A federal judge on Tuesday refused to lift a preliminary injunction preventing the Department of Energy from canceling the unfinished Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The ruling means project prime contractor CB&I AREVA MOX Services will continue building the plutonium-conversion plant — which is by the company’s own estimates more than 10 years behind schedule and about $5 billion over budget — at least until an appeals court rules on a separate DOE petition to overturn the injunction.
The Energy Department argued the injunction was no longer necessary because the agency had, at U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs’ direction, delayed scheduled layoffs at the plant and lifted a partial stop-work order handed down to the contractor before the state of South Carolina sued to block the agency from canceling the project.
Childs did not buy that argument.
“When an injunction both nullifies previous actions and enjoins future actions, compliance with the injunction’s retroactive portions does not make the injunction as a whole, and specifically its prospective portions, moot,” Childs wrote in her order refusing DOE’s bid to stay the injunction.
South Carolina sued the Department of Energy in May, demanding the agency’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) finish building the MFFF and get on with the facility’s planned mission under a U.S.-Russian arms control deal to turn 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel.
The NNSA wants to turn the MFFF into a factory capable of annually producing 50 plutonium nuclear-warhead cores by 2030. The agency, which runs the Department of Energy’s active nuclear-weapon programs, says it can more cheaply dispose of the surplus plutonium by diluting it at proposed Savannah River Site facilities, then burying the processed material deep underground at the agency’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
