US Nuclear Weapons Plant Suspends Operations Over Wildfire Threat

Originally established in 1942 as an ordnance facility, the Pantex plant is currently the lone facility for nuclear weapon assembly and dismantling in the United States.

The US' only nuclear weapon assembly and disassembly facility has been forced to temporarily halt operations due to concerns over the nearby wildfires in Texas.

According to local media reports, the announcement about the plant’s shutdown came on Tuesday evening, with Pantex insisting that the weapons and “special materials” stored at the site are safe.

"We have evacuated our nonessential personnel from the site, just in abundance of caution, but we do have a well-equipped fire department that has trained for these scenarios and is on-site watching and ready should any kind of real emergency arise on the plant site," Laef Pendergraft, a nuclear safety engineer with the US National Nuclear Security Administration production office at Pantex, was quoted by Amarillo Globe-News as saying.

The media outlet added that Consolidated Nuclear Security and National Nuclear Security Administration officials warned about some sort of incident occurring at the plant earlier on Tuesday evening.

Pantex Plant: What is It?

Originally established in 1942 as an ordnance factory, the Pantex plant had been repurposed as a nuclear weapon assembly and dismantling facility – the only one of its kind in the United States.

Located near the city of Amarillo in Texas, the Pantex plant is a US Department of Energy facility run by BWXT Pantex and Sandia National Laboratory.

Aside from the assembly of nuclear weapons and the dismantling of the nukes slated for retirement from the US stockpile, the plant also handles maintenance and modification of the United States’ nuclear ordnance.

Though the plant has not produced any new nuclear weapons since 1991, it has since “safely dismantled thousands of weapons retired from the stockpile by the military and placed the resulting plutonium pits in interim storage,” a statement on Pantex’s website claims.