The National Nuclear Security Administration removed a tranche of weapon useable plutonium from the Nevada National Security Site after a roughly three-year layover, Nevada’s senior U.S. Senator said Friday.
The nuclear weapons agency moved the plutonium to the test site in 2018 after the state of South Carolina successfully sued the government for keeping the material at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., past a legal deadline.
The plutonium was part of a one-ton tranche declared surplus to national defense needs in the 1990s. The material was supposed to be disposed of forever, but DOE in May 2018 diverted it back into the nuclear weapons production pipeline. It was ticketed for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, with layovers planned at the Nevada National Security Site and the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas.
Now, the tranche moved to the Nevada site’s Device Assembly Facility has left the Silver State, Cortez Masto said in a press release.
Though the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) immediately disclosed its plans to ship the plutonium to Los Alamos via Nevada and Texas, Cortez Masto — who is up for re-election in November — characterized the shipment as a “secret.”
After Cortez Masto help up nominees for high-level DOE jobs over the plutonium shipments, the agency said it would begin removing the material from the test site by 2021 and finish by 2026.
NNSA is preparing to cast plutonium pits for planned W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile warheads at Los Alamos. The weapons will tip the placed Sentinel missiles that Northrop Grumman is building to replace the current fleet of Boeing-made Minuteman III missiles.
Pits, which can be roughly softball shaped, are the fissile cores of nuclear-weapon first stages. Los Alamos is supposed to start making multiple war-ready pits by fiscal year 2024 and ramp up to 30 annually by 2026.
