NUCLEAR RISKSRaging Texas Wildfires Force U.S. Main Nuclear Weapon Facility to Evacuate, Temporarily Shut Down

Raging wildfires in the Texas panhandle have forced the evacuation and temporary closure of the Pantex plant, the U.S. premier nuclear weapons assembly facility.

The Pantex plant said that “All weapons and special materials are safe and unaffected.”

The main facility that assembles and disassembles America’s nuclear arsenal shut down its operations on Tuesday night as homes in Hutchinson County were damaged or destroyed.

“We have evacuated our personnel, non-essential personnel from the site, just in an abundance of caution,” Laef Pendergraft, a spokesperson for National Nuclear Security Administration’s Production Office at Pantex, said during a news conference.

“But we do have a well-equipped fire department that has trained for these scenarios, that is on-site and watching and ready should any kind of real emergency arise on the plant site.”

Early Wednesday Pantex posted on X, formally known as Twitter, the plant “is open for normal day shift operations” and that all personnel were to report for duty according to their assigned schedule.

Pantex is about 17 miles northeast of Amarillo and some 320 miles northwest of Dallas. Since 1975 it has been the U.S. main assembly and disassembly site for the country’s nuclear bombs. It assembled the last new bomb in 1991 while disassembling thousands.

In Borger, a community of about 13,000 roughly 25 miles north of Pantex, Hutchinson County emergency management services personnel planned a convoy to take evacuees from one shelter to another ahead of expected power outages and overnight temperatures in the 20s.

With evacuation orders mounted, county and city officials live-streamed on Facebook and posted answers to questions from panicked residents. Officials urged residents to turn on their cellphones’ emergency alerts and be ready to evacuate immediately.

Evacuation was hazardous, however, as some roads as were having fire on both sides of the road.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) official Laef Pendergraft told reporters at a press conference late Tuesday that nonessential personnel were evacuated from the site out of an “abundance of caution,” but a “well-equipped fire department” remained on site to tackle any potential emergency if needed.

The NNSA official added there was no fire “on our site or on our boundary” at the time of the press conference.

The facility later announced it had completed its “employee accountability process” and all employees “have been accounted for.”

The Pantex  websitenotes that the plant assembled its last nuclear weapon in 1991. Since then its primary function has been the safe dismantling of thousands of nuclear weapons which have been retired from the U.S. military’s stockpile.

The Federation of American Scientists’  report from last year says that the U.S. nuclear weapon stockpile stood at 5,244 warheads, including 1,536 retired warheads that are “in the queue for dismantlement.”