To settle a 2018 lawsuit over storage of plutonium, the Department of Energy tentatively agreed not to send more of the weapon-usable material to Nevada, the state said Friday.
Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford announced the development in a press release summarizing the unpublished settlement between the Silver State and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The development ends, for now, about a year-and-a-half of legal and political drama that started in November 2018, when the state sued in U.S. District Court to stop the federal agency from moving half a metric ton of plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS). In early 2019, the agency admitted it sent that material to the desert test site before the state filed the lawsuit.
The settlement leaves the future open-ended. The Energy Department reserves the right to send more plutonium to the NNSS, if needed, and District Judge Miranda Du dismissed the state’s suit without prejudice, meaning it can be refiled.
Nevada said the NNSA “stated its intention” not to send more weapon-usable plutonium to NNSS as part of the agency’s effort to dispose of 34 metric tons of such material. Under the settlement, the Energy Department must notify Ford within 30 days “if this ‘intention’ changes,” according to the state press release. “This will give the AG Ford time to file suit if necessary to protect the State’s residents and environment.”
The settlement also requires the NNSA to make good on its promise to begin removing the half ton of plutonium at NNSS by 2021, and finish by 2026. The material was reclassified in 2018 as for-defense production use and will be sent to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to help make new fissile warhead cores, called pits, for future W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile warheads.
Nevada politicians, particularly those with statewide constituencies, are hypersensitive about nuclear material storage, whether it is civilian spent fuel at the proposed Yucca Mountain repository or defense plutonium such as the tranche now stored at NNSS’ Device Assembly Facility.
