An appeals court will “likely” hear arguments about why the Department of Energy should remove half a metric ton of weapon-usable plutonium from Nevada by August, attorneys for the state wrote in a Monday court filing.
The news dropped in a filing with the U.S. District Court for Nevada, in which the state reasserted its request to delay DOE’s motion to toss out the lawsuit now on appeal in the Ninth Circuit.
To comply with a 2017 court order in a separate lawsuit, DOE moved the plutonium to the Nevada National Sercurity Site’s (NNSS) Device Assembly Facility some time before November 2018. Nevada sued on Nov. 30, 2018, to stop that shipment, and has said it did not know at the time the material had already arrived.
After DOE declared the shipment in a January filing in District Court, Judge Miranda Du declined to grant Nevada an injunction blocking the already-completed transport. Du did not rule that Nevada’s complaint was moot, as the Energy Department later argued in the Ninth Circuit.
Also on Monday, Nevada formally asked Du for permission to investigate a total of three current and former DOE officials, and to collect information from the agency about plutonium shipments to NNSS over the last 20 years. The agency has asked to the court to protect that information from discovery.
The judge had not ruled on any of these matters at deadline Tuesday for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
The Energy Department, under the 2017 court order, must move 1 metric ton of plutonium out of the Savannah River Site in South Carolina by Jan. 1, 2020, and possibly more after that. The agency in 2016 missed a legal deadline to remove the plutonium after failing to turn it into fuel for commercial nuclear power plants. South Carolina, in court filings, estimated the 2017 court order applies to nearly 10 metric tons of plutonium.
