Nevada will be allowed to seek removal of half a metric ton of nuclear weapon-usable plutonium sent to the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site by amending a nearly year-old lawsuit, a federal judge ruled Monday.
The state sued DOE and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in U.S. District Court for Nevada in November 2018, seeking to prevent the federal agencies from shipping the plutonium to the former Nevada Test Site from the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
In January of this year, the NNSA informed the court it had transported roughly 500 kilograms of plutonium to Nevada before the lawsuit was filed. The NNSA had publicly said in August 2018 that it would, as ordered in 2017 by another federal court in a lawsuit field by South Carolina, move the plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) and the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, before Jan. 1, 2020.
However, the agency never said exactly when it would ship the material, citing security concerns about weapon-usable material.
After Nevada learned of the shipment, the District Court denied as moot its request to block the material from entering the state. The state took its case to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which also denied the appeal, ruling that Nevada’s request to block the shipment could not be interpreted as a request to remove the plutonium.
Nevada then asked the District Court for permission to amend its lawsuit and seek the removal of plutonium on the grounds that it was a nuisance under federal common law.
District Court Judge Miranda Du has allowed that, though she would not allow the state to seek removal of the plutonium on the grounds that it represented a nuclear incident, as described by the federal Price-Anderson Act. That law gives federal courts jurisdiction over injuries to persons and property caused by some nuclear materials.
The plutonium sent to the NNSS would eventually go to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which would turn it into fissile nuclear weapon cores, suitable for use on future intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Energy Department has committed to removing the material from Nevada by 2026.
