After four months of deliberations, the state of South Carolina and the Department of Energy could not agree on how best to remove plutonium from DOE’s Savannah River Site, or whether the department will pay $200 million in fines that have piled up while the dispute lingered.
In a joint statement Monday to Judge J. Michelle Childs, of U.S. District Court in Columbia, S.C., the sides acknowledged they had failed to resolve their differences: “the Parties have not been able to reach agreement as to a proposed order, and do not believe that further discussions would be constructive.”
Childs is the presiding judge in a lawsuit filed in February 2016 by the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office, which claimed the federal government breached a 2003 deal to either remove 1 ton of nuclear weapon-usable plutonium from SRS, or convert it into nuclear reactor fuel through the still-unfinished Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF).
Per the agreement, DOE would be on the hook for a daily fine of $1 million – capping off at $100 million annually – if it failed to move the plutonium out of state by Jan. 1, 2016. Today, that total sits at $200 million. When DOE failed to begin payments early last year, state Attorney General Alan Wilson filed suit against the Energy Department and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which oversees the MOX project.
The lawsuit has now stretched on for nearly 18 months. In March, Childs ordered the parties to the bargaining table, asking them to resolve the plutonium removal dispute with new timetables and deadlines. The two sides were ordered to release a joint statement and also agreed to issue separate statements detailing their own ideas of how to proceed. South Carolina officials confirmed during deliberations that the monetary claim was also being considered.
Beyond acknowledging the apparent futility of further talks, the state and federal governments in this week’s joint statement offered no other details about the deliberations.
