DOE, ex-Yankee operators have until January to finalize settlement in latest spent fuel suit

A federal judge last week gave the Department of Energy and the former operators of three shuttered New England Power Plants until January to settle their differences in a lawsuit of the agency’s latest failure to take custody of the plants’ spent fuel.

On Friday, at the request of both parties, a request the Yankee operators said they agreed to only reluctantly, the Court of Federal Claims delayed the looming trial in the case until Jan. 13. 

The trial had been on the slate for October until DOE and the former plant operators last week told the court that on Sept. 9, they had come up with an “agreement in principle” to avoid a court date.

Now, the sides will get four about months to iron out the details of the settlement of the 2021 lawsuit, which covers DOE’s failure to remove spent fuel from the plants from 2017 to 2020. 

The plaintiffs are Connecticut Yankee Atomic Power Company, Maine Yankee Atomic Power Company, and Yankee Atomic Electric Company. In the suit, they sought $149 million in damages from DOE.

Like other current and former plant operators, the ex-Yankee operators have successfully sued DOE before over the agency’s breach of its own standard contract, which called for the federal government to take custody of spent fuel beginning in 1998.

There is no permanent spent fuel repository in the U.S., so DOE has not taken custody of any spent fuel. Instead, plant operators became the indefinite storage sites for their own fuel. Payments in previous lawsuits of this kind were settled from the U.S. Justice Department’s judgment fund, not DOE’s budget.