A federal judge is not pulling the plug yet on Nevada’s lawsuit to have a half-metric ton of plutonium trucked out of the state, despite the Department of Energy’s repeated requests to dismiss the case.
The U.S. District Court for Nevada has scheduled a teleconference for March 12 to discuss the state’s desire to conduct further discovery in the lawsuit, according to a notice posted last week.
Nevada, since filing the lawsuit in 2018, has sought DOE documents state lawyers believe will show the agency did not fully comply with federal environmental law when it quietly shipped weapon-usable plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site sometime in 2018.
Nevada initially wanted to stop DOE from moving the plutonium to the former Nevada Test Site from the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. About a year ago, the Energy Department acknowledged it had shipped the material before the lawsuit was even filed. Nevada then amended its claim in District Court late last year to seek removal of the plutonium, after that court ruled the state had not proved it legally suffered irreparable harm and an appeals court rejected the original complaint as moot since the plutonium had already arrived.
In the amended complaint, the state claims the half-metric ton of plutonium stored at the Nevada site’s Device Assembly Facility constitutes a nuisance. The Energy Department counters that the plutonium and its radioactivity will be contained to the site and do not, in any case, constitute a legal nuisance.
The Energy Department has said it will by 2026 ship the material to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where it will be made into plutonium pits: fissile nuclear weapon cores suitable for W87-1 warheads planned for use with Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missiles. The missiles will replace the Minuteman III fleet starting around 2030.
