As budget hearing season ramps up in Washington, D.C., hearings of a different kind are scheduled elsewhere in two court cases touching the nuclear security enterprise: one involving a former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who pleaded guilty to lying about ties to China, another involving weapon-usable plutonium sent to Nevada for safekeeping.
First, Turab Lookman, the former physicist at the Department of Energy nuclear-weapon facility, is scheduled to be sentenced April 22 in U.S. District Court for New Mexico by Chief District Judge William Johnson.
Lookman was indicted in 2019 for lying on a form, and to a DOE investigator, about his ties to China’s Thousand Talents Program: a recruiting initiative Beijing says aims to advance basic science research and development, but which the Donald Trump administration says is an effort to steal U.S. intellectual property and national security secrets.
Lookman initially pleaded not guilty to three counts of lying to the federal government before switching his plea to guilty in January, in a deal through which the government agreed to press only one count of lying.
The Department of Justice plans to recommend that Lookman serve no more than 10 months in prison. However, the offenses to which he has pleaded guilty could land him up to five years incarceration, three years of supervised release, and a fine as large as $250,000.
Plutonium ‘Nuisance,’ or Not
Meanwhile, a judge in U.S. District Court for Nevada is scheduled on May 13 to hear a DOE motion to dismiss a lawsuit from the state of Nevada, which claims the agency’s 2018 relocation of 500 kilograms of weapon-usable plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site in 2018 created a nuisance and endangered people and nearby property.
The NNSA shipped the plutonium to Nevada from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina under order in a separate lawsuit. Nevada sued to stop the shipment, but the NNSA later disclosed it had sent the material prior to Nevada’s suit.
After losing an appeal in which it claimed the complaint to stop the shipment could be interpreted as a suit to force the NNSA the remove the plutonium, Nevada retooled its lawsuit in the District Court to include the current nuisance complaint. The state wants the court to force the NNSA to relocate the plutonium to anywhere except Nevada; the agency said it has followed federal environmental law and a judicial order in sending the material to the Nevada National National Security Site.
The NNSA has said the plutonium sent to Nevada will be removed starting in 2021, and completely relocated by 2026 to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. There, the agency plans to convert the material into fissile nuclear-weapon cores for future intercontinental ballistic missile warheads.
