Nev. seeks to stop plutonium shipments

Attorney general asks another court to keep out more radioactive waste

RENO, Nev. — Nevada’s attorney general is making another bid for a court order blocking shipments of weapons-grade plutonium to a site near Las Vegas, declaring Thursday that the U.S. government’s assurances no more of the radioactive material is Nevada-bound “aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.”

Attorney General Aaron Ford filed notice earlier this week that the state will appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after a federal judge in Reno refused to grant an earlier request for an order prohibiting shipments.

He filed a new motion in U.S. District Court in Reno on Thursday seeking a preliminary injunction to block the arrival of any more plutonium until the San Francisco-based appellate court rules.

The Energy Department disclosed Jan. 30 that it secretly trucked 1,000 pounds of the highly radioactive material to the site sometime before November, when the state first filed a lawsuit seeking to ban the shipments from South Carolina.

The department said it doesn’t intend to ship any more of the material from its Savannah River site to Nevada.

But Ford said in earlier court documents that lawyers representing the DOE had told Nevada’s lawyers as recently as last month that no shipments would occur until at least the end of January, only to learn it had been shipped months earlier.

“When the Department of Energy takes unilateral action to ship dangerous material to Nevada, it robs the state of our ability to prepare for the risks associated with transporting and storing plutonium,” Ford said Thursday.

“Frankly, the Department of Energy has lost all credibility and trust, and its assurances that it will not ship any plutonium in the future aren’t worth the paper they’re written on,” he said.

A spokeswoman for the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration declined comment Thursday.

DOE officials said last week in revealing the previous shipment that they had to keep it secret until recently for national security reasons. They insist appropriate notice was provided in August when the DOE approved plans to temporarily store plutonium in Nevada to meet a court-ordered deadline to remove it from South Carolina by Jan. 1, 2020.