Days after asking as much in oral arguments, the Department of Energy on Monday again asked a federal appeals court to let it shut down the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility under construction at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
In early June, as part of a lawsuit filed by the state of South Carolina to keep the project alive, a U.S. District Court judge issued an injunction blocking DOE from canceling the over budget, behind-schedule plutonium-disposal plant while the lawsuit plays out in court.
The Department of Energy immediately appealed the decision to the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, grinding the lawsuit to a halt while the agency and the state made their cases. That court rejected DOE’s request that it lift the lower-court injunction during the appeals process.
On Monday, just a weekend after some 40 minutes of oral arguments before three appellate judges from the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., DOE prodded the court to quickly reconsider its June decision to leave the injunction in place.
“For the reasons discussed in our briefs and at argument, we respectfully submit that the State has not met its burden of establishing entitlement to the preliminary injunction,” attorneys for the department said in Monday’s renewed motion for a stay “If this Court agrees, it would be appropriate to issue a stay to prevent the unwarranted expenditure of millions of additional dollars in taxpayer funds.”
In its arguments, the agency said South Carolina had no right to sue DOE in District Court.
The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) was designed to turn 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel. The Energy Department wants to cancel the plant and instead dilute the plutonium at proposed Savannah River Site facilities, then bury it deep underground in New Mexico at the agency’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. The MFFF would then be turned into a factory to annually produce 50 fissile weapon cores called plutonium pits by 2030.
