A federal judge has decided to let the Department of Energy and a contractor argue in court about whether the agency was allowed to claw back some $20 million in fees on a long-overdue, over-budget plutonium disposal plant in South Carolina.
That is according to an April 27 order by U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Thomas Wheeler, declaring he would hear oral arguments May 17 about a series of motions for summary judgment filed by the Department of Energy and its contractor, CB&I AREVA MOX Services, since January.
The $20 million is only about a tenth of the total damages CB&I AREVA MOX Services is seeking in the Court of Federal Claims as part of a 2016 lawsuit that alleges DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration is responsible for putting the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) behind schedule.
The plant, under construction at the agency’s Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., is designed to turn 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel under an arms-control pact with Russia that was negotiated over a decade and finalized in 2010.
MOX Services claims DOE was not allowed to reclaim the $20 million fee award until the facility was built. The Energy Department claims it was allowed to take back the fees whether the MFFF is finished or not, since its contract with MOX Services says the fee can be calculated at the end of a contract option period that expired in 2016. DOE clawed back the fee shortly after the option period ended.
Even after Wheeler rules on the oral arguments, DOE and its contractor would still have to argue the rest of their case. In total, MOX Services is seeking about $200 million fees and damages.
The Energy Department claims the MFFF is too expensive and now wants to get rid of the material using a process dubbed dilute and dispose: chemically weakening the plutonium at Savannah River, mixing it with concrete-like grout, and burying the resulting mixture deep underground at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. The agency has sought to cancel the project for three years, but Congress has yet to go along with the request.
