
The federal government last week asked a judge to vacate a judgment favoring environmentalists in a plutonium pit lawsuit and stop the case from going to an appeals court. The defendants, the Department of Energy and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), asked district judge Mary Geiger Lewis to vacate her Sept. 30 judgment validating the plaintiffs’ complaint that the federal government “violated the National Environmental Policy Act (‘NEPA’)” by failing to review the environmental effects of making plutonium…