By ELLEN WALTON
White Rock
If you blinked, you missed the National Nuclear Security Administration’s July 25, 2025, announcement of the 15-day public comment period for the LANL EPCU (Electrical Power Capacity Upgrade) Project Floodplain Assessment for extensive powerline construction on DOE property managed by LANL (link at https://www.energy.gov/nepa/
This is the same project which will tear through the Caja del Rio and up through White Rock Canyon to provide Los Alamos and LANL with the capacity to import an unprecedented amount of power to the community and to LANL. LANL’s reasoning for the project is that electrical power demand will suddenly double by 2027.
The new construction will run through flood plains and waterways in the complex system of canyons of White Rock, near Bandelier, on land of historical value and great beauty. Those waterways feed into the Rio Grande either directly or through underground springs along the way.
The deadline for public comment on this assessment is August 7, 2025. Instead of allowing nearby residents of White Rock to ask questions and learn more about the impacts of the project in public meetings, the NNSA chose to email only a select group of entities and put a quickie announcement out to the Los Alamos Daily Post on July 25, giving only a few days for those lucky enough to know about it to read and respond.
This is not meaningful opportunity for engagement with those residents who will be impacted by the project’s dust, noise, and visual changes. Those residents, by the way, are the very ones who have supported LANL and have family members working for LANL. I am a resident who can walk to the area of the power line construction from my yard and am downwind of the firing sites in those canyons and the dust coming from them. I have questions about the project, and am sure my neighbors do also.
LANL creates distrust by avoiding the public and giving an insufficient nod to the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) procedures adopted by the DOE in this case. Failing to reach out to nearby residents diminishes the sacrifices LANL families make every day living so close to sites of known contamination and the care they have given to loved ones whose work for LANL made them ill.
I ask that LANL and/or NNSA notify residents of these project assessments that directly affect us and hold two public informational meetings announced in the Los Alamos Daily Post, the Santa Fe New Mexican, and the Rio Grande Sun. Once these meetings have taken place, I ask that the public be given 30 days to provide comment on the Floodplain Assessment. Please, LANL, restart your process for public input on this EPCU Floodplain Assessment, and do it like you mean it.
View looking west toward the area of proposed construction at LANL from along Potrillo Canyon in November 2024 during a regular test explosion at a nearby firing site. Photo by Ellen Walton