This week, lawyers for the state of Nevada filed new briefs in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, saying that the Trump administration is engaged in a clandestine “charade” intended to turn Nevada “into the nation’s radioactive dump,” reports the Associated Press.
Nevada wants the San Francisco-based court to overturn a January 30, 2019 decision by Nevada U.S. District Judge Miranda Du, who refused to halt all plutonium shipments to the Nevada site under contention. Judge Du concluded that any potential harm to the state from the plutonium shipments was “speculative.”
On January 19, 2019, U.S. District Judge Miranda Du, A federal judge in Nevada said it would likely be next month before she could make a final ruling on whether to block the U.S. Energy Department from shipping a metric ton of weapons-grade plutonium from South Carolina to the nuclear security site north of Las Vegas.
The state’s lawyers contend that the secret shipments of weapons-grade plutonium last year exposed Nevadians to the equivalent of 100 to 200 chest X-rays annually for three years.
The federal government changed the rules
State Attorney General Aaron Ford and his deputies cited a number of legal briefs that date back to 2017 when the federal government argued unsuccessfully in 2017, and again in a failed appeal to keep the plutonium at South Carolina’s Savannah River Site because of the risks associated with moving it someplace else.
Nevada’s lawyers noted that the Department of Defense had repeatedly noted that “it would be impossible to safely transport and store that much plutonium before the year 2025.”
The government agency went on to say that Savannah River was the only place with the “required capacity, security, safety analysis, and surveillance program to receive and store any significant amount of plutonium in the form and packaging configuration as it exists today.”
After a federal judge ordered the removal of the plutonium from Savannah River by 2020, the DOE again appealed to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals claiming it was not safe to make the removal. Needless to say, eight months after the appeal was denied, “the impossible happened,” Nevada’s lawyers wrote.
What happened? Amazingly, the DOE made another analysis and this time, they deemed the plutonium was safe to move to the Nevada National Security Site. “DOE’s previous capacity, safety, security and surveillance concerns magically disappeared,” Nevada said.
The one thing that is still in everyone’s craw is the fact that on January 30, 2019, DOE lawyers told the federal judge in Nevada the plutonium shipment had been trucked to the Nevada National Security Site – about 70 miles (113 kilometers) north of Las Vegas
In the new brief filed this week, Nevada says: “In the middle of the talks, DOE trucked a half-ton of weapons-grade plutonium to Nevada without warning state officials or emergency responders. DOE continued the charade through the district court’s preliminary injunction hearing by pretending the shipments had not yet occurred.”