A federal appeals court decided last week it does not need to hear oral arguments about whether the U.S. government violated environmental law when it sent half a metric ton of weapon-usable plutonium to the Nevada in 2018.
In what could be a sign that judges will rule swiftly on Nevada’s appeal of a lower court’s decision last year not to prevent the shipment, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said it will consider the case Aug. 9 in San Francisco based on briefs already filed by attorneys representing the state and federal governments.
“The court is of the unanimous opinion that the facts and legal arguments are adequately presented in the briefs and the record and that oral argument would not significantly aid the decisional process,” the Ninth Circuit Court wrote in a July 2 order.
On Nov. 30 — well after the shipment arrived — Nevada sued the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in U.S. District Court for Nevada to stop the agency from moving 500 kilograms of weapon-usable plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site’s (NNSS) Device Assembly Facility from the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The state argued the NNSA failed to perform a detailed assessment of the shipment’s environmental consequences as required under the National Environmental Protection Act. The federal agency says it did all the reviews the law requires.
As part of the lawsuit, Nevada asked District Court Judge Miranda Du to block the NNSA from sending the plutonium to the Silver State. Later, the state argued that the injunction, if granted, could legally force the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency to remove the plutonium it had already shipped.
Citing security concerns, the NNSA waited until January 2019 to disclose that it had shipped the plutonium to Nevada. The state said it only learned of the shipment from that disclosure.
The NNSA must move 1 metric ton of plutonium from South Carolina by Jan. 1, 2020, because of a court order in a separate lawsuit that state filed in 2016. The half-ton not sent to the NNSS is headed for the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas.
The NNSA plans to use the plutonium now stored at in Nevada — as well as the Pantex-bound tranche — to make fissile nuclear-weapon cores called pits. The agency has said it will by 2026 transfer the plutonium now stored at the NNSS to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The pits will be used for for the W87-1-style warheads planned for use on future Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent Missiles: next-generation intercontinental ballistic missiles slated to replace the current Minuteman III fleet beginning around 2030.
