The federal government this week told a court it is settling a 2021 lawsuit over the agency’s failure to take custody of spent nuclear fuel from shuttered New England power plants.
It is the most recent, but not the first, lawsuit filed by Connecticut Yankee Atomic Power Company, Maine Yankee Atomic Power Company, and Yankee Atomic Electric Company over the Department of Energy’s breach of the standard contract, under which the agency was supposed to cart off spent fuel from the plants for disposal in 1998.
The suit by the Yankee owners covers contract breaches from 2017 to 2020.
Even if the settlement is finalized, something DOE said Wednesday in a court filing it is still working on, there would still be more than a dozen similar standard-contract lawsuits pending before the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, where for decades the agency has been successfully sued by plant operators forced to become their own waste storage sites following the government’s failure to build a permanent disposal site.
It could still take months to finalize the settlement, according to the joint status report filed by DOE and the former Yankee operators on Wednesday. The case was set to go to trial in late October, but the parties asked the judge in the case to delay the court date until December or January while they iron out the settlement paperwork.
DOE decided to settle after failing earlier this year to get the case thrown out. The agency said that it should not have to pay the Yankee companies $149 million because their decommissioning trust funds, money set aside to pay for teardown and cleanup of the plants, should have accrued at least that much in interest.
The Court of Federal Claims rejected that argument in February/
Connecticut Yankee operated the Connecticut Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in Haddam Neck, Ct., until 2007. Maine Yankee operated the Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in Wiscasset, Maine, until 1996. Yankee Atomic Electric operated the Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Station in Rowe, Mass., until 1992.
Money for standard contract breaches, whether from settlements or lost lawsuits, comes from the U.S. judgment fund maintained by the Justice Department, not DOE’s budget. As of September 2023, the government had paid nearly $11 billion out of the judgment fund for breaches of the standard contract, according to DOE’s latest financial report.
