To settle a lawsuit filed in 2016, the federal government will pay $600 million to South Carolina in recognition of the Department of Energy’s inability to remove several metric tons of plutonium from the state by a legal deadline of 2022, state and federal officials said Monday.
The money will come from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, rather than the DOE budget. However, the settlement also calls for the Energy Department to move some 9.5 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium, now stored at the Savannah River Site, out of South Carolina by 2037 — or else pay the state even more money.
To meet the deadline, DOE is considering at least three disposal options: trucking some of the plutonium out of state; diverting some to fuel the versatile test reactor program run by the agency’s Office of Nuclear Energy; and disposing of some at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico as part of the “dilute and dispose” program, formally called Surplus Plutonium Disposition.
“There are several disposal paths forward,” Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette told reporters after a press conference with Alan Wilson, the state attorney general who led the lawsuit. “Dilute and dispose is but one. There are certain types of plutonium that are at the SRS site that we can store today in other locations that DOE owns around the country. So that’s one option for us. We’re going to lay those out over the course of the next few weeks and months.”
To comply with a 2017 court order in a separate lawsuit that South Carolina won, DOE redirected some of the surplus plutonium stored at Savannah River back into the nuclear weapons program, which will use the material to make fissile cores, or pits, for future intercontinental ballistic missile warheads. After re-designating the plutonium for defense use, DOE shipped 1 metric ton to Nevada and, presumably, Texas.
The local Aiken Standard published audio of the question-and-answer session with officials.
In exchange for the up-front payment, and DOE’s promise to move the plutonium out of state faster, South Carolina has agreed not to sue over the 9.5-ton tranche of plutonium until 2037 deadline, giving the agency 15 years to begin the Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program without fear of yet legal challenge.
If DOE cannot move any more of the 9.5-ton tranche out of South Carolina by 2037, it would under the settlement be on the hook for $1.5 billion in additional payments, Wilson said Monday. Moving any plutonium out would reduce the fine that comes due that year, he noted. If DOE can remove half of the 9.5 tons out of state by 2037, it will get another five years to ship out the rest.
On Monday, Brouillette said the department plans to relocate the entire 9.5 ton tranche well before 2037.
The 9.5 tons of plutonium DOE plans to speed from Savannah River is part of a 34 metric-ton inventory that was once to be turned into commercial reactor fuel by the site’s now-canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF). The plutonium covered by the settlement is not the only plutonium stored at Savannah River Site.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and other federal and state lawmakers attended the press conference. Notably absent was Gov. Henry McMaster (R), who did not like the terms of the settlement.
“I am not confident that this long-term arrangement provides sufficient assurances that DOE will remove the plutonium from our state in a timely manner,” McMaster wrote in a letter to Wilson dated Aug. 30. The Aiken Standard posted the letter on Twitter.
