A federal judge has placed a South Carolina lawsuit against the Department of Energy on hold until an appeals court decides if she was right to block the agency from stopping work at the Savannah River Site’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF).
It would not make sense to address other issues in the high stakes case until the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals decides whether to reverse the injunction handed down June 7 from the South Carolina District Court, Judge Michelle Childs, the district court judge, wrote Monday.
The Appeals Court is set to hear oral arguments about the injunction from Sept. 25-28. South Carolina sued DOE in May in the South Carolina District Court after the agency moved to shut down MFFF construction and turn the facility into a factory to produce fissile nuclear warhead cores called plutonium pits.
MFFF is designed to meet a U.S.-Russia arms-control pact by converting weapons-usable plutonium into commercial nuclear fuel. The unfinished plant is billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule, with about $5 billion already spent since construction began in 2007.
MFFF prime contractor CB&I AREVA MOX Services estimates the facility could be finished by 2029 for a total of about $10 billion. DOE says it will take until 2048 and cost more than $17 billion, including sunk costs.
South Carolina has sued DOE five times since 2014 to keep the MFFF going. MOX Services is also suing DOE over its plans for MFFF, alleging in the Court of Federal Claims that the agency mismanaged the contract and caused the scheduling delays it subsequently cited as a reason for turning the facility into a pit factory.
Childs granted the June 7 injunction on the grounds that DOE did not follow safety and environmental protocols before attempting to shutter MFFF. Among other things, Childs said the agency must issue an environmental impact statement on the risks and impacts of terminating work at the facility, as the federal National Environmental Policy Act requires.
If the MOX facility is indeed terminated, it would result in about 34 metric tons of plutonium which would have to be diluted into transuranic waste form and disposed of, probably at the DOE Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
