A U.S. District Court Judge will consider several motions issued by parties in the lawsuit over plutonium processing at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina during a June 30 hearing in Columbia, S.C. The U.S. Justice Department’s confirmation of the hearing date also signals that Judge J. Michelle Childs will likely deny or ignore the Department of Energy’s earlier attempt to delay the hearing until she rules on a separate motion.
The lawsuit involves the Department of Energy site’s unfinished Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF), which is designed to honor a U.S.-Russia agreement under which each nation must dispose of 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium. The MFFF would achieve that goal by converting the material into commercial nuclear fuel.
A separate 2003 agreement between the Energy Department and South Carolina requires the federal agency to either remove 1 metric ton of the plutonium from the state, or process 1 ton through the MFFF, by Jan. 1, 2016. When that didn’t happen, the state began charging the federal government $1 million a day – a stipulation granted in the 2003 agreement. And when the federal government failed to begin paying the money, the state filed a lawsuit on Feb. 9 seeking the money, capping off at $100 million in April, and the removal of plutonium from the site.
South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson filed a motion on April 6 seeking a summary judgment in the lawsuit. “There is no genuine dispute of any material fact, and the State is entitled to judgment granting the relief sought in the Complaint as a matter of law,” Wilson wrote in the motion.
On April 26, the Energy Department filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit altogether, claiming that “none of South Carolina’s claims can be advanced” in U.S. District Court. A month later, on May 25, the Energy Department requested that the court postpone the hearing and decisions on the request for a summary judgment until after a ruling on the dismissal of the lawsuit.
“There is a hearing scheduled for 10 a.m. on June 30, which is to address those three motions,” the Justice Department stated in an email on Thursday.
As South Carolina and the Energy Department prepare for court, South Carolina congressmen are looking to save the project. The facility’s rising costs, including a 2015 estimate from DOE that the project will cost $51 billion over its lifetime instead of the original $17 billion estimate, led the department to request in its fiscal 2017 budget proposal to terminate the project. But the U.S. Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act on Tuesday, which included $340 million for MOX construction. U.S. Sen Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, praised the passage of the bill, stating “we took steps to ensure the Obama Administration cannot cancel the MOX program.” In addition, Graham’s office said Thursday that an April request by the Senate Appropriations Committee for the Armed Services Committee to hold a MOX hearing is “in the works.”
The Obama administration wants to move forward with downblending, a method that would dilute the plutonium at SRS and send it to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. The transuranic waste storage facility has been shut down since February 2014 due to two separate incidents — a salt haul truck fire on Feb. 5 and the release of a small amount of radiation on Feb. 14. The Department of Energy has said it intends to reopen the facility in December.
