The Department of Energy’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) will enjoy judicial protection from the federal ax for essentially the rest of the government’s 2018 fiscal year after an appeals court on Friday decided not to immediately lift a lower court’s ban on closing the plant.
South Carolina sued in May to prevent DOE from shuttering the over-budget plutonium disposal project at the Savannah River Site. On June 7, it secured an injunction from a U.S. District Court judge in South Carolina to keep the facility open at least for the duration of the lawsuit.
The Energy Department appealed the decision June 15, asking the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to stay the injunction until after the higher court ruled on the appeal. The Fourth Circuit declined to do so Friday, wem ot scheduled oral arguments on the appeal for Sept. 25-28: days before the Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year.
If DOE prevails in those arguments, the appeals court could lift the District Court order that protects the facility. The agency also asked the District Court to stay the injunction, but Judge J. Michelle Childs denied that request the week before the appeals court issued its ruling.
Citing runaway costs and tight budgets, DOE has sought for the past three years to close the MFFF, which is being built by CB&I AREVA MOX Services to turn surplus weapon-usable plutonium into fuel for commercial nuclear power plants. In papers filed with the appeals court two weeks ago, the agency claimed it costs more than $1 million a day to continue construction.
The department wants to turn the MFFF into a factory for fissile nuclear-warhead cores called plutonium pits and dispose of the surplus plutonium by burying it at the agency’s deep underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
Meanwhile, the State of South Carolina last week asked the District Court to block the agency from closing the MFFF until the government conducts an environmental review of its proposed alternative. The state is pushing for a ruling about that before the end of the calendar year, but the lower court had not ordered further briefings on the request at deadline Sunday for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
