Warnings of death and devastation echoed Thursday night as dozens of speakers took turns decrying Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plan to construct a new plutonium lab.

“I feel like I’m standing on a train track, and the train is coming full speed ahead,” said Santa Fean Adele Caruthers.

Officially, the meeting held at Santa Fe Community College for public comment was a federally mandated part of the supplemental environmental impact study being conducted by the National Nuclear Security Administration as it prepares to build a Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility at LANL.

The building is projected to cost $5.8 billion and scheduled to be completed sometime after 2020.

The meeting was the last of four such meetings held around the state this week, and almost every one of the dozens of speakers Thursday was against the lab.

Apocalyptic overtones were in the majority, too. Elana Sue St. Pierre said she spoke “for the children whose voices will hold all here accountable in the days yet to come.”

St. Pierre said radioactive contamination from the lab is too close to Santa Fe’s water supply and “may be seeping into our life-giving, limited water resources, becoming the water within wombs birthing lives plagued by deformity, sickness and deaths.”

“LANL sits on a windswept mountain top, in a seismic zone, where wildfires and contaminated run-off continue to threaten the health of millions who live down-wind and downstream,” said Shannyn Sollitt of Santa Fe. “Where does the government get the right to exert this form of cruel authority over the people here who repeatedly … have to defend their communities against this tyranny?”

Robert Gilkeson, who told the audience of about 100 people he has been a geologist for more than 40 years, warned of studies that reveal a complex, 29-mile-long fault system beneath Los Alamos that has produced three “active earthquakes with surface rupture” in the past 2,000 years.

It will, Gilkeson said, “eventually trigger an earthquake event” at Los Alamos, where the CMRR, if built as proposed, will be holding 6 metric tons of plutonium in long-term storage.

That amount seemed excessive to Jan Boyer, who said the supplemental study being conducted wasn’t extensive enough to weigh all the risks.

“If anyone wants to party with 6 tons of plutonium, I feel that deserves a serious diagnosis,” Boyer said. “Please don’t do this. It’s too weird.”

Numerous people questioned why the federal government would finance a $6 billion nuclear facility when America’s school districts are cutting budgets, and they appealed to New Mexico’s congressional delegation to stand against the CMRR building.

There was also much outcry against the plant’s weapons mission, and the CMRR was referred to repeatedly as a “bomb factory.” Lab officials have said the building will continue weapons work, but by maintaining the country’s existing stockpile rather than by creating new nuclear weapons.

Two speakers at the beginning of the hearing did say they were in favor of the new lab.

Each touted the potential for construction to bring hundreds of jobs to Los Alamos.