Energy Secretary Rick Perry and the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration were set to meet Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) in Nevada on Friday, about a week after after the Silver State’s senior senator stopped blocking nominees for senior Department of Energy jobs because of a contentious plutonium shipment last year.
The meeting was still on as of Thursday, according to a media advisory DOE emailed to the press. Spokespersons for DOE, NNSA and Cortez Masto would not confirm whether the meeting had already happened at deadline Friday Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
According to Perry’s letter, the four officials and their staff will tour the NNSA site where the plutonium was shipped.
The NNSA, at the order of a federal judge in South Carolina, at some point in 2018 shipped half a metric ton of weapon-usable plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site’s (NNSS) Device Assembly Facility from the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. Nevada sued on Nov. 30 to stop the shipment, only to be told months later that the plutonium was already at NNSS.
Cortez Masto swiftly became the standard bearer for the issue in Washington, demanding explanations from Perry and NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty about why the agency had shipped the fissile material without first notifying Nevada officials.
In a February letter to Cortez Masto, the agency cited security concerns to justify the secrecy, adding that DOE never reveals when or by which routes classified shipments of special nuclear materials move. The agency also repeated, as it had in communications last year with then-Nev. Gov. Brian Sandoval (R), that it would remove the plutonium from NNSS by 2026.
Cortez Masto was not satisfied and, after a follow-on meeting with Gordon-Hagerty, decided to block four nominees for high-level DOE and NNSA management roles from moving quickly through the Senate. William Bookless, the nominee to be Gordon-Hagerty’s deputy, was among these.
Cortez Masto said she would drop the hold if Perry told her, in writing, when the NNSA would remove the plutonium from Nevada.
In the April 24 letter, Perry told Cortez Masto the same thing DOE told Sandoval last year: the plutonium would be gone by 2026. At that time, the NNSA plans to turn the tranche of solid metal plutonium into fissile nuclear weapon cores called pits. The plutonium now at NNSS will become W87-1-style pits, usable in future intercontinental ballistic missile warheads.
The Energy Department moved the plutonium to NNSS because South Carolina in 2017 won a lawsuit in which it had demanded removal of plutonium from the Savannah River Site that DOE had failed to turn into commercial reactor fuel. The judge in the case gave DOE until Jan. 1, 2020, to get 1 metric ton of plutonium out of state.
Half of that tranche is the 500 kilograms now staged in containers at NNSS. The NNSA plans to send the other half-metric-ton to the Pantex weapons assembly and disassembly plant in Amarillo, Texas. South Carolina estimates that the NNSA has since 2002 moved nearly 10 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium to Savannah River for conversion into commercial reactor fuel in the now-canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility. That includes the 1 metric ton on its way out.
The Energy Department has said it will move no more of the 1-ton tranche of plutonium affected by the 2017 court order to NNSS.
The agency was on the hook to dispose of 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium as part of a now-moribund arms-reduction pact signed with Russia in 2000. The agency says it will still dispose of the material, but not with the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility. Instead, DOE will have the NNSA immobilize the plutonium in concrete-like grout at a planned Savannah River facility, then bury the resulting mixture deep underground at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
