In the latest turn in a nearly year-old legal battle, Nevada plans to ask a federal judge to force the Department of Energy to remove half a metric ton of weapon-usable plutonium shipped to the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) in 2018, according to court papers.
The state revealed its plan in a procedural motion in U.S. District Court in Reno, filed only days after the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco rejected as moot the state’s original strategy to rid itself of the roughly 500 kilograms of plutonium metal.
Nevada sued DOE and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in District Court on Nov. 30, 2018, alleging the agency needed to perform lengthy environmental reviews to ship plutonium to the NNSS Device Assembly Facility. As part of the lawsuit, the state filed for an injunction that would have temporarily blocked the NNSA from shipping plutonium to Nevada.
Then, in January, the NNSA revealed in a District Court filing that it had sent the plutonium to the NNSS before the state sued to stop the shipment.
Nevada argued, all the way to the Ninth Circuit, that its injunction request could also cover removal of plutonium from the NNSS. District Judge Miranda Du disagreed, and so did a panel of Ninth Circuit judges. That sent Carson City scrambling back to District Court, where the state and its attorneys said last week that “Nevada intends to file a motion for leave to amend its Complaint to include, among other things, a request that DOE remove the plutonium it shipped here without Nevada’s knowledge or consent.”
The motion is expected to be filed on Aug. 30, according to last week’s procedural filing.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry has said the plutonium shipped to Nevada will be removed by 2026 to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which will use the material to make new fissile nuclear-weapon cores called pits for future intercontinental ballistic missile warheads.
Nevada claimed the NNSA violated federal law by shipping plutonium over the road to the state without performing a more detailed environmental review than the agency wound up doing. The NNSA claims its review of the move, called a supplement analysis, fulfilled its legal obligations.
The plutonium sent to Nevada was half of a 1-metric-ton tranche that had to be removed from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, under a federal court order in a lawsuit filed by that state, by Jan. 1, 2020. In a July filing in the South Carolina lawsuit, the NNSA said it had removed the rest of the plutonium covered by the 2017 court order from the Savannah River Site and South Carolina.
