A federal appeals court should throw out Nevada’s request to block further shipments of weapon-usable plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site, since the Department of Energy has already shipped the material there, according to court filings from the agency and the state of South Carolina.
Nevada is trying to get the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to block the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) from sending any more plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS), about 100 miles from Las Vegas.
The NNSA in January acknowledged it had shipped around 500 kilograms of the material to NNSS’ Device Assembly Facility sometime before November 2018. Nevada sued in U.S. District Court for Nevada to stop the shipment on Nov. 30; the state claimed it filed the lawsuit without knowing the plutonium had already been moved from the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., as ordered by another federal court in 2017.
The District Court, which learned about the shipment only after it happened, refused to block DOE from shipping more plutonium to Nevada. The state appealed that decision to the Ninth Circuit in February, again requesting an injunction pending the result of the appeal.
“[T]he Federal Defendants have represented that there will be no future plutonium shipments to Nevada … which rendered this matter moot,” attorneys for South Carolina, including state Attorney General Alan Wilson, wrote in a March 15 response to Nevada’s earlier motion for injunction. That representation applies only to 1 metric ton of plutonium ordered out of South Carolina by Jan. 1, 2020, and described by the NNSA in an environmental document called a supplement analysis published around August.
Appearing the same day before a joint meeting of two Nevada Legislature committees, state Attorney General Aaron Ford made clear his office intends to pursue the legal battle. Ford said a hearing before the Ninth Circuit could happen “hopefully quite soon.”
The Nevada Attorney General’s Office is requesting $1.7 million for nuclear waste litigation in the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 budget years. But it might need additional funding to contest both the plutonium shipment and ongoing federal efforts to revive licensing of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, AG Chief of Staff Jessica Adair told lawmakers.
NNSA has to ship one metric ton of plutonium out of South Carolina by Jan. 1, 2020, per the 2017 court order. The agency has said it will ship the other half of that ton to the Pantex weapons assembly-and-disassembly plant in Amarillo, Texas, by Jan. 1, 2020. Last week, an NNSA spokesperson said that Pantex prime Consolidated Nuclear Security in late February obtained a safety basis supplement needed for the plant’s new plutonium staging mission.
The plutonium is part of a 34-metric-ton tranche that was supposed to be turned into commercial reactor fuel using the now-canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at Savannah River. After staying in Nevada and Texas until the mid-2020s, the material will go to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to be made into fissile warhead cores.
Like South Carolina, the NNSA said the issue, or at least Nevada’s appeal in the Ninth Circuit, is moot, because the shipment is complete. In a Monday filing opposing Nevada’s request for an injunction pending appeal, the agency also repeated its longstanding position that it had completed all required environmental reviews before shipping plutonium to Nevada.
Meanwhile, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) this week doubled down on her resolve to block quick confirmation of nominees for senior DOE jobs — including the NNSA No. 2-designate — until Energy Secretary Rick Perry sets a date for removing the plutonium from the Nevada National Security Site.
It has to be a date, Cortez Masto tweeted Thursday, that is “not 20 years down the road.”
Perry reached out to Cortez Masto last week in an attempt to resolve the senator’s blockade, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported this week. The two agreed that Perry’s staff would draft and deliver a letter on the matter to Cortez Masto’s staff, but nothing more had publicly come of the exchange at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
The NNSA in November told then-Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) that any plutonium shipped to the Nevada National Security Site because of the 2017 court order will be “prioritized for removal and transferred to LANL by the 2026-2027 timeframe.” That is according to according to a letter from the agency to Sandoval, which Nevada filed Dec. 4 with the U.S. District Court for Nevada as part of its initial lawsuit against the plutonium shipment.
Chris Schneidmiller, Exchange Monitor editor in chief, contributed to this story from Washington.
