A judge this week gave parties involved in a three-year lawsuit against the Department of Energy another 12 days to reach a compromise over environmental review of the agency’s plutonium pit program, court papers show.
The new due date for a joint proposal by both parties is Nov. 4, according to a filing in the case. The deadline was previously Oct. 25.
“The parties have been working diligently to adhere to the Court’s order and have already met three (3) times to negotiate a potential compromise remedy,” the attorneys for both parties said in the most recent court document. “At each meeting, the parties make incremental progress.”
The attorneys said that the court asked both parties to consider “including Plaintiffs’ request for fees, costs and expenses” as part of a compromise. Currently, according to the court document, the plaintiffs would share their billing data to negotiate fees by Oct. 22.
Attorneys declined to comment to the Monitor Thursday on how the Oct. 22 meeting went, and whether the plaintiffs shared the billing data.
In a joint filing in March, lawyers for the NNSA and the environmentalists said that “an amicable resolution of this dispute is unlikely.”
At the beginning of October, Judge Mary Lewis ruled that the defendants, consisting of the Department of Energy and its semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, did not adequately study the effects of producing nuclear-weapon cores in two states, including at the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
But instead of halting construction at the Savannah River Site, as the environmentalist plaintiffs requested, Judge Lewis ordered the parties to reach a “middle ground,” according to court documents.
The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility would not open until the early 2030s, NNSA has said. A companion plant at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico started making pits this year and might make 30 pits a year by 2028, lab officials have said.
The plants would make fissile cores for the primary stages of the W87-1 warheads to top the Air Force’s silo-based Sentinel missile for the ground leg of the nuclear triad next decade.
