The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said late Wednesday it has shipped a metric ton of weapon-usable plutonium out of South Carolina, as ordered by a federal court in 2017.
The Department of Energy and its semiautonomous nuclear-weapon branch “have removed not less than one metric ton of defense plutonium or defense plutonium materials from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina to other states,” NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty wrote in a declaration filed Wednesday with the U.S. District Court in South Carolina.
The court ordered DOE and NNSA to ship the 1 metric ton of plutonium out of South Carolina after they failed to meet a legal deadline to either turn it into commercial reactor fuel at the Savannah River Site’s now-canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF), or remove it from the state by Jan. 1, 2016.
The NNSA said it last year sent half the metric ton covered by the 2017 order to the Nevada National Security Site, some 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The agency planned to send the rest of the plutonium to the Pantex weapons assembly and disassembly plant in Amarillo, Texas.
“Due to operational security, NNSA does not disclose how much material was shipped to each site,” an NNSA spokesperson wrote in response to questions about whether and how much plutonium was shipped to Pantex from Savannah River.
The court order that booted the metric ton of plutonium out of South Carolina is part of a lawsuit the state brought in 2016. In a separate lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, South Carolina is suing the NNSA under the same federal law, which entitles the state to collect $1 million in fines for the first 100 days of each year starting Jan. 1, 2016, that NNSA fails to remove plutonium from South Carolina.
The state is still trying to collect $200 million in Federal Claims Court after settlement negotiations collapsed this summer. Under federal law, the NNSA has until 2022 to process or remove all the plutonium shipped to Savannah River for processing in the MFFF. There is roughly 10 metric tons of such plutonium at Savannah River now. The plant was to process 34 metric tons of plutonium.
The NNSA said last week it does not plan to start building the MFFF’s replacement, the Surplus Plutonium Disposition facility, until 2022. The planned facility will not start up until 2028, according to the agency’s current plans.
