Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) said Monday she will block the Senate from quickly confirming nominees for senior Department of Energy jobs until the agency schedules removal of a half-ton tranche of plutonium from Nevada.
“Until I get commitment from [Secretary of Energy Rick Perry] that [DOE] will set a date for the removal of plutonium they secretly shipped to Nevada and stop any further shipment, I will be putting a hold on all nominees,” Cortez Masto wrote on Twitter. The Nevada Independent first reported the news.
Cortez Masto made her vow only days after the Senate Armed Services and Energy and Natural Resources committees again approved five DOE nominees, including William Bookless to be second-in-command at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Rita Baranwal as assistant energy secretary for nuclear energy.
Nevada sued the NNSA in federal court on Nov. 30 to stop the plutonium shipment, unaware, the state said, that the agency had already moved the material to its Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) from the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The NNSA was required to move the material out of South Carolina after failing to turn it into commercial reactor fuel, per a 2017 federal court order in a separate lawsuit.
A senior DOE official, speaking with reporters Monday on a conference call about the agency’s fiscal 2020 budget request, said “It’s every Senator’s prerogative to exercise their judgement … on nominees.”
Cortez Masto cannot single-handedly prevent the Senate from voting on the nominees, but she can prevent the upper chamber from approving the nominations by unanimous consent. That process, also known as hotlining, takes much less time than organizing a roll-call vote, but it only works if no senator objects.
By publicly signaling she would object to a future request for unanimous consent to approve DOE nominees on the floor, Cortez Masto has essentially short-circuited that process.
The NNSA has said it will keep the half metric ton of plutonium in Nevada until about 2026 or 2027, when it plans to ship the material to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Los Alamos will make the plutonium into fissile nuclear-weapon cores known as pits.
