Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) said this week she will block the Senate from quickly confirming nominees for senior Department of Energy jobs until the agency sets a date to remove half-ton a ton of plutonium from Nevada.
“Until I get commitment from [Secretary of Energy Rick Perry] that [DOE] will set a date for the removal of plutonium they secretly shipped to Nevada and stop any further shipment, I will be putting a hold on all nominees,” Cortez Masto wrote on Twitter. The Nevada Independent first reported the news.
Cortez Masto made her vow only days after the Senate Armed Services Committee approved William Bookless to be second-in-command at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The Donald Trump administration nominated Bookless, a physicist who spent most of his career at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to be NNSA’s principal deputy administrator in August. The Senate Armed Services Committee approved the nomination in December, but the 115th Congress ended Jan. 3 before the full Senate could send him to NNSA.
Bookless then had to repeat the nomination process, sans a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, in the 116th Congress. He was cruising along, until Cortez Masto put her foot down over the clandestine shipment of half a metric ton of plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site’s (NNSS) Device Assembly Facility sometime before November 2018.
Nevada sued the NNSA in federal court on Nov. 30 to stop the plutonium shipment, unaware, the state said, that the agency had already moved the material to NNSS from the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The NNSA was required to move the material out of South Carolina after failing to turn it into commercial reactor fuel, per a 2017 federal court order in a separate lawsuit. The semiautonomous Department of Energy agency said it informed Nevada leaders of the incoming plutonium.
A senior DOE official, speaking with reporters Monday on a conference call about the agency’s fiscal 2020 budget request, said “[i]t’s every Senator’s prerogative to exercise their judgement … on nominees.”
Cortez Masto’s office did not reply to a request for comment.
Cortez Masto cannot single-handedly prevent the Senate from voting on the nominees, but she can prevent the upper chamber from approving the nominations by unanimous consent. That process, also known as hotlining, can take much less time than organizing a roll-call vote, but only if no senator objects to a nominee.
By publicly signaling she would object to a future request for unanimous consent to approve DOE nominees on the floor, Cortez Masto has essentially short-circuited the hotline.
On Thursday, Bloomberg Environment reported that Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chair Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) planned to speak with Cortez Masto about the latter’s concerns in hopes of resolving the nominee hold
The NNSA has said it will keep the half metric ton of plutonium in Nevada until about 2026 or 2027, when it plans to ship the material to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Los Alamos will make the plutonium, which was once scheduled to be disposed of forever, into fissile nuclear-weapon cores known as pits.
