The state of South Carolina has no better idea than anyone else outside the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) about whether the agency has yet shipped 500 kilograms of weapon-usable plutonium to the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, according to a recent court filing.
In December 2017, a federal judge in South Carolina ordered the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency to ship 1 metric ton of plutonium out of the Savannah River Site by Jan. 1, 2020, after missing a deadline to turn the material into commercial nuclear reactor fuel.
In January, the NNSA told a federal court in Nevada that it had shipped about half of that plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site sometime before November 2018. Nevada, which says it was unaware of the exact timing of the shipment, sued to stop the shipment on Nov. 30.
Now, the NNSA has said it will ship no more of the 1-ton tranche of fissile metal to Nevada, effectively earmarking about 500 kilograms of the material for Pantex.
“The State has not been provided any further information regarding the status of the remaining one-half metric ton of plutonium,” attorneys for South Carolina wrote in a letter filed March 1 with the U.S. District Court for South Carolina in Aiken.
In a supplement analysis published around August, the agency said plutonium ordered out of South Carolina in 2017 would go only to Nevada and Pantex.
Citing operational security, the NNSA has said it will never provide details about shipments of special nuclear materials such as the plutonium ordered out of Savannah River. The agency plans to use this material to make warhead cores called plutonium pits at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in the mid-2020s.
South Carolina’s letter is part of a lawsuit the state filed against the NNSA in May, and which is separate from the lawsuit in which Judge J. Michelle Childs sided with the state in 2017 to boot the ton of plutonium out of Savannah River.
The May lawsuit is one of two South Carolina is now litigating against the NNSA. In the other, consolidated in 2018 from a pair of lawsuits in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, the state seeks some $200 million in fines it says the NNSA owes it under federal law for failing to move the weapon-grade plutonium out of Savannah River sooner.
The NNSA once intended to use the now-canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at Savannah River to turn 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel, under an arms-control pact with Russia. When the facility fell behind schedule and ran over budget, the agency missed a legal deadline to start processing plutonium into fuel by 2014, and a subsequent deadline to remove that plutonium from South Carolina by Jan. 1, 2016.
