A judge Monday granted an extension for parties involved in a three year-old lawsuit against the Department of Energy to reach a compromise, a court document shows.
The new due date for a joint proposal by both parties is Oct. 25, according to a filing in the case.
Judge Mary Lewis last week 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.
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.
With the deadline weeks away, plaintiffs reached Tuesday were circumspect about whether they would stick to their insistence that NNSA halt construction on the Savannah River pit plant, which is still in a very early phase that mostly consists of gutting the partially constructed building the plant will eventually occupy.
“As we have not yet had discussions with DOJ concerning the development of a ‘joint proposal,’ it would be premature to say what such interaction might yield,” Tom Clements, director of the one of the plaintiffs, Savannah River Site Watch, told the ExchangeMonitor in an email. Clements said he is “hopeful” that the Department of Justice and NNSA will “duly consider the court’s instructions.”
The court, in its Sept. 30 ruling, wrote that “[t]he parties’ discussion and proposal should take into consideration Plaintiffs’ request for injunctive relief.”
Plaintiffs asked that the court require DOE and NNSA to “take no further actions toward proceeding with their plutonium pit production plans until they have complied with” the National Environmental Policy Act, according to the plaintiff’s complaint from June 2021.
“I can tell you that some kind of injunctive relief while the order is complied with is definitely on the Plaintiff’s minds and was clearly contemplated by the Judge’s directions,” Scott Yundt from the nonprofit Tri-Valley CAREs told the Monitor.
“[W]e will see what kind of injunctive middle ground can be reached that will allow the required NEPA analyses to be conducted in good faith and not simply to justify a ‘decision already made,’” Yundt said, quoting the court’s ruling in the case.
Jay Coghlan, executive director of anti-nuclear group Nuclear Watch New Mexico, another one of the plaintiffs, told the Monitor that it would be “foolish” for him to “publicly discuss litigation strategy.”
The NNSA again declined to comment on the lawsuit, as it did last week when the court ruled for the anti-nuclear groups.
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 was to start making pits this year and to make 30 pits a year by 2028. 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.
Editor’s note, Oct. 14, 2024, 1:36 p.m. Eastern time. The story was changed to show that the court ordered parties in the lawsuit to consider the plaintiffs’ request for an injunction, and to correctly quote remarks by Tom Clements, director of Savannah River Site Watch, about this order.
