The messaging war over a clandestine shipment of plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site last year continued Saturday in the pages of the Las Vegas Review Journal, where Secretary of Energy Rick Perry insisted that his agency gave Nevada officials all the notice the federal government could about the shipment.
The Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)admitted in court in January that the agency shipped half a metric ton of plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) from the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., sometime before November 2018.
NNSA made the admission in a federal lawsuit that Nevada filed Nov. 30 in the U.S. District Court for Nevada in an attempt to stop the shipment. As it turned out, the lawsuit landed in court at least a month after the plutonium landed in NNSS’ Device Assembly Facility.
Nevada officials cried foul, accusing NNSA of lying about the timing of the shipment.
Perry, in his letter to the Review Journal, said “Nevada officials were not blindsided at all” because NNSA announced its plans to move plutonium to NNSS in August as part of an environmental document called a supplement analysis.
Nevada’s congressional delegation, Gov. Steve Sisolak (D), and former Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) all have said that environmental document, and a limited private dialog about it with Department of Energy and NNSA officials, were all the notice the Silver State got about the shipment.
Perry, echoing language from a Department of Energy press release issued Jan. 31 after the agency’s bombshell court filing, said his agency “was as transparent about this movement as operational security would permit.”
Nevada never argued that NNSA could not ship plutonium to NNSS, only that the agency had failed to conduct a required environmental analysis first. Judge Miranda Du in the U.S. District Court has yet to rule on that claim, and the lawsuit is on hold while Nevada appeals Du’s decision not to block NNSA from shipping more plutonium to Nevada. Nevada’s opening appeals brief is due to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on March 4.
