To settle a 2018 lawsuit over storage of plutonium, the Department of Energy has tentatively agreed not to send more of the weapon-usable material to Nevada.
Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford announced the development in a June 26 press release summarizing the unpublished settlement between the Silver State and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The development ends, for now, about a year-and-a-half of legal and political drama that started in November 2018, when the state sued in U.S. District Court to stop the federal agency from moving half a metric ton of plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS). In early 2019, the agency admitted it sent that material to the desert test site before the state filed the lawsuit, so Nevada revised the lawsuit to seek removal of the plutonium.
The settlement leaves the future open-ended. The Energy Department reserves the right to send more plutonium to the NNSS, if needed. District Judge Miranda Du dismissed the state’s suit without prejudice, meaning it can be refiled.
Nevada said the NNSA “stated its intention” not to ship to NNSS any more weapon-usable plutonium brought to the Savannah River Site for disposal.
Under the settlement, the Energy Department must notify Ford within 30 days “if this ‘intention’ changes,” according to the state press release. “This will give the AG Ford time to file suit if necessary to protect the State’s residents and environment.”
The settlement also requires the NNSA to make good on its promise under then-Energy Secretary Rick Perry to begin removing the half ton of plutonium from Nevada by 2021, and to finish by 2026. The material was reclassified in 2018 as for-defense production use and will be sent to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to help make new fissile warhead cores, called pits, for future W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile warheads.
Nevada politicians, particularly those with statewide constituencies, are hypersensitive about nuclear material coming into their state, whether it is civilian spent fuel at the proposed Yucca Mountain repository or defense plutonium such as the tranche now stored at the NNSS Device Assembly Facility.
As part of a post-Cold War arms-reduction agreement with Russia, the NNSA plans to permanently dispose of 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium over the next 50 or so years. The agency stores some 10 metric tons of that material at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The plutonium sent to the NNSS was once slated for disposal under this program, but a federal judge in 2017 ordered the NNSS to remove 1 metric ton of plutonium from South Carolina. That order grew out of a South Carolina lawsuit over a federal law setting limits on how long the agency could warehouse plutonium within the Savannah River Site in the state.
The half-ton not sent to NNSS was supposed to go to the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. The NNSA said it shipped the other half prior to Jan. 1, 2020, but didn’t say where the material went.
That still leaves about 10 metric tons of surplus weapon-usuable plutonium stored at Savannah River. The same federal law that South Carolina used to sue in 2017 could require the NNSA to remove all 10 metric tons of the material by 2022.
