A federal appeals court should throw out Nevada’s request to block further shipments of weapon-usable plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site, since the Department of Energy has already shipped the material there, according to a Friday filing by the state of South Carolina.
Nevada is trying to get the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to block the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) from sending any more plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS), about 100 miles from Las Vegas.
The NNSA in January acknowledged it had shipped around 500 kilograms of the material to NNSS’ Device Assembly Facility sometime before November 2018. Nevada sued in U.S. District Court for Nevada to stop the shipment on Nov. 30; the state claimed it filed the lawsuit without knowing the plutonium had already been moved from the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., as ordered by another federal court in 2017.
“[T]he Federal Defendants have represented that there will be no future plutonium shipments to Nevada … which rendered this matter moot,” attorneys including South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson wrote in a Friday response to Nevada’s earlier motion for injunction. That representation applies only to 1 metric ton of plutonium ordered out of South Carolina by Jan. 1, 2020, and described by the NNSA in an environmental document called a supplement analysis published around August.
The NNSA has said it will ship the other half of the 1 metric ton to the Pantex weapons assembly-and-disassembly plant in Amarillo, Texas, by Jan. 1.
Nevada can reply to South Carolina’s response in the appellate court by Monday evening.
The plutonium is part of a 34-metric-ton tranche that was supposed to be turned into commercial reactor fuel using the now-canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at Savannah River. After staying in Nevada and Texas until the mid-2020s, the material will go to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to be made into fissile warhead cores.
