State and federal lawyers are dotting “i’s” and crossing “t’s” on a settlement that would end the lawsuit over the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) 2018 shipment of weapon-usable plutonium to Nevada.
In an order posted Friday, Judge Miranda Du of U.S. District Court for Nevada gave the parties until June 29 to tweak the settlement language into final form. Lawyers on Thursday jointly asked Du for permission to continue the settlement negotiation, and keep other action in the case on hold.
The request for another stay in the case hit the courts right after tensions between Nevada and the federal government flared up again, in the wake of a Washington Post report that President Donald Trump was considering conducting a nuclear explosive test. The former Nevada Test Site was for decades the home to atmospheric and underground explosive tests of nuclear weapons.
“The parties are currently working diligently to finalize high level government approvals and obtain signatures,” reads Thursday’s joint request for a second stay. “Any order or decision issuing from the Court has the potential to disrupt current negotiations and jeopardize the amicable resolution to the ongoing dispute.”
Nevada lawyers and the federal attorney representing the NNSA started settlement talks in mid-March.
Sometime before November 2018, the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency shipped half a metric ton of weapon-usable plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site’s Device Assembly Facility from the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The move was required for the NNSA to comply with a 2017 order in a separate federal lawsuit brought by South Carolina, which wants the plutonium removed from its own borders. Nevada officials, unaware the plutonium had already arrived, filed suit in November 2018 to stop the shipment to the former test site. The state later amended its complaint to demand removal of the plutonium.
By 2026, the NNSA plans to send the plutonium now stored at the Device Assembly Facility to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the agency will use the material to build pits — fissile nuclear-weapon cores — suitable for the future W87-1 warheads now being designed for planned Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missiles.
