The Department of Energy remains on track to remove a remaining half-metric of plutonium from the Savannah River Site and the state of South Carolina by the end of the year as ordered in a federal lawsuit from 2016, according to a recent status report.
South Carolina sued the federal government in 2016 in the U.S. District Court for South Carolina, invoking a federal law that required the DOE to remove 1 metric ton of surplus, weapon-usable plutonium from the state by Jan. 1, 2016, after failing to turn it into commercial reactor fuel using Savannah River’s then-incomplete and now-canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF).
The state is separately suing DOE to collect $100 million a year in fines associated with the agency’s failure to remove the material from South Carolina by the federal deadline.
In December 2017, U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs sided with the state in the lawsuit and told DOE to remove 1 metric ton of plutonium by Jan. 1, 2020.
In last week’s court-mandated status report to Childs, the agency said it will ship half of that tranche from South Carolina by the end of the year, either “to the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, and/or the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New, Mexico.” The Energy Department reported in January that, prior to November 2018, it had shipped the other half-ton to the Nevada National Security Site.
The department does not provide details of plutonium shipping campaigns for security reasons and will not do so, even to the court, until “sufficient time” has passed after the shipment, according to the report. The status report says the material “has been or will be shipped” by the Jan. 1, 2020 deadline.
In a supplement analysis published around August 2018, DOE said the plutonium covered by Childs’ 2017 order would go to Pantex and Nevada before being shipped to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The agency has also said it would not ship the remaining half metric ton to Nevada.
Los Alamos did not have space to store 1 metric ton of plutonium at the time DOE published the supplement analysis. The Energy Department expects the half-ton delivered to Nevada to stay there until around 2026, when it will be needed at Los Alamos not make new fissile weapon cores called pits.
In a separate lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, South Carolina seeks to collect a total of $200 million in fines because DOE failed to remove the ton of plutonium from Savannah River by Jan. 1, 2016. That covers fines for 2016 and 2017.
Federal law allows South Carolina to collect a maximum of $100 million a year, and the state has said it could seek to collect fines for 2018 and 2019. The Energy Department and the Columbia are negotiating a settlement on the $200 million claims court lawsuit and expect to deliver a status report about those negotiations no later than June 28.
