Neither South Carolina nor Nevada want anything to do with 1 metric ton of weapons-usable plutonium that has been legally evicted from South Carolina, and each state is due this week to tell a federal judge why the other should host the material.
It is a case of one lawsuit leaking into another, with South Carolina due to brief Judge Miranda Du in the U.S. District Court for Nevada on Wednesday about a 2017 decision by the U.S. District Court for South Carolina. Nevada must respond to South Carolina by Friday, according to a Jan. 4 order by Du. The South Carolina court ordered the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to move 1 metric ton of weapon-usable plutonium out of the Savannah River Site in the state by Jan. 1, 2020.
South Carolina wants to make sure the NNSA meets the deadline and appeared Jan. 4 in the Nevada suit, crying foul on the Silver State’s Nov. 30 request for a preliminary injunction to stop the federal agency from transporting plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site.
Nevada claims the NNSA has not done the environmental due diligence required to move the plutonium. The semiautonomous DOE branch claims it did, and that it published its findings online in a July 2018 document called a supplement analysis.
A hearing on the injunction is set for Jan. 17.
The court in South Carolina ordered the NNSA to remove plutonium from the Savannah River Site because the agency failed to convert the material into commercial reactor fuel, as required by federal law.
In summer 2018, the NNSA announced it would move the plutonium at issue to the Los Alamos National Laboratory by way of the the former Nevada Test Site about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The NNSA refuses to say when it will begin shipments, but filings in the District Court for South Carolina show they could start by mid-March. Nevada, according to court papers filed in December, fears shipments could start as soon as the end of January.
“NNSA is engaged in moving the 1 [metric ton] of plutonium out of the state [South Carolina],” an agency spokesperson said by email Friday. “To protect operational security, we are unable to share specific information regarding shipments.”
