In a pound-the-table brief filed this week, Nevada asked a federal judge to hear oral arguments in an ongoing lawsuit to get some 500 kilograms of weapon-usable plutonium shipped out of the state.
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration shipped the material to the Nevada National Security Site in 2018 to comply with a court order in a separate lawsuit requiring the plutonium’s removal from the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. Nevada sued in November 2018 to stop the shipment, only to have the NNSA admit in January the plutonium was already in the state.
Nevada has since amended the lawsuit to demand the plutonium’s removal from the former Nevada Test Site’s Device Assembly Facility, making the legal argument that the material constitutes a nuisance, and that its shipment violated federal environmental law.
Escalating its rhetoric in a brief filed Monday with the U.S. District Court for Nevada, the state called DOE’s 2018 actions a “secret plutonium smuggling operation,” and refuted the agency’s calls to dismiss the case.
The Department of Energy, which in 2018 released a supplement analysis detailing the expected environmental impacts of the cross-country plutonium shipment, has denied it violated federal environmental law. The agency also says the legal nuisance standard Nevada cited does not apply in the case.
Judge Miranda Du had not set a date for oral arguments at deadline Wednesday for Weapons Complex Moring Briefing. The plutonium shipped to the Nevada National Security Site was once part of a 34 metric ton tranche DOE planned to convert into fuel for civilian power plants using the now-canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at Savannah River. The plutonium in Nevada will be sent starting in 2021 to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where it will be used to make pits, fissile nuclear-weapon cores, for future U.S. warheads.
The NNSA says it will still dispose of 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium, despite the diversion of some of this material to Nevada.
