,” those comments were strictly limited to making suggestions on the scope of the Draft that was to be completed and circulated. The notice itself contained no details of the plan – that was to happen in the draft document. Further, the notice stated that one or more public hearings and a written comment period would be held. Another set of lies, as it turns out.
On his first day in office, Donald Trump issued Executive Order 14154 “Unleashing American Energy” intended to speed the time for energy projects to become implemented. The order instructed the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to provide new implementation guidelines for those projects. President Trump also rescinded a Carter-era executive order, and the CEQ circulated a template that suggested making draft EIS’s and public hearings on drafts optional, but then said the “template is not a regulation, does not carry the force and effect of law, and is not intended to bind the public or any federal agency.”
Livermore Lab and the NNSA jumped on the chance to exclude public comment, however thin the legal reed, and the agency revised its longstanding National Environmental Policy Act procedures in July 2025 to forgo drafts. Then, in November 2025, NNSA retroactively applied the rule change to the promised draft EIS and one or more public hearings for ‘Enhanced Plutonium Utilization’. The plan to increase plutonium at Livermore Lab is not an energy project to be “unleashed.” Nor is the curtailment mid-process of public input in a draft document legally mandated.
Tri-Valley CAREs submitted scoping comments on ‘Enhanced Plutonium Utilization’. We expected an extensive Draft EIS, and we planned further comment on its analysis, proposed action, and alternatives. Instead, an elective – and total – cone of silence descended, leaving the public in the dark.
For more background on this plan, and how the NNSA decided to leave out the public, you can go to our previous posts here, here and here (in chronological order).
To add insult to injury, when we read the Final EIS and ROD, over a holiday weekend no less, we saw that the NNSA and Livermore Lab ignored many of our scoping comments and questions. Similarly, the agency ignored comments and questions from other groups and hundreds of members of the public.
For example, Tri-Valley CAREs and other commenters asked for clarification about the extent to which the plan to enhance plutonium utilization is for plutonium pit support work, but the Final EIS provides no new information. Commenters asked for clarification as to whether full plutonium pits or hemishells (partial cores) would be shipped to the Lab and whether they would be allowed in work areas, but the document only points to general agency rules with no site-specific information.
Environmental Justice
The fact that there was no draft document and no public hearing reduced government accountability and thus directly enabled that bad behavior. This behavior is not only wrong, it is dangerous, and mirrors the decades past when agency secrecy led to many accidents, spills and releases from Livermore Lab, causing the Main Site, where plutonium activities are centered, to be placed on the EPA’s Superfund list of most contaminated sites in the nation in 1987.
Anoushka Raj, Tri-Valley CAREs’ Environmental Programs Manager and Superfund Technical Advisor, spoke about the environmental justice harms, “This decision to increase plutonium activities is not happening on a ‘clean slate’. Livermore Lab’s Main Site and Site 300 are both long-running nuclear weapons sites with ongoing Superfund cleanup obligations tied to past soil and groundwater contamination. The Final EIS itself acknowledges that people of color make up nearly two-thirds of the population within 50 miles of both the Main Site and Site 300, yet it still concludes that there will be no disproportionate impacts on ‘at-risk populations’. NNSA’s conclusion understates what is at stake. A risk calculation can fall within an agency’s chosen threshold and still leave communities carrying added burdens from a site with a long history of contamination. The question is not just whether the numbers fit inside a model, but whether workers, nearby residents, and people along transportation routes were given a real chance to review the details and challenge the assumptions. Enhanced plutonium utilization is a serious environmental health concern, and it deepens the long-standing problem of making high-consequence nuclear decisions without meaningful community input.”
Connections to the Federal Budget and Plutonium Pit Production
This momentous change is not happening in a vacuum. It is part of an overarching, multifaceted scheme to vastly increase funding for new nuclear warheads and to reinstate industrial-level plutonium pit production, all of which is slated to manufacture new plutonium cores for new nuclear weapons that will then be placed in the stockpile for possible use in a nuclear war.
Livermore Lab’s largest budget request ever is at stake, $3.2 billion for Fiscal Year 2027, with nuclear weapons activities amounting to over 88% off that budget. The Lab is using the lion’s share of this money on new warhead development.
One of those new weapons, the W87-1, is the first new warhead since explosive nuclear testing ceased in Nevada in 1992 to contain all new components and “need” new plutonium pits. Support work for these new plutonium pits will be done in Livermore, while Los Alamos Lab is tasked with their manufacture. To enable this, plutonium will be shipped between Los Alamos in New Mexico and Livermore Lab’s Main Site.
Yet, the NNSA’s Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement on plutonium pit production, which was tasked with analyzing the plan’s nation-side impacts abjectly fails to include analysis of the potential impacts of plutonium pit support work at Livermore Lab.
Because of a Judge’s Decision in the lawsuit brought by Tri-Valley CAREs and colleague organizations, the government is forced to engage in a public process on its nationwide plutonium pit production plans. NNSA is taking public comment on the Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for Plutonium Pit Production until July 16, 2026. Check out the Tri-Valley CAREs website. For more on how you can submit a written comment click here.
Tri-Valley CAREs’ Demand
Tri-Valley CAREs, on behalf of its more than 6,000 members, demands that the National Nuclear Security Administration and its Livermore Lab immediately withdraw its Final EIS and Record of Decision on “Enhanced Plutonium Utilization” and undertake instead one of the following two actions:
One, withdraw the “Enhanced Plutonium Utilization” program and proceed without it, as a measure to “enhance” worker and public safety, not deadly plutonium. Or,
Two, withdraw the Final EIS and ROD, consider the May 21, 2026 document as a draft EIS, and commence public hearings and a public comment period.