Environmental and peace activists are claiming a pair of preliminary victories in a battle over bringing Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) labs to the nation's top nuclear weapons research facilities in Los Alamos, N.Mex., and Livermore, Calif. The two facilities would be the first built for US Department of Energy labs; about 250 BSL-3 facilities exist nationwide.

First, a San Francisco federal district judge issued a stay on December 15 preventing operations from commencing at both of the two planned BSL-3 laboratories until at least May 15. Then, National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) officials announced on January 23 that they plan to repeat environmental analyses for the Los Alamos facility because of “new circumstances and information that were not considered in the original” assessment.

Even though laboratory officials said the December 15 stay would have no impact on the scheduled openings—planned for early summer at Los Alamos and by September at Livermore—the environmental groups said the order showed federal judge Saundra B. Armstrong takes their concerns seriously. They also say the decision to perform a repeat analysis was in response to pressure from their lawsuit, while NNSA officials in Los Alamos say it has nothing to do with the suit and shouldn't delay the facility's opening.

Whether those setbacks signify larger problems remains a question as the matter heads to court in San Francisco. The first detailed legal arguments in the case were filed February 12. At the moment, both Los Alamos and Livermore labs are limited to using BSL-2 facilities.

Nuclear Watch of New Mexico and California-based Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment (CAREs) filed the lawsuit against the Energy Department and NNSA in August 2003.

The groups say they aren't against BSL-3 facilities in general, but think such labs shouldn't be operated at top-secret nuclear weapons facilities. They say it would establish a bad international precedent. “It could very well weaken the Biological Weapons Convention,” said Marylia Kelley, executive director of Tri-Valley CAREs. “It could lead to other nations mixing their biodefense research with their military research.”

Los Alamos and Livermore officials say the BSL-3 facilities will enable their scientists—such as Paul Jackson, who helped identify, through extracted DNA, the strain of anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax attacks—to respond more quickly to national emergencies. “If a sample has to be bounced from one institution to another with different handling and shipping requirements… it turns into a complex but very slow analysis,” said Los Alamos spokeswoman Nancy Ambrosiano. “Something that could [otherwise] take hours could take on the order of 5 to 10 days.”

Concerned for the safety of the surrounding communities and the security of deadly agents at the BSL-3 laboratories, Nuclear Watch and Tri-Valley CAREs want the Energy Department to do a more thorough environmental analysis of the potential impacts of the facilities.

“This is the lab with the missing hard drives,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, referring to several classified hard drives and computer disks that remain missing. “How about some missing bugs?”

“The last thing we want is for live anthrax to be joining the radioactive and toxic contamination that is already in our environment and already causing health problems in our community,” CAREs' Kelley said.

Energy Department analyses found a very low likelihood that the public or uninvolved workers in adjacent buildings would be exposed to biological agents at either proposed facility.

The environmental groups also want a programmatic environmental impact statement reviewing the cumulative impacts of all current and planned Energy Department biosafety labs to expose unnecessary redundancies. “These are materials that need to be very carefully guarded and we think a programmatic environmental review would really enhance the overall security of the program,” Coghlan said.