Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) on Tuesday agreed to stop blocking nominees for high-level Department of Energy jobs after securing an in-person meeting on storage of plutonium in Nevada with Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, head of DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The senator, her staff, and the DOE top-dogs are set to tour the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) together May 10, according to an April 24 letter from Perry to Cortez Masto.
Against Nevada’s wishes, DOE last year shipped half a metric ton of weapon-usable plutonium to NNSS from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The shipment precipitated a nominee hostage situation in March, when Cortez Masto announced she would not allow the Senate to speedily confirm five high-level DOE management candidates until Perry set a date for removing the plutonium from Nevada.
In his April 24 letter, Perry did set a removal date — essentially the same one the agency provided last year in private communications, later made public, with the administration of then-Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R).
“DOE commits to commencing removal of this material from Nevada beginning in calendar year 2021, and completing the removal by the end of 2026,” Perry wrote in his latest letter to Nevada’s senior U.S. senator.
In a Nov. 20 letter to Sandoval’s office, Ike White, Gordon-Hagerty’s chief of staff, said the half metric ton of plutonium was expected to be “prioritized for removal and transferred to [the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico] by the 2026-2027 timeframe.”
In a roughly one-minute video posted from her official Twitter account late Tuesday, Cortez Masto said “the Department of Energy agreed that they would no longer ship any plutonium from the state of South Carolina to Nevada.”
The Energy Department did not exactly say that. Rather, Perry repeated a declaration DOE made in the federal lawsuit Nevada filed last year to block shipment of the plutonium to NNSS: that the state would receive no more of a 1 metric-ton tranche of plutonium ordered out of South Carolina in 2017 by a federal judge in a different lawsuit.
At deadline Wednesday for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, the Senate had not scheduled confirmation votes for DOE nominees Cortez Masto blocked. The chamber on Tuesday confirmed William Cooper as the department’s general counsel.
Other DOE nominees still awaiting floor consideration include William Bookless to be second-in-command at the NNSA and Rita Baranwal to be DOE’s assistant energy secretary for nuclear energy.
