Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) this week demanded the Department of Energy conduct additional environmental reviews before sending any defense plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site from the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
In December 2017, a federal judge ordered DOE to move not less than 1 metric ton of defense plutonium out of the Savannah River Site by Jan. 1. 2020. Judge J. Michelle Childs handed down the order in a lawsuit between the state of South Carolina and the agency in U.S. District Court for South Carolina.
Although the agency appealed the decision, it did comply with Childs’ directive to publish a plan for moving the material out of South Carolina. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) provided that plan in a supplemental analysis, dated July 2018, in which the semiautonomous DOE nuclear weapons agency said it might move the plutonium to one or both of the Pantex weapons assembly plant in Amarillo, Texas, and the Nevada National Security Site near Las Vegas.
Nevada and Texas would only be temporary staging grounds for the plutonium, which the NNSA would later send to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. There, the material could be used sometime next decade to help the agency make new fissile nuclear-weapon cores called plutonium pits, according to the supplemental analysis.
Heller, in a Sept. 6 letter to Energy Secretary Rick Perry, said moving plutonium to Nevada before the NNSA completes a lengthier environmental review is “completely inappropriate.”
“DOE’s desire to expeditiously pursue this proposal does not outweigh the rights of Nevadans to be safe in their own backyard,” Heller wrote.
The Silver State’s governor also piled on DOE. “I have been made aware that @ENERGY intends to store plutonium in #NV with no timeline for removal. I will fight this at every level,” Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval tweeted Thursday.
In the supplemental analysis, the NNSA said no further review is required.
Both the Nevada National Security Site, a former nuclear-explosive test site, and Pantex have handled defense plutonium before. Some of the defense plutonium now stored at Savannah River came to South Carolina from Pantex in the early 2000s.
At that time, the NNSA planned to turn some of its surplus defense plutonium into commercial reactor fuel using the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) still under construction at Savannah River by CB&I AREVA MOX Services.
The planned swords-to-ploughshares effort was part of an arms-reduction pact with Russia finalized in 2010 after a decade of negotiations, and which called for Washington and Moscow each to get rid of 34 metric tons of defense-usable plutonium.
In 2015, the NNSA decided the MFFF was too expensive to complete and proposed disposing of the plutonium in other planned Savannah River facilities. The agency later said it wants to turn the facility into a pit-production plant that would begin production oin 2030 as a complement to Los Alamos’ planned pit factory.
But South Carolina objected to using the MFFF for anything but plutonium conversion, and took the NNSA to court over the issue several times.
In the 2016 suit, which produced the ruling that has upset Heller, South Carolina said the NNSA had an obligation under federal law either to begin processing defense plutonium at the MFFF by Jan. 1, 2014, or to start removing the material from the state by Jan. 1, 2016.
In another suit filed May 25, 2018, South Carolina won an injunction that temporarily prohibits NNSA from closing down MFFF’s conversion mission. NNSA has appealed the decision, and oral arguments are set for Sept. 27 in the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
