The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Nevada have agreed in principle to settle a 2018 state lawsuit contesting the shipment of 500 kilograms of nuclear weapon-usable plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site.
“The parties are currently working diligently to finalize the necessary documents and to obtain final government settlement approvals,” attorneys for the state and the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency wrote in a joint filing Tuesday in U.S. District Court for Nevada.
Nevada and the NNSA asked Judge Miranda Du to stay further action in the case until May 29. Prior to the breakthrough in settlement talks, which began earlier this year, the state wanted the federal govenment to remove the plutonium.
To comply with a court order in a separate federal lawsuit, the NNSA shipped the plutonium from South Carolina some time before November 2018. Nevada officials, unaware the plutonium had already been sent, filed suit that month to stop the shipment, later amending the complaint to demand removal of the plutonium.
The state said shipping the plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site’s Device Assembly Facility created a nuisance; threatened people, property, and Nevada’s tourism industry; and violated federal environmental law.
The NNSA said it complied with federal law by supplementing an existing environmental analysis on transporting plutonium, and that it was safe to keep the material in the Device Assembly Building – one of the newest NNSA facilities rated to safely store the fissile material.
The plutonium at issue in the case is part of a 34 metric-ton tranche of military surplus once slated for disposal at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The now-terminated Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility was to turn it into commercial reactor fuel.
To comply with a judge’s 2017 order to ship the plutonium out of South Carolina before Jan. 1, 2020, the NNSA re-designated 1 ton of the surplus material at Savannah River as for defense-production use. The material could then be sent to Nevada and the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, the NNSA said in a 2018 supplement analysis. The agency has not confirmed the other 500 kilogram went to Pantex, but has said this half of the 1 ton-tranche was removed from South Carolina.
Ultimately, the NNSA plans to ship the plutonium now stored in Nevada to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where it will be used to make pits for future W87-1 warheads that are supposed to tip Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missiles. Those missiles, to be made under a $25 billion Pentagon contract expected to be awarded to Northrop Grumman this summer, will replace 400 deployed Minuteman III missiles.
The NNSA has said it will start moving the 500 kg plutonium out of Nevada in 2021 and finish by 2026. The agency has not said whether it will send more plutonium there.
Under federal law, the NNSA must by 2022 remove all weapon-usable plutonium from South Carolina that it sent to Savannah River Site for disposal. About 10 metric actually made it to the facility. The NNSA started shipments in 2002 and stopped them last decade.
