Nevada and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) are attempting to resolve the lawsuit seeking the immediate removal of 500 kilograms of weapon-usable plutonium from the Nevada National Security Site, court papers filed Tuesday show.
To comply with a court order in a separate federal lawsuit, the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency shipped the plutonium to Nevada from South Carolina some time before November 2018. Nevada officials, unaware the plutonium had already been sent, filed suit in December 2018 in U.S. District Court to stop the shipment, later amending the complaint to demand removal of the plutonium.
Now, “the Parties are currently engaged in substantive and promising settlement negotiations,” according to a joint filing seeking a stay in the case. “If the Parties reach an agreement in principle by March 31, 2020, the Parties will file a Notice of Settlement Status and request that the Court extend the Stipulated Stay so that the Parties can finalize the settlement.”
The state claimed the shipment, then storing plutonium at the NNSS Device Assembly Facility, constituted a nuisance potentially harmful to Nevada’s people and property. The NNSA disagreed, saying it complied with federal environmental law in moving the material, which was in any case safely ensconced in one of the agency’s newer storage sites, smack in the middle of a 1,300-square-mile desert compound more than 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The plutonium now sitting at the Device Assembly Facility was once part of a 34-metric-ton surplus tranche slated for disposal at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. However, South Carolina in 2016 sued the NNSA and demanded the agency remove the plutonium from the facility after blowing a legal deadline that year to dispose of the material in the now-canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.
The NNSA subsequently reclassified 1 metric ton of the South Carolina plutonium as for weapons-production and shipped it to Nevada and Texas. Ultimately, the plutonium will be used to make pits — fissile cores — for W87-1 style warheads intended for the future Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent: silo-based Air Force missiles scheduled to replace the current Minuteman III fleet starting around 2030.
The NNSA plans to ship the plutonium now in Nevada to Los Alamos starting in 2021, cleaning out the entire 500-kilogram tranche by 2026.
