A key figure in federal lawsuits involving weapon-usable plutonium moved last year to the Nevada National Security Sitehas retired from the Department of Energy, the agency confirmed this week.
Henry Allen Gunter left DOE after a long federal career, a spokesperson for DOE’s Environmental Management Office at Savannah River confirmed in an email Tuesday. The state of Nevada wants to depose Gunter for a lawsuit it filed last year to stop the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) from moving plutonium to the atomic test site from the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The Energy Department, which ordinarily does not comment on personnel matters, did not publicly announce Gunter’s retirement. Tom Cantey, the NNSA’s surplus plutonium disposition program manager, mentioned Gunter’s retirement last week during a public presentation to a National Academies panel. The DOE spokesperson refused to say when Gunter retired. Cantey also did not say when Gunter retired.
Gunter was most recently the department Office of Environmental Management’s plutonium program manager and senior technical adviser to the assistant manager for nuclear materials stabilization at the Savannah River Operations Office. Gunter had held that role for more than 35 years, according to a 2017 court filing. Sometime last year, the NNSA shipped half a metric ton of plutonium over the road from Savannah River to the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS), about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
In August 2017, DOE made a 29-page analysis by Gunter the cornerstone of its defense in another federal lawsuit involving the plutonium now stored at NNSS. In that ultimately successful suit, the state of South Carolina asked a U.S. District Court judge to force the NNSA to remove some 10 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium from Savannah River after the feds missed a legal deadline to dispose of the material by converting it into fuel for civilian nuclear-power reactors.
In his analysis, Gunter said it would be risky and expensive, if not impossible, to safely remove the plutonium from the site before 2025 while also complying with federal environmental law.
Gunter’s analysis did not sway the federal judge in the South Carolina case, who in December 2017 ordered DOE to move an initial tranche of 1 metric ton plutonium out of South Carolina by Jan. 1, 2020. Under the judicial gun to comply, the NNSA quickly stood up an ad-hoc group of agency experts to find a way around the hurdles Gunter described in his declaration to the District Court in South Carolina.
The group’s solution involved recategorizing 1 metric ton of South Carolina-domiciled plutonium as “for defense-production use.” This material, which is in solid-metal form, was previously classed as surplus to defense needs and marked for permanent disposal. Made available again for weapons use, the NNSA decided to send the material to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico by way of the NNSS and the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. Starting in 2026, Los Alamos, which does not now have the room to store a ton of plutonium, would reshape the material into fissile weapon cores called plutonium pits. Those pits could be used in future warheads suitable for intercontinental ballistic missiles, the NNSA has said.
The NNSA announced this plan publicly in an August 2018 supplement analysis. Nevada immediately opposed the plan, escalating informal conversations with DOE and NNSA in the late summer into a lawsuit against the agencies in the U.S. District Court for Nevada later that year.
Nevada filed suit Nov. 30, 2018, demanding the District Court prohibit shipment to the NNSS. The state seized on Gunter’s August 2017 declaration as evidence that the NNSA’s shipping and storage violated federal environmental law. Among other things, the state claims the NNSA failed to asses all the potential environmental affects of preparing the material for shipment and moving it over the road.
In January, the NNSA admitted that it had moved the half-metric-ton of plutonium to NNSS from Savannah River before Nevada even sued to stop the shipment. The state subsequently asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to force the agency to remove the material from the site. In court papers, Nevada said it filed its District Court lawsuit before it knew NNSA had shipped any formerly excess plutonium.
