MOX Services will not receive any interest payments on $20 million in clawed-back fees the shrinking company won from the Department of Energy in a lawsuit over the agency’s cancellation of a controversial plutonium disposal plant at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Thomas Wheeler handed down the order on Wednesday following oral arguments last week over the $800,000 in interest the company claimed it is owed by DOE. Wheeler awarded MOX Services the $20 million in 2017 after the company successfully argued that its contract required the department to release the money: a fee payment for work completed prior to the lawsuit.
MOX Services also claimed DOE owed interest on the payment because the agency withheld it for so long. Wheeler, though, sided with the government, accepting a federal attorney’s argument that because MOX Services got the $20 million through a court order, rather than through an administrative claim governed by federal contracting law, the company could not claim interest.
MOX Services was building the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) to turn 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel. The Energy Department terminated the company’s contract in October after Congress finally let the agency halt the project following three years of trying.
Meanwhile, the MOX Services lawsuit rolls on. The company is seeking a total of $200 million in damages and withheld fees, which are separate from the roughly $20 million covered by Wheeler’s 2017 ruling.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has scheduled oral arguments in Nevada’s appeal of a ruling in a lawsuit separate from, but related to, the MOX case.
The appeal concerns a lawsuit the state filed against DOE in 2018, upon learning that some of the plutonium intended for conversion to reactor fuel in the MFFF was headed to Nevada. Carson City asked a U.S. District Court judge in Reno to block the shipment. In January, DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration admitted it had sent about half a metric ton of plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site before the state even sued.
The judge in that case subsequently denied Nevada’s motion to block the already-completed shipment — not on the grounds that the motion was already moot, but because Nevada had not demonstrated that the shipment amounted legally to irreparable harm that could trigger court action.
Nevada swiftly appealed the lower court’s decision, and arguments in the Ninth Circuit are now slated for Aug. 9.
